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Peter Marié died at 1:30
o'clock yesterday afternoon at his residence, 6 East
Thirty-seventh Street, in the seventy-eighth year of
his age, from complication of diseases. He had been
in failing health for a long time, and his last
illness prostrated him about ten days ago.
The funeral services will be held in St. Patrick's
Cathedral on Friday morning at 10 o'clock.
Peter Marié may be called
the last gentleman of the old school in New York
society. There are other men who have courtly
manners and who have been noted for generous and
kindly hospitality, but they are in a way mere boys,
and none of them has in his veins the Gallic blood
which does so much toward making the gallant. Mr.
Marié was not, however,
the modern Gaul, but a survival practically from the
eighteenth century.
He came from an old French family which held office
at Cap Francais, in the French West Indies, in the
days before the Revolution. His grandfather was
Maitre du Port in that place. In 1792 he lost his
life in an accident by drowning. The men who were
sent to San Domingo in those days from France were
of excellent families. They carried with them to
that island all the manner and the graces of the
Courts of the Louis.
Mr. Marié's maternal
grandfather was a planter on the same island. He
owned a large estate there, and was assassinated at
a banquet which was being held to celebrate the
cessation of hostilities between the whites and the
blacks. His name was Arnaud, and his widow, like
many other ladies of San Domingo, made her escape to
the United States, boarding a merchant vessel. She
was an American. Her youngest daughter was Leontine
Arnaud, who, in 1811, at the age of sixteen, married
John B. Marie, the father of Peter. Mr. Marie was
the fourth son in a family of nine. His father
became a prosperous ship merchant, trading with
Mexico. He died in 1835.
Peter Marie, the fourth child, was born early in the
last century, when all the traditions of the old
Court life in France and the similar existence in
the Colonies in the homes of the wealthy planters
and Government officials were still fresh. There was
a small circle of French people in New York, many of
whom had succeeded in escaping the terrors of the
famous revolt of negroes in San Domingo. They formed
a part of the old society of this city. The
Brugieres, the Maturins, and others are descended
from them, as were also the Grymes, through Mrs.
Claiborne of New Orleans, the Alliens, and many
others.
Peter Marié was brought
up in the mercantile establishment of his father and
for years continued in business. He amassed a
comfortable fortune in the early sixties, and this,
added to his inheritance, enabled him to retire
early. Ten years before he had become a member of
the Union Club then the only great social
organization of New York. He was always very fond of
society, and from his youth he was considered what
was called in those days a great beau. French
fashions and French customs were more to the taste
of the gilded youth of those days, and they took
little from England. Mr. Marié
was always a welcome dinner guest, he danced at all
the balls and assemblies, and there were few young
men who were better known or more popular.
His life as a bachelor suited him. It was the custom
for men to marry young in the ante-bellum days, and
Mr. Marié was one of the
very few bachelors in town, who, although most
gallant and most devoted to the fair sex, was
content with his own lot, and who lived in a house
of his own and entertained as a bachelor host. His
residence was at 48 West Nineteenth Street, one of
the best sites in the city, near to the then new
building of the Union Club, and quite far up town.
There he began his famous dinners and his little
evenings.
In the house in Nineteenth Street he began the
foundation for an extraordinary collection of
objects of art. he always with gentle insistence
claimed the miniature or the portrait of every new
beauty he met. This was done with such rare courtesy
that the fair doner could not refuse. His house
became a museum for the pictures of all the beauties
in New York society and in other cities as well. The
walls were adorned with their likenesses, and to be
in the collection was always deemed an honor.
But Mr. Marié did not
stop there. He was a man of culture and of reading.
His library is one of the finest in New York, if not
in America. He had a passion for rare old books and
artistic bindings, and collectors were always at
work for him to add to his library. He was a rare
judge of paintings and of antiques, and his house
soon become too small to hold the collection. But
everything he had was good, and there was no sign of
crowding anywhere.
And to all this, Mr. Marié
added another accomplishment. He was a
delightful writer of verse not serious, exactly, but
of that pretty kind which was the fashion at the end
of the eighteenth century, when patches and powder
were in vogue and the minuet was danced.
Among his surviving relatives in New York are the
widow of his brother, Joseph Marié,
and her two daughters, Misses Leontine and Josephine
Marié. The younger of
these has written several books which have had a
great success. The daughter of his sister, the late
Mrs. Emil Sauer, is Mrs. Suse. Her daughter was one
of the debutantes of the Winter. Another sister was
the Vicomtesse de Bermingham, and another married
Ferdinand Thierot of Leipsic, whose father had been
Chamberlain to the King of Saxony. A niece was the
first wife of Frank Pendleton. His eldest brother
was Camille Marié
Mr. Marié belonged to the
Union, the Knickerbocker, the Grolier, the City, and
the Tuxedo clubs, the American Geographical Society,
the New York Academy of Sciences and other
societies, and was a patron of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design, and
the American Museum of Natural History. He was Vice
President of the New York Institute for the Blind.
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