StoryChantilly, its museum with invaluable collections, its majestic park, its vast forest… and its abysmal deficit. To bail out the estate, the Institut de France, its owner, is stepping up privatization operations, such as Nabilla’s wedding in July. A contested management, at the origin of the shattering departure of the last administrator.
This July 6, 2021, Nabilla Benattia has an appointment with history. For her second marriage to Thomas Vergara, the model and ex-star of the “Angels of reality TV” has treated herself to a princely setting: the Château de Chantilly, in the Oise, former home of the Montmorency and the Condé. How to dream of a more captivating setting? An old medieval fortress set on the water, formal gardens designed by Le Nôtre, monumental stables …
Here she arrives in a carriage drawn by four white horses. Nabilla, immaculate dress signed Jean Paul Gaultier, walks on her father’s arm towards the guests spread out in front of a mirror of water. There is the family, but also the agent of influencers Magali Berdah, the singer Bilal Hassani and the whole team of the program “Touche pas à mon poste” – the head of the band, Cyril Hanouna, will slip away. after the reception.
Selfies and Instagram stories are banned: guests have been asked to seal their phones. The exclusivity of the images falls to the cameras of the American broadcaster Amazon Prime. Behind the scenes of the celebrity wedding of the young woman of 29 years will soon become (the broadcast date is still unknown) a documentary series: “Nabilla sans filtr”. Seven episodes to tell “the rise to success and fame of Nabilla”, announces the platform.
The pin-up Nabilla, known for her creative syntax and exuberant breasts, in the footsteps of Grand Condé, Louis XIV’s rebellious cousin. The poster looks like a postmodern Jeff Koons-style collage. In any case, it is far from the chic and discreet image cultivated until then in Chantilly, where the “happy few” meet regularly for “white picnics” or “Institute rallies”. With its museum, the hanging of which has not changed for over a century, the place sometimes seems frozen in 1886, when it was bequeathed to the Institut de France.
“After all, if Nabilla’s marriage allows younger generations to discover the castle, I am not a bugger”, reasons aloud Xavier Darcos, who has headed the Institut de France since 2018. And the academician and former minister (under Jacques Chirac then Nicolas Sarkozy), more familiar with dictionary meetings in green clothes than heckled platters of “TPMP”, eyes widening, suddenly worried: “But wasn’t she already married?” “
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