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one of her most successful nail lacquer shades. The books on the mirrored bookshelves are all identically bound in matching leather. Behind the books, small invisible lights create a mysterious glow, like footlights glowing across an act curtain beneath a stage proscenium.
    But it is Mimi’s dining room, at the end of the central gallery, that is perhaps the most dramatic room in the apartment. Its strié walls are painted in a dusky-rose blush to match one of her Miray face powders, and, incredibly, in late August, Mimi has found fresh tulips to match the blush exactly. These fill three George I epergnes arranged across the length of the rosewood dining room table. In this room, too, are Mimi’s famous set of Louis XIV chairs, an even dozen of them, signed “Boulle,” their backs inlaid with tortoiseshell and yellow and gold metal in scrolls and cartouches, their seats covered with a deep pink Fortuny fabric. This same fabric has been used to treat the three tall, park-facing windows. A splendid pair of eight-paneled coromandel screens flank the fireplace, and its mantel displays a pair of eighteenth-century Sèvres vases—in the same pink as the Fortuny, an unusual color for Sèvres, which is more commonly blue, the color called sang du roi —and these are filled with more dusky-rose tulips, baby’s breath, and thin strands of bear grass.
    This is the room where, when she entertains, Mimi likes to use pieces from the collection of motif French and English china dinner and dessert plates that she and Brad have been building over the years. She now has plates to match almost any course she chooses to serve. If, for instance, a main course is to consist of baby lamb chops, Mimi has a set of Wedgwood plates painted with a pastoral scene of sheep grazing in an English meadow. Tonight’s dessert, poached fresh pears in crème fraîche , will be presented on plates decorated with pears, pear leaves, and blossoms. She also has plates decorated with grapes, strawberries, plums and apples, and on and on. For years, for Christmas, anniversaries, and birthdays, Mimi and Brad have given each other sets of motif plates to add to the collection, and a favorite pastime on Saturday afternoons for Brad and Mimi has been exploring the antiques shops along Second and York avenues, looking for plates with food motifs, no matter how whimsical the design. No one in New York has a collection quite like theirs.
    Mimi has been called a perfectionist. But look more closely. That Sèvres vase on the left has been broken, and repaired. When Badger Moore was nine, he and his friend Alex Brokaw came home from St. Bernard’s and, in an unsupervised moment, decided to construct a pair of forts in the apartment. The boys used sofa cushions from the living room and library, overturned ottomans and Boulle chairs, and, in a stroke of military inventiveness, decided that the pair of vases would serve admirably as cannons. The vase on the left was one of the first casualties of that battle.
    â€œYour mother is going to be furious! ” Felix roared when he heard the crash and came running from the kitchen. “Your mother is going to kill you! ”
    But of course it wasn’t quite as bad as that.
    â€œGet rid of them both, darling,” the famous decorator Billy Baxter told Mimi when he noticed the maze of tiny lines where the Sèvres vase had been pieced together. “As a matched pair, they have no value now, since one of them’s been broken. Get rid of them, and replace them with something of museum quality.”
    But Mimi demurred. Whether they are broken and restored or not, she still loves those vases. Besides, who else owns a piece of pre-Revolutionary French porcelain that was once mustered into service as a cannon?
    Yes, as the young model commented, it is a nice place that Mimi and Brad Moore have here, and it works, both as a showcase for Mimi’s considerable talents and as a