The year was 1882. The palace was the Luxembourg Palace: the ball, the Senat Bal, held at the beginning of autumn. It was still warm, and so the garden was used as well. I was the soprano. I was Lilliet Berne.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I grew up around the Luxembourg Gardens, so I guess that is my best memory.
Never in a million years would I want to live at Versailles with Marie Antoinette or anybody else. I hate to tell you this but I did not even like visiting Versailles. I found it just too ornate. It was like a complete diet of cotton candy, marzipan, and whipped cream.
Early Nineties - that was what it was all about: how people dressed on the terraces.
It was in the Seventies but I still recall what was a good night for my club. Of course, the stadium has changed now but I have heard that the atmosphere is still the same.
My earliest memory is a picnic in the park near our house, which was next to Wimbledon Common. Why on earth we went to a park when we lived so near the common is a mystery, but it had formal gardens and lawns - perhaps it was that very difference that took my parents there.
One of the first gardens I did outside the family was for the designer Hattie Carnegie. I was 23 then, and I went to her salon, but could not afford any of her dresses myself, though I loved them. Miss Carnegie suggested I do a garden in exchange for a coat and dress, and so I designed and planted a garden for her.
Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.
Introduced to this world in Llandyssul, Cardiganshire, Wales, November 14, 1843, I celebrated my first anniversary by landing at Castle Garden, in New York City.
Recently, I was in Bernalda, my dad's ancestral home town in Italy. He has just refurbished a palazzo and turned it into a hotel, so we had my sister's wedding there. It was beautiful.
Once we played for the Princess of Monaco in Paris. We were the biggest ducks ever, wearing rented tuxedos. We trashed the party, took a bunch of girls and champagne in limos underneath the Eiffel Tower, and set up an acoustic show. It was like a Hilary Duff movie.