Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland Read Free Book Online

presence witnessing this, my throat was instantly parched, and it was impossible to swallow.
    He glanced at me, looked abashed, and lowered his voice. “Too much Stourbridge, anyway. We want original shapes derived from nature, not these tired old classics.” He waved his arm derisively at the rubble on the floor.
    I felt protective of my girls if he would ever unleash his dissatisfaction with our work with a swing of his cane.
    “You still want us to keep experimenting with iridescence?” Mr. Nash asked in a surprisingly calm tone.
    “Perfection, Arthur! Nothing less! We work until we attain it.”
    “But the time. The fair is only ten months away now.”
    “Don’t tell me what I already know!”
    “And the expense. We’ve already spent—”
    “Don’t tell me that either!”
    …
    THAT EVENING AT the dinner table I described Mr. Tiffany’s outburst and glass smashing.
    “What is he? A maniac?” Mrs. Hackley asked.
    “I never thought so before this,” I said.
    Hank patted his mouth with his napkin. “There are a few things I know that might explain his behavior. I’ve been researching his family history for an article to come out during the Chicago Fair.”
    “Please, tell me everything.”
    “You sure you want the whole deal?” Dudley asked. “Nobody’s windier than Hank when he gets rolling.”
    “The lady asked, Dudley, so I have to start with Theophania, a Greek merchant named after a festival honoring Apollo, where he sold silk. His descendants inched northward across Europe, selling what came to be known as tiffin silk.”
    “How did you find that out?” I asked.
    “The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society and early company brochures in the Astor Library. One leap took the family from England to New England, and a few more generations followed as cotton merchants in Connecticut, each one shrewdly outdoing the preceding one. Comfort Tiffany rose above his father by hiring Indians to build a mill, and then selling them molasses and rum to recoup the wages he had paid.”
    “A canny business move,” said Bernard Booth, the Englishman, an import businessman himself.
    “Comfort’s son Charles, Louis’s father, had ambitions that stretched beyond backwater towns.”
    “He’s the one who established Tiffany and Company,” I said.
    “By buying crates of goods abandoned on the docks during a depression, and selling the contents to the carriage trade, since the upper class wasn’t affected. When working-class people could buy again, he opened a gimcracks emporium selling glass ‘diamond’ necklaces, Japanese fans, Chinese parasols. For the middle class, he imported Bohemian glass and French porcelain.”
    “Smart to offer a range of products to entice people to buy up,” said Bernard.
    “Everything had a price tag, an innovation that put a stop to undignified haggling over every sale,” Hank said.
    “I believe his company was one of the first to send out mail-order catalogs,” Bernard remarked.
    “They still do. I have one,” boasted Mrs. Hackley.
    “Save it. It will be a collector’s item someday,” Bernard said.
    “How did Charles Tiffany elevate the company into fine jewelry?” I asked.
    “That happened through blind luck.”
    Hank explained that Charles’s partner was in Paris on a buying mission in 1848 when Louis Philippe’s regime collapsed and the aristocracy was on the run and sold their jewels for half their value. The partner bought up as much as he could. Charles had the gems reset in new styles, and the Goulds, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Astors all came running. Even Queen Victoria. So he became known as the King of Diamonds.”
    “From gilt to gold, from glass to gems,” said Bernard, piling mashed potatoes and peas on the back of his fork. “Ingenuity bred wealth, and now wealth is breeding art. We could call it the Tiffany Imperative for each son to exceed his father.”
    “And that was behind his fiery temper in the take-out room,” I said,