Every designer or design groupie idolizes an individual whose taste, spirit, and knowledge introduced him or her to a wider, wilder world. For interior designer Albert Hadley, it was Rose Cumming, the eccentric Manhattan antiques dealer. For decorator Billy Baldwin, it was Van Day Truex, the head of the Parsons School of Design and, later, the effortlessly creative design director of Tiffany & Co. For me and countless others who came of aesthetic age in the last decades of the 20th century—including the editor in chief of Architectural Digest, Margaret Russell—that mentor was Roger Prigent, a short, bespectacled antiques dealer who taught his followers to believe, as he did, that everything is “chic or not chic.”

Though his personal preference was for almost anything Empire—hence the name of his shop on New York City’s Upper East Side, Malmaison, christened in honor of Josephine Bonaparte’s country house near Paris—Roger, who died on December 15, 2012, at the age of 89, approved of a surprisingly wide range of objects and styles. It was that catholicity of taste that opened my eyes when I arrived in New York from Austin, Texas, at 27, and stumbled into his glorious, glittering shop, where rock-crystal chandeliers hung thickly from the ceilings like an extremely expensive Milky Way.

A towering Lucite-bedecked cabinet by the midcentury American manufacturer Grosfeld House was chic. So were snakeskin-clad telephone tables by Karl Springer, a chinoiserie étagère once owned by the Duchess of Windsor, an alarmingly ornate verre-églomisé cocktail table fit for a Mafia don’s living room, and curlicue mirrors of Venetian glass. Especially chic, in Roger’s estimation, was the custom-made furniture produced by Jansen, the elite Paris design firm whose soigné fauteuils and sofas he helped rediscover and popularize in the 1990s, so much so that they became a trophy of sorts in decorating circles. Not everything stamped with the company’s name was worth purchasing, however. As Roger once warned me, with an unapologetic dig at dealers he considered to be less discriminating, “Jansen made furniture for maids’ rooms, too, baby.”

He called everybody baby, by the way, in a heavy French accent absolutely unaltered by decades of living in the United States. It was a diminutive that made his disciples consider him our unofficial godfather. Formidably knowledgeable, entertainingly indiscreet, and a bit of a rascal, Roger accepted and encouraged our obsessions with all things fabulous, from Daisy Fellowes’s jewels to Stéphane Boudin’s interiors to ’50s fashion models and their star-crossed romances with bullfighters, movie stars, and artists. He praised our every effort, dashing off vibrant notes to writers, photographers, even editors in chief, about how much he liked our latest work—even when, as his eyesight failed, he could no longer see our articles and photographs but was only told about them by others.

Roger Paul Prigent was born in 1923 in Hanoi, Vietnam (then a protectorate of France), the eldest son of a French military officer. That exotic locale, to hear the dealer tell it, was romantic in the extreme, with all the trappings of a Marguerite Duras novel—the family lived in a fretworked and verandaed villa, he and his three siblings (Guy, Yvonne, and Annick) each had their own nanny, and his mother startled fellow expats by adopting the traditional áo dài pantsuit instead of wearing conventional European dresses. That Asian sojourn greatly affected Prigent’s youthful worldview, often in comical ways. As he once laughingly recalled, when the family was visiting France in the ’30s, the sight of pedestrians struggling with packages on a street made him ask his mother why they didn’t just hire an elephant.

The globe-trotting Prigents were living on the West Indian island of Martinique when World War II broke out, and Roger enlisted in the French air force, where he learned to use a camera as part of his surveillance duties. (His brother, Guy, a war hero, would be killed in Vietnam in 1954, in the battle of Dien Bien Phu.) That training led him to take up photography professionally after the war, first as a photojournalist in Paris and then as a fashion photographer in New York. Though not a star like his onetime boss Lillian Bassman or his idol Richard Avedon, Prigent was nonetheless a regular presence on the newsstand, his work appearing in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal, TV Guide, McCall’s, and Paris Match. Fashion models such as Dovima, Dorian Leigh, and Suzy Parker preened for his lens, as did actors (Phoebe Cates, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda), fashion designers (Diane von Furstenberg), royalty (Princess Lalla Meryem of Morocco), and singers (Alice Cooper and Barbra Streisand both used Prigent portraits on album covers). Commissioned to photograph a young interior designer named Matthew Patrick Smyth in 1986, Roger refused payment. “I was just starting out,” Smyth recalls, “and he said, ‘Take me to dinner when you become rich, baby!’”

Photo shoots brought Roger success, but his true love was for antiques, often Bonaparte-related. His home on the Upper East Side was dominated by a massive Canova bust of Napoléon; he slept in one of the emperor’s beds; a bicorne hat that belonged to the monarch was safely stored in a vault; and one Empire treasure, a circa-1803 writing desk, is currently on loan to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. “I always had a passion for buying furniture and made a lot of money,” Prigent once told The New York Observer. “So I bought, I bought, I bought; there was stuff everywhere.” Eventually the accumulations, along with failing eyesight, led him to become an antiquaire in the late ’70s; his sister Yvonne Lacks, immaculate and glamorous, managed the business. (She survives him, as do a niece and two nephews.)

For nearly 25 years Malmaison—first located on East 10th Street and later in the three lower levels of Prigent’s brownstone residence on East 74th Street—was a mecca of high style. The soaring rooms were crowded with gilt-wood and crystal, mahogany and bronze, lacquer and Lucite, and swirling with pulse-quickening provenances. The shoppers were high caliber, too, from star decorator Jacques Grange to fashion provocateur Gianni Versace. Invitations to Roger’s haphazard, wine-soaked dinner parties were coveted, attracting old-line connoisseurs, journalists, decorators, dealers, the odd foreign politician, strange but endearing neighbors, and celebrities straight from vintage issues of Vogue. (I remember sitting alongside Maxime de La Falaise, the ’50s Anglo-Irish supermodel turned boho icon, a woman whose gypsy sense of style had transfixed me for decades.) All of us sat elbow to elbow at a mirror-top table, typically sharing prosciutto and melon served on antique silver chargers, followed by spaghetti with red sauce on rare Russian porcelain plates. The dessert course was always the same—ice cream, scooped from the carton.

Ironically the brilliant eye that made both of Prigent’s careers possible eventually let him down. Macular degeneration undermined his vision, and in 2002, once it became clear that no treatments or surgeries would stem the encroaching blindness, Prigent closed the shop and sold the brownstone, though he would continue to receive clients at a penthouse apartment a block away and maintain warehouse spaces in Harlem that were open only by appointment.

“Before, when I walked into a gallery or a room, I would see right away what the best thing was; that was my talent,” said Roger, who dispersed the crème de la crème of his stock at Christie’s in New York ten years ago, a sale that brought more than $1.8 million. “But now, voilà—I can’t see, I can’t discover. So it’s just no fun anymore.”