The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  In 1898, the Dreyfus Affair at last reached its sorry nadir. That winter, as word spread of the new revelations and of a whispered cover-up, literary and intellectual France broke ranks with the aristocracy and came to the aid of Alfred Dreyfus. On that evening of June 1, at the Hôtel Ritz’s inaugural gala, the nation was riveted by the unfolding consequences.

  Marcel had watched firsthand as the drama escalated in the cultural salons of Paris that winter. Paris in the 1890s was a city of private salons—soirées where the capital’s elite gathered in the homes of fashionable women to debate ideas and shape politics. The salons had been Marcel’s entrée into the world of high society, and Robert de Montesquiou more than anyone else had unlocked for Marcel the doors. Now that relationship was newly precarious.

  Count de Montesquiou and Marcel attended all the same salons—and there were many of them. At the Wednesday-evening salon of Madame Arman de Caillavet, her literary lover, the novelist Anatole France, held court. There Marcel listened keenly as luminaries such as the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the count passionately debated the case.

  All the gossips in Paris whispered that Bernhardt was the longtime lover of one of the partners in the Hôtel Ritz enterprise, the legendary Auguste Escoffier. Every year for her birthday, the two dined together in a private celebration on a meal the great chef prepared for her. They had known each other for nearly two decades, long before either of them rose to world renown and public attention. Food was his métier, but the “divine Sarah” was Auguste Escoffier’s great consuming passion. Sarah Bernhardt’s zeal in the Dreyfus Affair would play a leading role in the hotel’s future.

  Marcel and the count regularly appeared at other soirées across the city, too. The salon of the immensely powerful but shallow Mélanie, Countess de Pourtalès, was the pinnacle of exclusivity. Marcel secretly preferred, however, the friendlier salon of his friend and patroness Geneviève Straus, which Robert de Montesquiou often attended with his cousin, the Countess de Greffulhe. Here Marcel encountered the young playwright Sacha Guitry and the daring English aristocrat Lady de Grey, whose husband was another of the substantial investors in the Hôtel Ritz project in Paris.

  It was over a heated conversation at the salon of Madame Straus that the Dreyfus Affair reignited in this small circle of Parisian high society that past autumn. In October 1897, one of Geneviève Straus’s old friends, a lawyer and politician named Joseph Reinach, rashly announced that he knew who the real culprit was in this treason scandal. It was not Alfred Dreyfus. It was a certain major, whose aristocratic last name—Esterházy—linked him to one of the noble families of Hungary. The anti-Semitic impressionist painter Edgar Degas stormed out of the party in a fury. Others in the world of intellectual and artistic Paris listened.

  One of those who soon became persuaded that the French government had framed an innocent man was the nation’s greatest living writer and another of Geneviève Straus’s regular visitors—Émile Zola. On January 13, 1898, Zola published in the Paris newspaper L’Aurore history’s most influential letter to the editor. The letter was directed to the president of France and began with the daring words J’accuse. It is French for “I accuse,” and the writer knew that the letter was certain to get him charged with libel. That was precisely his intention.

  The next day, there was a second letter in the paper, this one titled “Manifesto of the Intellectuals.” It was an impassioned statement of support for Émile Zola’s bravery and a call for an investigation into l’affaire Dreyfus—the “Dreyfus business.” It was also the moment in France when the concept of the French “intellectual” as a voice of political conscience first captured the public imagination.

  Marcel was an aspiring writer, now at work on his first novel. He also had—like Madame Arman and Madame Straus—a Jewish family background. In the letter published on January 14, 1898, he added his name as one of the three thousand signatories. The count had not been amused by this act of social rebellion. Marcel explained gently to Robert de Montesquiou that, when it came to embracing this deeply rooted French anti-Semitism, “our ideas do differ.” Or, rather, Marcel went on, “I have no choice of opinions on this subject,” having an Israelite mother.

