One of the most squeaky details of the series The marquesse is to see how incredibly talented people orbit around the inanity of Tamara Falco. The most obvious example is that of Mario Vargas Llosa: an entire Nobel Prize suddenly reduced to a secondary character of a girl – natural, friendly and endearing, yes – incapable of articulating a speech with a minimum of content. But, along with the writer, there are other prominent figures who parade through this Netflix product and will surely go unnoticed by the audience, when they would deserve a documentary on their own.

It is the case of Isabelle d’Ornano, the lady who invites Tamara to lunch in the third episode. “I’m going to meet the woman thanks to whom I am at Sisley, who was a friend of my father and the truth is that for me she is a reference of elegance,” explains the protagonist of the docuseries (who has an image contract for the French cosmetics brand) before entering her host’s Parisian apartment.

I remember when I myself ate in that house full of flowers and candles, invited by Sisley along with other journalists specialized in women’s press, and the impact that Madame d’Ornano had on me. Because she is indeed very elegant, as Falcó claims, but also extremely inspiring, educated and sagacious.

At this point, I think the story of Sisley deserves a few lines. In 1976, when no one could ever fill their mouths with the word “sustainability”, the couple Hubert and Isabelle d’Ornano founded a brand of beauty products based on the power of natural ingredients and respect for the environment. .

From there some of the most revolutionary cosmetics that exist today were born, such as the All Day All Year treatment, a kind of shield that protects the skin from external aggressions while increasing its own defenses, or the unclassifiable perfume Eau du Soir. According to the firm’s website, its products are currently distributed in more than one hundred countries and the company has around 4,500 employees.

These achievements are due to the late Hubert d’Ornano, a business visionary, but also to Isabelle. The daughter of a count and a princess, she was born in Warsaw, she grew up in Madrid, studied at Oxford and then moved to Paris to marry Hubert, a descendant of Napoleon. “Her life seems like a fairy tale,” I told her on another occasion when I met her again to interview her for the magazine. ellebecause I only knew the most frivolous details of his biography.

“Life is never completely a story,” he gently corrected me. And then she went on to tell me that his parents had left Poland because of the war and were never able to return to their country. She also alluded to the death of two of her five children at young ages (they were 20 and 40 years old, respectively). “I have always tried not to let this influence the joy of my family,” she concluded without any drama or fuss.

It’s been seven years since that conversation and then Isabelle openly confessed to me that she had already turned 77, so now she will be 84. From what I see in the press releases and photos, she continues to maintain an active role in the family business, the The same one that all the large luxury conglomerates have tried to buy without success. Furthermore, she has not given in to the temptation of getting rid of the signs of aging from her.

It is another of the lessons she gave me when I chatted with her: “The wrinkles? They ended up not bothering me. I think that nowadays they even give you a certain originality, because since there are almost no women with wrinkles left…” she joked.

Tamara Falcó does very well in accepting that a documentary be recorded about her privileged life and in benefiting financially from it if she so wishes, but when are audiovisual production companies going to give the space they deserve to those women who are truly called to leave a mark on the world?

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