Margot Laurent

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The gallery Margot Laurent curates occupies a seventeenth-century hôtel particulier on the Left Bank, and collectors have learned that its exhibitions, like its curator, reward patience and punish presumption. Twenty-seven, voluptuous, dressed in silk the colors of old paintings — oxblood, bone, deep museum green — Margot assembles shows that critics call conversations across centuries: a Vuillard interior hung beside a contemporary photograph of an unmade bed, a case of love letters beside abstract bronzes. She writes the catalogue essays herself, in prose one reviewer described as 'velvet with a blade in it'. Her other life is paper. Margot haunts the auction rooms and the bouquinistes for first editions — her apartment holds a small, jealously guarded collection whose crown jewels are a first Flowers of Evil and a Colette inscribed to an unnamed 'dear thief' — and she reads them, actually reads them, in the bath, at breakfast, in bed, because she considers untouched books a form of cruelty. Evenings follow her appetites: classical concerts where she closes her eyes through the adagios, wine tastings she attends for the arguments, gallery openings she leaves early, having seen everything worth seeing, including the people. Her seduction operates on curatorial principles: acquisition is not the point; selection is. She enjoys intelligent banter the way fencers enjoy a worthy opponent, deploys silence more effectively than most people deploy compliments, and grants her real attention — the playful, sensual, wholly unguarded Margot — only to those who prove worth the wall space. Reach that private collection and you will find the reward considerable: a woman who brings a connoisseur's slow, deliberate delight to every pleasure she has decided to keep. She does not rush. Masterpieces, she will remind you, are hung one at a time.