Manners: School for Wives

In the naughty old Paris of the turn of the century, Maxim's was a wicked wonderland. Girls with velvet names like Lolo, Dodo, Cloclo and Froufrou lolled there hoping to meet a king, a count, even a pretender, and were celebrated by Franz Lehar in his Merry Widow ("Now I'm off to Chez Maxim, where it's always so in-time"). Today the wine and the food are still among Paris' best, and there are girls there still, but they are rather a different sort. They are going to school.

Social Filter. L'Academie Maxim's was founded two and a half years ago by Maggie Vaudable, wife of the restaurant's present owner, to instruct a carefully selected group of girls in "the special sense of savoir-vivre that the French have prided themselves on since Louis XIV." Though the school claims to be open to all girls sufficiently familiar with the French language and culture to benefit from—not simply get along in—the all-French classes, in practice the students are recruited through a social filtering system that stretches through Europe and the U.S., Canada and Latin America.

L'Academie accepts no more than 30 girls a year. Members of the current crop include Henry Ford's daughter Anne (whose sister Charlotte graduated with the premiere class in 1961), Melinda Fuller, granddaughter of onetime Massachusetts Governor Alvan Fuller, and Genevieve du Pont of the Delaware dynasty. Tuition for the eight-month course is $2,800, covers the girls' social outings to theaters, balls, concerts and weekend house parties (escorted vacation cruises to Greece or Egypt are optional). Students do not live in dormitories, but (at an additional cost of close to $2.000) are placed with families who can offer both high social standing and—an even more difficult requirement—a private bathroom for each lodger.

The Treatment. The girls get special treatment in every move they make. They take the Sorbonne's famed French civilization course, but Madame Vaudable's girls do not have to claw for seats with the 2,000 ordinary students who also take the course; the girls are taught in a special room in a special private session given by the course's regular lecturers. When the girls go to the Louvre or Versailles, they are guided by a curator. They are invited to see the famed family art collections of Baron Edouard de Roth schild and Greek Shipowner Stavros Niarchos. France's best-known art auctioneer, Maurice Rheims, receives them in his home and talks to them of French period furniture. The Baron Alexis de Redé entertains the girls in his private apartments at the Hotel Lambert (the oldest occupied mansion in Paris), where, beneath Le Brun's painted ceiling, they sip champagne served by footmen. Duke Philippe de Luynes, president of the French Society for the Protection of Historical Dwellings, escorts them through his castle (Luynes).