Princess Grace Kelly

I went to the Grace Kelly exhibition at Hotel de Ville recently and was amazed by the seeming perfectionism this woman oozed. An Oscar winning actress who gives up her acting career to marry a Prince and turns into a ball hosting, poetry reading, dried flower art making, virtual saint of a mother of three. Looking at bits of her life encased in glass made it all surreal somehow, like she was a phantom Princess, with her gold oscar and white wedding dress floating on display, her ghostly presence visible in the background with grainy black and white clips from her movies, untouchable and unreal. Apart from her tragic and too early death, her life was perfect, so it seems. Surrounded by rich and famous friends, adored by a Prince and her children, she embodied all the roles of women endeavor to, rolled into one. Something just doesn’t seem right....

Then we discover she was not always ‘perfect’, as she engaged in an affair with a married man before she married Prince Rainier. Her father was blatantly against this, as his personal letters to her were encased in glass in the exhibit, open for all to read. Joking with my friend about this whilst reading the letters, an older French lady joins in our conversation. ‘Oh yes, he was having an affair with her”, she said, almost proudly confirming this man’s infidelity and then defending it with a quip that, to the French it just doesn’t matter....’zit is zee Franche waaay...’