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Stewing over 'love, madness'

January 22, 2007 12:50 am

Archie and Amelie were the perfect celebrity couple of the Gilded Age--beautiful, brilliant, rich and unhappy.

Everyone knew who they were. Amelie Rives was the gorgeous Virginia author whose first novel told of forbidden female sexual passion and scandalized a public that turned it into a best-seller.

John Armstrong "Archie" Chanler was dashing, tragic and incredibly rich, an heir to the vast fortunes of the Astor family.

Their marriage, troubles and eventual divorce were followed avidly long before People magazine and US Weekly were even gleams in publishers' eyes.

Contemporaries of Gari Melchers, the Chanlers may or may not have known the artist, who spent the second half of his life as a Virginia gentleman painter, living and working at Belmont in Stafford County.

But whether or not they ever met, Gari Melchers and the Chanlers moved in the same glamorous circles and undoubtedly knew of one another, author Donna Lucey said.

"The Gilded Age world was a very small one," Lucey said, in which heirs and socialites, artists and writers could mix at the highest levels of society.

Lucey will speak about her new book "Archie and Amelie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age" at a dinner to be held at 7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3, at Gari Melchers Home and Studios.

The event, which takes place at the property's Studio Pavilion, costs $45 for members of Friends of Belmont and the University of Mary Washington community, $55 for nonmembers. After the dinner and presentation, Lucey will sign copies of the book pre-purchased from the Belmont Museum Shop.

Lucey and her husband, the writer Henry Wiencek, live in Charlottesville--not far from the Albemarle County estate of Castle Hill where Amelie Rives grew up and spent her later life.

The once-wealthy Rives family were genteel victims of Civil War ruin. But they were gentry nonetheless, and Amelie, born in 1863, saw herself as royalty, Lucey said.

She was splendid both physically and intellectually, and she was determined to use those gifts to gain wealth and restore Castle Hill to glory.

But the financial success of her first novel, "The Quick or the Dead?" came at a personal cost--criticism not only from literary scoffers but from shocked readers who assumed only an immoral woman could write such a breathless tale of female desire.

Archie Chanler, the eldest of 11 siblings, was just a teenager when his parents died. At adulthood, he inherited not only vast wealth but also partial guardianship of his younger siblings, from whom he expected deference.

Instead, they resisted his marriage to the charming but scandalous Amelie, setting the stage for what Lucey describes as heartless sibling betrayal.

When Archie was in his 30s, his marriage to Amelie over and his mental state at its most fragile, two brothers colluded to lock him away in a lunatic asylum.

The book tells of Archie's eventual escape and re-establishment as a Virginia gentleman, patron of the arts and soft touch for anyone with a sad story and a hand out.

Lucey also tells of Amelie's second marriage, to Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy, exiled and penniless member of the Russian royal family. Despite Amelie's remarriage, Amelie and Archie remained friends (and Amelie and the prince remained Archie's financial dependents) well into the 20th century.

Archie died in 1935; Amelie in 1945.

Gari Melchers lived from 1860 to 1932, traveled in many of the same European locales at the same time, and shared many acquaintances with the Chanlers.

"I'm sure they must have crossed paths at some points," Lucey said.

Whatever the case, she said, she's excited to tell her Gilded Age story at Belmont.

"It will be fun to be in that kind of setting, reminiscent of that world," she said.

To reach LAURA MOYER: 540/374-5417
Email: lmoyer@freelancestar.com