During lockdown, when the rest of the world was at home baking bread and planting zinnias, Casiraghi took advantage of the time to return to university and take a philosophy course. Where her uncle Prince Albert II and his wife Princess Charlene provide the tabloids with a rollercoaster of content, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle chase an increasingly long list of brand extensions, Casiraghi stays out of the limelight, happy to do her duty, albeit quietly and with spare time for her own nerdy pursuits. At 36, the scion of House Grimaldi, Monaco’s ruling dynasty, is defying the public’s expectation of an idle or frantic royal.

In fact, the evening-low-key, highbrow, and decidedly unflashy-is much more in keeping with Casiraghi’s preferred modus operandi. Unlike the mob scenes outside a typical fashion show, the crowd here is modest, a mixture of rapt French journalists and academics, though seemingly only attractive ones.Ĭhanel coat and pumps ($1,500) Chanel Fine Jewelry earrings ($9,000) and ring ($1,550). The novelist Marie NDiaye is seated in the front row, next to Casiraghi’s husband, the French film producer Dimitri Rassam, and Chanel creative director Virginie Viard, who is staging the house’s spring collection in a few days and conceived these “rendez-vous littéraires” with Casiraghi when she became an ambassador for Chanel two years ago. Her hair is pulled back into a sleek ponytail, and her square jaw is in profile as she faces the other women on the stage, the Cameroonian author Léonora Miano, the literary historian Fanny Arama, and the actress Anna Mouglalis. And this really is her kind of party: a literary salon at the late Karl Lagerfeld’s photo studio, a soaring, skylit room on the Rue de Lille, in Paris’s 7th Arrondissement, where the walls are covered floor to ceiling with books. Charlotte Casiraghi is perched on a sharp-angled armchair, leaning forward with the anticipation of a child waiting for her birthday party to begin.

Grace under pressure meaning