Salomon de Rothschild

One of the more reckless scions of the famous Rothschild family, Salomon James de Rothschild was born in Paris in 1835. His father, James Meyer, had brought the Rothschild banking empire to France and expected his children, in turn, to expand the sphere of the family’s influence. Instead, Salomon lost vast sums of money on the stock exchange. As punishment, he was assigned a tedious apprenticeship with another branch of the family in Frankfurt, where he met his cousin and future wife, Adèle. His father later sent him to tour the United States on the eve of the Civil War, where Salomon sympathized with the Confederate cause. Despite these sympathies, and his proclivity for gambling—the cause, the Goncourt brothers claimed, of his relatively early death at the age of twenty-nine—he was known to have a philanthropic side. He was buried in the family vault at Père-Lachaise Cemetery in France.