While other husbands may gift their wives with bouquets of flowers or strings of pearls, industrialist and philanthropist Alfred I. duPont bestowed his second wife, Alicia, with a 47,000-square-foot mansion modeled after Marie Antoinette’s Versailles retreat, Petit Trianon. Designed by illustrious New York architects Carrere and Hastings, the late-eighteenth-century neoclassical-style house was completed in 1910 and christened Nemours after the northern French town of Alfred’s ancestors.
