Antoine Bibesco

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Prince Antoine Bibesco (1878–1951) was a Romanian aristocrat, lawyer, diplomat, and writer. Born in Paris to Prince Alexandre Bibesco and Elena Epureanu, he grew up in Paris while overseeing the Bibesco estates in Craiova after World War II. His mother’s Paris salon connected him with many great artists and writers, and he maintained friendships with Marcel Proust and others throughout his life. Bibesco helped bring attention to Proust’s work and published Letters of Marcel Proust to Antoine Bibesco.

A writer as well as a diplomat, Bibesco penned plays in French and had an American success with Ladies All on Broadway in 1930. He also translated works by Noël Coward and John Galsworthy into French. Early in his career he served as a counsellor at Romanian legations in Paris and Petrograd, became First Secretary of the Romanian Legation in London by 1914, and later joined the inner circles of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith.

In diplomacy he held high-profile posts for Romania: Minister (Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary) to the United States from 1921 to 1926, and Minister to Spain from 1927 to 1931. His tenure in Washington helped establish the Romanian Embassy as a formal mission. In 1936, during a period of political unrest, Bibesco worked to reassure Britain and France that Romania would not fall under fascist influence.

On the personal front, Bibesco married Elizabeth Asquith in 1919, the daughter of Margot Asquith and sister of Margot’s circle of writers and society figures. They had a daughter, Priscilla, born in 1920. The marriage endured social acclaim but was marked by Bibesco’s well-known charm and affairs, including a noted relationship with Enid Bagnold and a later dalliance with Rebecca West.

During World War II, Bibesco stayed in Romania after his wife’s death in 1945. After the war, his estates were confiscated by the communists, and he left Romania, never to return. He spent his final years in Paris, where he died in 1951 and was buried there. Enid Bagnold remembered him as a man with “three tombs in his heart”—for his mother, his brother, and his wife.