Mistress of the Ritz

by Melanie Benjamin

  Mistress of the Ritz is a work of historical fiction, using well-known historical and public figures. All incidents and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Melanie Hauser

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DELACORTE PRESS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Benjamin, Melanie, author.

  Title: Mistress of the Ritz : a novel / Melanie Benjamin.

  Description: New York : Delacorte Press, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018052997 | ISBN 9780399182242 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780399182259 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Auzello, Blanche, approximately 1897–1969—Fiction. | Auzello, Claude—Fiction. | Ritz Hotel (Paris, France)—Fiction. | France—History—German occupation, 1940–1945—Fiction. | World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—France—Fiction. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Biographical fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A876 M57 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018052997

  International edition ISBN 9781984817419

  Ebook ISBN 9780399182259

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Laura Klynstra

  Cover illustration: H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Lily

  Chapter 1: Blanche, June 1940

  Chapter 2: Claude, 1923

  Chapter 3: Blanche, June 1940

  Chapter 4: Claude, 1923

  Chapter 5: Blanche, June 1940

  Chapter 6: Claude, 1924

  Chapter 7: Blanche, Spring 1941

  Chapter 8: Claude, 1927

  Chapter 9: Blanche, Spring 1941

  Chapter 10: Claude, 1938

  Chapter 11: Blanche, Autumn 1941

  Chapter 12: Claude, 1938

  Chapter 13: Blanche, Autumn 1941

  Chapter 14: Claude, Autumn 1941

  Chapter 15: Blanche, Autumn 1941

  Chapter 16: Claude, Autumn 1942

  Chapter 17: Blanche, Autumn 1942

  Chapter 18: Claude, Autumn 1942

  Chapter 19: Blanche, Autumn 1942

  Chapter 20: Claude, Winter 1943

  Chapter 21: Blanche, Winter 1943

  Chapter 22: Claude, Winter 1944

  Chapter 23: Blanche, Winter 1944

  Chapter 24: Claude, Spring 1944

  Chapter 25: Blanche, June 1944

  Chapter 26: Claude, June 1944

  Chapter 27: Blanche, June 1944

  Chapter 28: Claude, June 1944

  Chapter 29: Blanche, June 1944

  Chapter 30: Claude, July 1944

  Chapter 31: Blanche, August 24, 1944

  Chapter 32: Claude, August 24, 1944

  The Ritz, August 25, 1944

  Chapter 33: Blanche, September 1944

  Chapter 34: Claude, Autumn 1945

  Lily

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Melanie Benjamin

  About the Author

  Blanche is dead.

  Sometimes death is a mercy, and I believe this is true for her. Because she was once so vibrant and spirited, and that’s how I’ll remember her. I have so many memories of Blanche: Blanche singing a sailor’s sea chantey with a glass of champagne balanced on the back of her hand, Blanche showing a streetwalker how to dance the Charleston, Blanche being gently compassionate to someone who didn’t deserve it, Blanche stubbornly turning her back and stomping her foot like a child.

  Blanche blazing with courage, defying—foolishly—those she should not.

  But the memory of Blanche that remains the most vivid is the memory of seeing her, for the first time, in the setting that suited her best: at the Ritz. Her beloved Ritz.

  * * *

  —

  BLANCHE WASN’T THERE the day the Nazis first arrived in 1940; she was still making her way back home from the South of France. But she told me how it happened that day.

  How at first, the Ritz employees and guests only heard them: the tanks and jeeps roaring into the vast square, positioning themselves around the tall obelisk as Napoleon himself stared down in horror from his lofty perch. Then the metal heels of boots ringing out on the cobblestones and pavement, faint at first but increasing in volume as the Germans came close, closer, closest. They wrung their hands, they looked at one another, and some of them bolted for the service entrance downstairs. But they didn’t get far.

  Madame Ritz herself, small, gallant, dressed in her best black dress, still in the old Edwardian style, waited inside the entrance to her home that was the grandest hotel in all of Paris. Her bejeweled hands trembled as she clasped them in front of her; more than once she glanced up at the enormous portrait of her late husband, as if his painted likeness could tell her what to do.

  Some of these employees had been with her, with him, in the beginning, in 1898. They remembered the first time these same doors flew open; the glittering, gay guests venturing into the richly appointed hall—no lobby for Monsieur Ritz’s new hotel; he did not wish for mere citizens to darken its gilded portals—eyes shining with awe. Princes and duchesses and the wealthiest of the wealthy: Marcel Proust, Sarah Bernhardt. Then, as musicians played, as chandeliers gleamed, as the kitchen sent up trays and trays of Auguste Escoffier’s finest creations—meringues of vanilla cream decorated with sugared petals of lavender and violet; tournedos Rossini, rich pâtés, even peach melba in honor of Dame Nellie Melba, who had agreed to serenade the guests later—they gave one last touch to their new uniforms and smiled, eager to do their jobs. To fetch, lift, provide, polish, dust, mop, chop, fold, soothe, fix. To pamper; to cosset. They were thrilled to be part of this—the opening of a grand new hotel, the only one in the world with bathrooms en suite, telephones in every room, completely wired with the new electricity instead of gaslight.

