'I was going to wear my diamond ring, too," Sheikh Mubarak alSabah of Kuwait told Lady Rothermere, who was showing off a 30-plus-carat diamond ring with her tartan-plaid day dress by Alexander McQueen for Givenchy. "But in the car on the way from Paris, Sao Schlumberger gave me a lecture about never wearing diamonds before five, so I switched to my emerald." The cousin of the emir of Kuwait and the Korean-born second wife of the English press lord Vere Rothermere were two of the 1,200 guests at the wedding lunch of His Serene Highness the Prince and Duke Pierre d'Arenberg and Silvia de Castellane—the culmination of a $1.7 million, three-day, high-society performance piece staged in four different locations in France this past October. The Paris papers billed it as the wedding of the decade. One bedraggled Brazilian socialite, having made her way from Paris to Versailles to the towns of Bourges and Menetou and back, pronounced it "social torture." The golden couple's gift registry was also daunting: Asprey and Porthault.

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"Pierre has always been a bit extravagant," says a friend of the 36-year-old groom, whose Holy Roman Empire title can be traced back to the fifth century. "Just like his mother." His mother, the late Peggy Bedford Bancroft d'Arenberg d'Uzes, a Standard Oil heiress from Philadelphia, "was the epitome of the social party girl," according to one of her great pals, man-about-Paris Jimmy Douglas. "Always impeccably dressed, always smiling, laughing, giggling. She thought it was her duty to be an upper." Another friend says she'd buy the entire collection of couturier Jean Dessis, "wear six dresses, and give the rest to friends. She was ruined by her generosity. She was Lady Brett, in a way." Douglas remembers seeing her last at Regine's, being showered with diamonds by diplomats from the Central African Empire. She was married three times: to New York banker Thomas Bancroft; to Prince Charles d'Arenberg, who died when Pierre was a child; and, finally, to the Duke d'Uzes, the premier duke of France. When she died in 1977, at age 44, in a car accident returning from a dinner dance outside Paris, one French newspaper declared, "As far as the social scene is concerned, the star on top of the Christmas tree has gone out."

The front pews were reserved for royalty—from Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Yugoslavia, and India.

The bride, a 30-year-old French beauty whose father's family was ennobled in the ninth century, also has party-giving in her blood. Her maternal grandmother, Beatriz Patino, whose second husband was the late Bolivian tin king Antenor Patino, was one of the reigning hostesses of the original jet set. The Patino Ball, given in Estoril, Portugal, in 1968, rivaled the legendary Rothschild balls of the same era. With his epic wedding, Pierre d'Arenberg, who oversaw every detail from the design of the wedding gown to the seating of the wedding lunch, laid claim to being the host with the most in both families, past and present.

The festivities began in the Palace of Versallies on Thursday night, October 9, with a three-act, black-tie gala. The guest list was limited to 400 friends and relatives who had traveled from abroad, including Infanta Elena of Spain, Princess Caroline of Monaco and Prince Ernst of Hanover, Prince Pavlos and Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece, Prince Frederick of Kent, the Duchess of Seville, and what one jester called "the Concorde Frequent Fliers' Club"— Nan Kempner, Lynn Wyatt, and Georgette Mosbacher. (A handful of Parisians managed to slip in, led by the bride's favorite shoe designer, the oh-so-social Christian Louboutin.) First there was a concert in the Royal Chapel by the Erato Chamber Orchestra of Germany and the d'Arenberg Choir of Belgium— a wedding gift from Mstislav Rostropovich, the cellist and conductor, and his daughter Olga's in-laws, the Guerrand-Hermes family. Then came an elaborate display of gold and silver fireworks over the illuminated gardens and gushing fountains of Versailles, watched from, and reflected in, the Hall of Mirrors.

The piece de resistance was supper in the Hall of the Battles, where the entire party was seated at a 300-foot-long table covered with one seamless gold brocade cloth, which party planner Pierre Celeyron had had woven in Lyons especially for the occasion. Each guest was served a whole black truffle en croute, followed by lobster with a puree of potatoes and white truffles, and profiteroles for dessert. When an Argentinean debutante said two courses of truffles were too much, costume jeweler Kenneth Jay Lane snapped, "That's like complaining about having two orgasms in a row."

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On Friday there was a Mass in memory of the groom's mother at the American Cathedral in Paris, followed by lunch at the Hotel Ritz. At 9:30 the next morning, armed and uniformed guards stood watch at the Gare d'Austerlitz as several hundred guests, including Bryan and Lucy Ferry, David and Julia Koch, Cornelia Guest, Gilles Dufour of Chanel, Florence Grinda of Ungaro, and an assortment of Hapsburgs, Hohenlohes, Furstenbergs, and Bismarcks, boarded a special train for Bourges. As requested on the heavily embossed invitations, the women all wore hats and the men were in gray swallow-tailed morning dress. Several hundred more titles and tycoons made the two-hour trip in their own chauffeured Bentleys, Mercedeses, and Jaguars. The bride and groom helicoptered from Paris, as did Anne Bass and Carolyne Roehm.

The entire supper party of 400 at Versailles was seated at a 300-foot-long table, covered with one seamless gold brocade cloth.

Inside the 13th-century cathedral of Bourges, which is considered one of the four most important in France, along with Notre Dame, Chartres, and Reims, the chandeliers were festooned in white Casablanca lilies, and white silk banners with the gold d'Arenberg crest hung from the hundred-foot-high ceiling. "It's fantasy time," muttered Baroness Helene de Ludinghausen as the bells tolled at high noon and 72 choirboys in white robes made their way down the aisle, which was banked with more lilies. The front pews were reserved for royalty: Prince Laurent of Belgium; Prince Jean of Luxembourg; Princess Isabel of Liechtenstein; Prince Michael of Bourbon-Parma and Princess Maria Pia of Savoy, with her sons, Princes Dmitri, Michael, and Serge of Yugoslavia; and the Rajmata of Jaipur. A few pews back, Jerry Hall, the consort of rock king Mick Jagger, looked as if she might deliver a Dauphin before Communion. Seven horn blowers in green velvet tunics and breeches heralded the arrival of the groom—"the Calling of the Stag," whispered Baroness de Ludinghausen—who walked down the aisle holding his top hat behind his back. The bride's gown, with its 25-foot train embroidered in India, was based on a 17th-century Dutch painting. It was made by Oscar de la Renta for Balmain and was rumored to have cost between $50,000 and $100,000, and to have been the subject of much back-and-forth between the designer and the groom, who wanted a 75-foot train. The bride was followed by eight flower girls and page boys, in white-and-gold satin outfits straight out of Van Dyck. The Mass, in English, French, and German, was officiated by the Archbishop of Bourges and four other prelates.

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On the buses which transported guests to the d'Arenberg family's Chateau de Menetou, liveried waiters served Dom Perignon 1985 champagne and tea sandwiches, and Beethoven was piped through the sound system. A replica of the Belgian royal family's greenhouse had been erected behind the chateau for lunch--crayfish bisque with truffles, braised quail with mousse of asparagus, and sherbet parfaits. The wedding cake was red and gold, the d'Arenberg-family colors, and when the bride and groom cut into it, a bevy of doves was released from underneath it. "Magnificent, simply magnificent," sighed Sao Schlumberger, absentmindedly caressing her black and white pearls.