  The last week of May 1898, those simmering tensions intensified in elite Paris. On May 23, the week before the opening of the Hôtel Ritz, Zola—whose first conviction for libel had been overturned on appeal—went on trial for a second time in a courtroom in Versailles, just outside Paris. Marcel, in a second act of defiance, went with coffee and sandwiches every morning to hear the evidence in the public gallery. He was trained in law: why shouldn’t he be interested?

  The trial would continue for weeks, and no one doubted that this would be the essential topic of conversation at any gathering. The examination of Émile Zola had emotions at a fever pitch, and polite neutrality and open-minded tolerance were fast becoming casualties of the shifting climate. The Dreyfus Affair was a turning point in French culture that summer—and it was the turning point in Marcel’s most important friendships, however much he tried to prevent any hard feelings.

  The door through which Marcel entered that evening was as powerful a symbol as any of just how many things in France were changing and why the aristocracy was so stridently anxious. No. 15, Place Vendôme, had been for centuries the private home of princes. Built at the beginning of the eighteenth century as a family mansion—an hôtel particulier, in the parlance of Parisian architecture—on the site of the Renaissance palace of the dukes of Vendôme, its four-story façade skirted the embroiled French Ministry of Justice.

  Behind the stone doorways of the plaza and in the small streets and alleys that ran outward from its center still lived aging aristocrats like Virginia Oldoini Verasis, Countess di Castiglione—the ruined beauty known as the “madwoman of the place Vendôme.” She had once been the mistress of France’s last emperor. Living connections to that imperial world were swiftly disappearing, and the countess was already suffering from the illness that would kill her the following autumn. Robert de Montesquiou was determined to write her biography.

  Now, the small palace at No. 15, Place Vendôme, refurnished and refitted, opened its doors to guests that included a different kind of emerging elite, who were challenging the old aristocratic supremacy—guests whose celebrity stemmed from innovation and an embrace of a culture swiftly moving in bold new directions.

  That night, Marcel’s future and the future of the Hôtel Ritz would both take a step in the same direction. He had spent years currying favor with the aristocratic young dandies of his generation, with aesthetes and backward-looking decadents like the count. They aspired to be, like their model Oscar Wilde, the beautiful “boys” of a high society that was already dying. Marcel had wanted to be one of them. He was coming to understand that it was futile. Artists and intellectuals and innovators were grasping at the reins of the coming twentieth century. His destiny was among them.

  From the first moment it opened its doors, the Hôtel Ritz was the province of that new world, even if nobody ever planned it. The Ritz was on the brink of becoming the celebrated haunt of the so-called Dreyfusards and their artistic supporters—of those who already in the last days of the nineteenth century had their eye on a kind of exhilarating horizon of creative possibilities. It wasn’t something that everyone on the hotel staff necessarily welcomed. But not even the most powerful maître d’hôtel could dictate the whims of fashion or hold back the tide of change rising across Europe.

  The Hôtel Ritz would become from the moment of its inauguration the herald of the modern—the center of all that was “new” about the era and of all that in the next two or three decades would become so intoxicating and magical about Paris. It would be part of what would make Paris a legend in the twentieth century. It would be part of why starving young artists, students, and dreamers still find in the city a kind of spiritual intoxication.

  Beginning in 1898, the Hôtel Ritz became the home and meeting place of this modern tribe—of
the artists and intellectuals; rising film stars and stage actresses; the movie directors and the avant-garde designers; the photographers, sculptors, and flamboyant and eccentric writers of the coming twentieth century. It became the chosen province, too, of the most homeless of all in this new world: the outcasts from those old aristocratic circles, the restless and creative and sometimes brilliantly mad countesses, the princes and princesses whom history turned to stateless exiles, the kings who jettisoned their thrones for undutiful romantic passions for women with names like Mrs. Simpson. (Decades later, unsurprisingly, it was still the last refuge of a recently divorced princess of Wales and her companion.)