  The Hôtel Ritz, on the Place Vendôme.

  This day, they did not smile. Some wept openly as the Germans stormed through the front doors, their dusty black boots sullying the carpets, their guns slung across their shoulders or holstered. They did not remove their caps, those imperious caps with the eagle insignia. Their uniforms—gray-green, the color of haricots verts—were ugly and offensive against the brilliant gold and marble and crystal of the hallway, the ornate tapestries on the walls, the regal blue of the carpeted grand staircase.

  The blood-red band on their arms—the menacing black spider of the swastika—made everyone shiver.

  The Germans were here. Just as everyone was told they would be, after the French Army crumbled like one of Monsieur Escoffier’s
fine flaky pastries, after the Maginot Line proved to be a child’s illusion, after the British Allies abandoned France, fleeing across the Channel at Dunkirk. The Germans were here. In France; in Paris.

  At the Hôtel Ritz, on the Place Vendôme.

  Her shoes.

  It’s her shoes that worry her, if that can be believed. Of all the things this woman should be concerned about on this horrific day, it’s her shoes.

  But in her defense, given who she is and where she is headed, her shoes are a problem. They’re filthy, caked with dried mud, the heels worn down. And all she can think about, as her husband helps her off the train, is how Coco Chanel, that bitch, will react when she sees her. How they’ll all react when she shows up at the Ritz with filthy, worn-down shoes, her ripped stockings practically disintegrating on her shapely calves. While she can’t do anything about her stockings—even Blanche Auzello would never dream of changing her stockings in public—she is desperate to find a bench so that she can rummage through her suitcases and find another pair of shoes. But before she can speak this wish, she and her husband are swept up in the wave of bewildered—well, what the hell are they now? French? German? Refugees?—who are flooding out of the Gare du Nord, eager, terrified, to see what has become of Paris in their absence.

  Blanche and her husband are part of the great unwashed; dirt and cinders have coagulated in pockets of perspiration beneath their chins, behind their ears, their knees, in the crevasses of their elbows. Greasy faces streaked with soot. They haven’t changed clothes in days; Claude packed away his captain’s uniform before they left his garrison. “To be worn again,” he assured Blanche—or more likely, she suspected, himself. “When we fight back. As we most certainly will.”

  But no one knows when, or if, that time will come. Now that the Germans have taken France.

  Outside, the pair finally push their way out of the crowd so that they can catch their breath, try to corral all the luggage that is slipping out of their hands; when they packed, nine months ago, they had no idea how long they’d be away. Automatically, they look for a taxi in the usual line outside the station entrance, but there are none; there are no cars at all, only one lone cart, hitched to the saddest horse Blanche has ever seen.

  Claude glances at the horse, takes in its heavy breathing, the foam dribbling from its mouth, ribs so defined it’s as if the flesh has been carved, and shakes his head. “That animal will never see another morning.”

  “You!” Blanche marches over to the man sitting on the cart, a man with small eyes and a gap-toothed smile.

  “Yes, Madame? Ten francs. Ten, and I take you anywhere in Paris! I have the only horse and cart within twenty kilometers!”

  “You unharness that horse right now. You bastard, that horse is about to collapse, can’t you see? He needs to be stabled, fed.”

  “Crazy bitch,” the man mutters, then sighs and gestures toward the street, teeming with humans on foot. “Don’t you understand? The Nazis took every healthy animal when they came. This nag is all I have to make a living.”

  “I don’t care. I’ll pay you twenty francs if you just let this animal lie down for a while.”

  “If he lies down, he won’t get up again.” The man glances at the poor animal swaying on its crooked legs, then shrugs. “I figure I have three, maybe four jobs left, and then he’s done. And so am I.”

  “I’ll do it myself, you—”

  But Claude has reached his wife and dragged her away, even as she still lunges toward the hapless horse and his owner.

  “Shh, Blanche, shh. Stop. We need to go. You can’t save every broken thing in Paris, my love. Especially not now.”

  “Try and stop me!” But she does allow her husband to steer her away from the station. Because one important fact remains. The Auzellos are still a long way from the Ritz.

  “I would have telegrammed to have someone meet us,” Claude says, mopping his forehead with his filthy handkerchief; he looks at it and winces. Blanche’s husband craves a clean handkerchief as much as she craves clean shoes. “But…”

  Blanche nods. All the telegraph and telephone poles linking Paris to the outside world had been cut during the invasion.

