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The convoluted amour known as a ménage à trois is the sort of entanglement typically conducted out of the public eye. But an auction being held this week at Christie’s in Paris brings back into the spotlight the French capital’s most brazen triad since the permissive days of Louis XV.

Marketed anonymously as “Collection d’un Amateur,” the auction, to be held on October 3 and 4, disperses the storied contents of La Lopeziana, the Saint-Tropez villa of socialite Patricia Lopez-Huici de Lopez-Willshaw, who died in 2010, two years shy of her centenary. (A Christie’s representative declined to identify either the estate or the consignors.) The 488 lots are a breathtaking tribute to a life so luxurious and refined that it is absolutely unimaginable today, from dining off shapely vermeil plates from the coveted 18th-century Orloff service (estimated to bring as much as $65,000) to relaxing in a chaise à châssis made for Madame du Barry by the menuisier Louis Delanois (estimated to bring $90,500 to $130,000).

An enigmatic Vienna-born Chilean, whose most prominent feature was a nose that British novelist Nancy Mitford described as looking like a shinbone, Patricia Lopez-Willshaw was one third of a startlingly self-possessed high-society troika that included her husband and cousin, Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, and his much younger lover Alexis, the baron von Rosenberg-Redé. Though traditionally blasé when it came to affairs of the heart, and well aware that the glamorous South American couple’s marriage was one of convenience, le tout Paris was somewhat startled when the forty-something Arturo—”a small, tad pretentious Chilean [who] was the king of guano,” one memoir recalls—returned from a trip to New York City in 1941 with the pouty 19-year-old nobleman in tow. Manicured eyebrows shot skyward upon the news that the millionaire had ensconced his Austro-Hungarian Antinous in a lavish apartment at Hôtel Lambert, the most desirable private residence on Île St. Louis. More unbelievable still was Lopez-Willshaw’s seigneurial diktat that the three dine together, attend costume balls together, even holiday together. (“It was an unusual arrangement, but it worked,” Redé observed late in life.) The unconventional trio remained a fixture on the French social scene until Lopez-Willshaw’s death in 1962. His fortune was divided between the lover and the widow—who, the previous year, had achieved the distinction of becoming Yves Saint Laurent’s very first haute couture client.

For the remainder of her very long, exceptionally chic life, Patricia Lopez-Willshaw maintained a low profile, shuttling between Paris, Kitzbühel, and Saint-Tropez, where she built La Lopeziana and filled its sunny rooms with the rare furnishings and spectacular objects she inherited. (“I can’t but love [Arturo] on account of his collection of Louis XIV silver,” Mitford, an ardent Francophile, swooned.) The art in the Christie’s sale, however, is largely banal, much of it likely acquired by Patricia after the death of her husband, the undisputed aesthete in the family.

Many of the best objects at La Lopeziana came from Hôtel Rodocanachi in the suffocatingly proper Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Shared by the Lopez-Willshaws for many years, the mansion was a baby Versailles and the chef d’oeuvre of amateur architect, designer, and music critic Paul Rodocanachi, reputedly another of Arturo’s lovers. After purchasing the hôtel particulier in the late 1920s, the guano magnate gave the simple but stately mansion a resplendent Sun King makeover, right down to a shellwork ballroom on the ground floor. Cyril Connolly, in the indispensable Les Pavillons: French Pavilions of the Eighteenth Century (The Macmillan Company, 1962), called it “the most dazzling recreation of the age of Versailles that I know.” Which surely pleased its chatelain, who once, when visiting that particular royal palace, was heard to murmur, “This reminds me a little bit of my house.”

Fifteen obsessively detailed watercolors of the ancien régime–style interiors at Hôtel Rodocanachi, now a cultural center, are in the Christie’s sale. Executed in the 1940s and ’50s by that most refined of Russian émigré artists, Alexandre Serebriakoff, each is estimated to bring between $11,000 and $16,000.

For anyone keeping score, it should be noted that Mrs. Lopez-Willshaw’s extramarital affections were lavished on several worthy gentlemen, among them a distinguished writer. And although she and Alexis de Redé, as her husband’s paramour was commonly known, disliked one another—so he observes in Alexis: The Memoirs of the Baron de Redé (Dovecote Press), an engrossing 2005 account of his life as a postwar Pompadour—the two rivals for Arturo Lopez-Willshaw’s attentions and argent eventually came to a truce. Amazing the litany of slights that access to a checkbook can heal.

UPDATE: Of the 488 offered lots, 311 sold, for a total of $8,062,043. An Italian porphyry mortar with ormolu mounts sparked a 10-minute bidding war that eventually ended with the auction’s top bid, $1,424,110; the item,  vaguely described as "probably from the first half of the 19th century," was expected to bring far less, $25,817 to $38,726. The high bidder surely suspects or knows that the piece is much older and rarer than the catalogue suggested.

For highlights of the Patricia Lopez-Willshaw collection, a.k.a. “Collection d’un Amateur,” click here.