Charlotte de Rothschild

Early years[edit]

She was born in Paris, the daughter of Betty von Rothschild (1805–1886) and James Mayer de Rothschild (1792–1868).^[1] Charlotte de Rothschild was raised by very wealthy parents who were at the center of Parisian culture. They patronized a number of major figures in the arts community including Gioacchino Rossini, Frédéric Chopin, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Delacroix, and Heinrich Heine. Chopin had become Charlotte's piano teacher in 1841, and as a tacit acknowledgment of the many years of support extended by Baron James and his wife Betty, dedicated to her an autograph of his so-called Farewell-Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 69 No.1,^[2] (almost certainly as an 1843 wedding present) his celebrated Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52, and four years later another work, his Waltz in C-sharp minor, Op. 64, No. 2.

In 1842, Charlotte married her English-born cousin Nathaniel de Rothschild (1812–1870) and in 1850 they moved to Paris, where he went to work at her father's bank, de Rothschild Frères. They were the parents of:


While Charlotte de Rothschild and her husband would always live in Paris, in 1853 they purchased the Château Brane-Mouton vineyard that they renamed Château Mouton Rothschild. In 1878, Charlotte bought the Abbaye des Vaux de Cernay in Cernay-la-Ville in the Vallée de Chevreuse, at the time only a ruins of a Cistercian abbey built in 1118. She undertook extensive restoration work and new construction to make the lakeside property into a country home. The property remained in family hands until 1945 when it was by sold by her grandson Henri James de Rothschild to aircraft manufacturer Félix Amiot.

Later years[edit]

Tragedy struck her family in 1881 when she lost her eldest surviving child, thirty-seven-year-old James-Edouard. An attorney in the Rothschild bank in Paris, James-Edouard de Rothschild had served in the Garde Mobile during the Franco-Prussian War and suffered from a number of illnesses, including depression that led to his suicide.