  “Monsieur! Madame!” Two enterprising young boys appear, offering to carry the Auzellos’ bags for three francs. Claude agrees, and they start to follow the urchins through the streets of Paris, normally so chaotic. Blanche can’t help remembering the first time she tried to navigate the circle around the Arc de Triomphe, so many lanes full of honking vehicles going every which way. But today, she’s stunned by the complete absence of traffic.

  “The Germans are confiscating every car,” one boy, a tall, pale lad with blond hair and a broken front tooth, says with the cockiness of a youth in the unusual position of knowing more than his elders. “For their army.”

  “I would blow it up first, rather than give my car to the Boche,” Claude mutters, and it’s on the tip of Blanche’s tongue to remind him that they don’t own a car. But she doesn’t; even Blanche knows that now is not the time to make that particular point.

  While the ragtag little group straggles along, she becomes aware of something else: silence. Not just from the crowd of stunned citizens stumbling out of the station, spreading out through the city like a muddy puddle of rain, but everywhere. If there is one constant in Paris, it is talk: Café tables crammed with volatile patrons arguing about the color of the sun. Sidewalks, too, crowded with Parisians stopping to make a point, jabbing a finger in a companion’s chest as they debate politics, the cut of one’s suit, the best cheese shop—it doesn’t matter, it never matters. Parisians, Blanche knows too well, love to gab.

  Today, the cafés are empty. The sidewalks, too, are bare. There are no noisy schoolchildren in uniforms playing in the vacant gardens. No vendors singing while they push their carts; no shopkeepers haggling with suppliers.

  But she feels eyes upon her, she’s sure of it. Despite the warmth of the cruelly sunny day, she shivers and tucks her hand beneath her husband’s arm.

  “Look,” he whispers, nodding his head skyward. Blanche obeys; the windows beneath the mansard roofs are full of people peering out furtively behind lace curtains. Her gaze is pulled toward the sky, caught by something shining, reflecting the light, up on the very rooftops.

  Nazi soldiers, carrying polished rifles, looking down at them.

  She starts to tremble.

  They haven’t encountered any soldiers until this moment. The Germans had not reached Nîmes, where Claude had been garrisoned at the start of the Phony War. Even on the train to Paris, where everyone was terrified that they would be strafed by bombers as so many people who fled had been; even though every scheduled—and unscheduled—stop caused all conversation to cease as they held their breath, afraid of hearing German words, German boots, German gunshots. Through it all, the Auzellos hadn’t encountered a single Nazi.

  But now that they are here, home, they do. It’s really happened, goddammit. The Nazis have really conquered Paris.

  Blanche takes a breath—her ribs ache, her stomach churns, and she can’t remember when they last ate—and walks on in her destroyed shoes. Finally, they come to the enormous paved square of the Place Vendôme; it, too, is empty of citizens. But not of soldiers.

  Blanche gasps; so does Claude. For there are Nazi tanks in the square, surrounding the statue of Napoleon. An enormous Nazi flag, with its twisted black swastika, hangs above several doorways—including that of the Ritz. Her husband’s beloved Ritz. Hers, too. Their Ritz.

  And at the top of the stairs leading to the front doors stand two Nazi soldiers. With guns.

  There’s a clatter. The boys have dropped the bags and are sprinting off like hares. Claude looks after them.

  “Perhaps we should go to the flat instead,” he says, taking out his dirty handkerchief again. For the first time today—for the very first t
ime since Blanche has known him—her husband looks uncertain. And that’s the moment when she understands that everything has changed.

  “Nonsense,” Blanche replies, feeling hot blood surge through her—strange blood, not her own, but the blood of a courageous woman with nothing to hide from the Nazis. To her own surprise, not to mention Claude’s, she gathers up the suitcases and marches straight toward those two soldiers. “We are going in the front door, Claude Auzello. Because you are the director of the Ritz.”

  Claude begins to protest but for once does not argue with her. He lapses into silence as they approach the two sentries, who each take two steps toward them but don’t, thank Christ, raise their weapons.

  “This is Herr Claude Auzello, director of the Ritz,” Blanche announces in her best German, a German that surprises her with its smooth confidence, as it obviously surprises her husband. After all, according to him, his American-born wife speaks French with the most atrocious accent he’s ever heard, so it’s more than a bit stunning to hear this flawless German.

  But then, the Auzellos have been surprising each other since the moment they first met.

  “I am Frau Auzello. We want to speak to an officer at once. Mach Schnell!”

  The soldiers look startled; one runs into the hotel. Claude whispers, “Mon Dieu, Blanche,” and she can see by the way he tightens his grip on his bags, he’s doing his earthly best not to cross himself in that infuriatingly French Catholic way.

  Blanche—despite trembling limbs—remains upright, even imperiously so, and by the time the officer, a short man with a red face, emerges, she knows exactly what she is going to say.