Paying no concern about the palace, yet highly interested in the estate that secured her incomes, Marie-Nicole Darvari was difficult to persuade into selling the whole estate to her first cousin, George Valentin Bibescu: “Martha [Bibescu] spent long years to make Marie-Nicole sell Mogosoaia to G.V.B[ibescu], to put the estate on her name, and even more to rebuilt the palace, the church and the belfry, the new house, the old kitchens, etc.”
In 1911, the transaction was finally concluded: Mogosoaia became Martha and George Valentin Bibescu’s property. A new epoch, of reconstruction and pomp, began in the history of the palace, and for more than three decades, the old Brancoveanus’ residence recovered the glamour it had had in days of yore. Restoration of the palace is Martha Bibescu’s incontestable merit: if the salutary gesture of the refined aristocrat had not occurred, time and men’s indifference would have ruined the monument for good.
A descendant of two illustrious Romanian boyar’s families, a daughter of Ioan N. Lahovary (1848-1915) and Smaranda Ema Mavrocordat (1862-1920), Martha Bibescu (28 January 1886-28 November 1973) received a remarkable education, developing early her artistic taste and literary gift, conquering Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. On June 21, 1902, she married Prince George Valentin Bibescu, the grandson of the former Wallachia’s voivode; in 1911, he bought from his first cousin the palace at Mogosoaia and gave it as present to his young wife. Ghislain de Diesbach, the author of the soundest monograph on Martha Bibescu, appreciated G.V. Bibescu’s gesture as the unique way to pull out his wife from Prince Charles de Beauvau-Craon’s arms, an idyll that almost destroyed his marriage: “It is a masterly manoeuvre, inspired, perhaps, by his mother, as the perspective to remake this building, which she cares for so much, is the only way to connect Martha both to Romania and to an active life.”
But not only this reckoning made George Valentin Bibescu buy Mogosoaia, it was also a sentimental decision: here, in Nicolae G. Bibescu’s family vault, was buried his father, George Bibescu (14 March 1834-7/20 May 1902), whose exceptional and adventurous life is summed up in the epitaph carved on the marble slab covering his tomb. On his left rests his wife, Marie Henriette Valentine, Countess of Caraman-Chimay. Born in the castle at Menars (Loire Valley) on February 15, 1839, she married in Berlin – on October 24, 1875, following her divorce from Prince of Bauffremont – George Bibescu and died in Bucharest on August 25, 1914.
