European Textiles

Turkish Prayer Rug

• Ottoman 18th Century
  197 x 125 cms
  Kashmir wool ground with gold & silver thread embroidery

Formerly in the collection of:
Roger Peyrefitte (17th August 1907 – 5th November 2000) was a French diplomat, writer of bestseller novels and non-fiction, and a defender of gay rights .

Born in Castres, Tarn, to a middle class bourgeois family, Peyrefitte went to Jesuit and Lazarist boarding schools and then studied language and literature in the University of Toulouse. After graduating first of his year from Institut d' Études Politiques de Paris in 1930, he worked as an embassy secretary in Athens between 1933 and 1938. Back in Paris, he had to resign in 1940 for personal reasons before being reintegrated in 1943 and finally ending his diplomatic career in 1945. In his novels, he often treated controversial themes and his work put him at odds with the Roman Catholic church.

A cultivator of scandal, Peyrefitte attacked the Vatican and Pope Pius XII in his book Les Clés de saint Pierre (1953), which earned him the nickname of "Pope of the Homosexuals". The publication of the book started a bitter quarrel with François Mauriac. Mauriac threatened to resign from the paper he was working with at the time, L'Express, if it did not stop carrying advertisements for the book. The quarrel was exacerbated by Mauriac's articles attacking the memory of Jean Cocteau because of his homosexuality and the release of the film adaptation of Les amitiés particulières. This culminated in a virulent open letter by Peyrefitte in which he accused Mauriac of being a hypocrite, a fake heterosexual who maligned his own children and a closeted homosexual with a past. It is said Mauriac was badly shaken by this letter, unable to get out of bed for a whole week.