  Soon the Hôtel Ritz also became a beacon to the vast numbers of Americans arriving in Paris—a transient colony of the newly rich and envoys from metropolises that had been modern from their inception. Much of the old Parisian aristocracy disdained these newcomers almost as much as it did France’s Jewish population.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that the Hôtel Ritz would become the playground of these new modern celebrities and socialites. There is a truism in the world of architecture that design creates culture. The Hôtel Ritz was designed with a forward-thinking sense of the innovative and the novel. In fact, that was precisely why the Belle Époque decadent Oscar Wilde quickly decided that he despised it.

  The founder, César Ritz, personally planned the layout of the Hôtel Ritz. Born the son of a Swiss peasant, César Ritz had risen through the ranks as a young man, from waiter to hotel manager and now to partner. With Auguste Escoffier, he had redefined at the Savoy in London how the wealthy thought of luxury hotels. In the spring of 1898, he was at the apex of his career, opening one new grand establishment after another.

  The Hôtel Ritz epitomized his personal philosophy of modern luxury. On the one hand, it was a palace hotel, meant to be the kind of place in which royalty might feel at home on a jaunt to Paris. The hotel famously had—indeed, famously has—no lobby proper. That was to prevent those who were not in residence from lurking voyeuristically in the foyer. It was part of a whole set of decisions calculated to make the palace feel private and intimate and cozy.

  Those admitted to its magic circle needed the chance to strut the stage, however. That was how it worked in high society, where much depended on visual cues and performance. So there was a grand staircase, from which the ladies could descend in their finery, watched by all eyes as they made their dramatic runway entrance. It was not by chance that the Hôtel Ritz was established in the heart of the new Parisian couture district at the very moment that the French were inventing modern fashion. The shops touting the great names of design and luxury were clustered around the Place Vendôme and to its west along the rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré. On the small streets that spun off the Place Vendôme, and along rue Cambon, especially, were milliners and fabric merchants and British tea shops and the ateliers of up-and-coming young designers.

  The Hôtel Ritz was a palace hotel, but there was nothing stuffy or ancestral about it, despite its aesthetic or its conveniences. To be sure, the furniture was classic and expensive, in the styles of the French kings. But all the rooms were designed to be contemporary and—since César Ritz had a not unreasonable fear of tuberculosis and cholera spreading among his guests—scrupulously hygienic. Heavy carpets and drapes that gathered dust and germs were anathema, and the bedrooms had newfangled innovations such as built-in closets and private, plumbed bathrooms. In tribute to his Swiss-born zeal for precision, in every room a small bronze clock on the wall kept the time exactly.

  As Oscar Wilde complained, bitterly if not entirely logically, the elevators moved too fast and each room had “[a] harsh and ugly light, enough to ruin your eyes, and not a candle or lamp for bedside reading. And who wants an immovable washing basin in one’s room? I do not. Hide the thing. I prefer to ring for water when I need it.” In 1898 bathroom sinks with indoor plumbing were a novelty. In the coming years—when war would mow down entire generations of young men and when professional careers for women became new possibilities—only the truly rich would be able to keep household retainers to fetch their water.

  Oscar Wilde might have despaired of the modern plumbing, but the early American visitors praised the Hôtel Ritz as the pinnacle of new luxury hotels. “It is beautifully situated,” wrote one Mrs. Elizabeth William:

  Some of its side rooms look out on the garden of the Bureau du Ministre de la Justice, and are very quiet as well as airy . . . [although] the view is not so entertaining as from those rooms that have windows looking out on the place Vendôme. . . . The hotel is quite up to date, and all the appointments are thoroughly sanitary.

  Marcel, with his asthma, approved entirely.

  From the kitchens, Auguste Escoffier modernized dining in Paris. With the help of Lady de Grey, he had already popularized high tea and made it fashionable—and accepted—for women to dine in public in London. He intended to do the same in the French capital. Escoffier invented the modern meal as we know it, popularizing “Russian service,” the system of serving dishes in courses. For generations before that, the French royalty had feasted on groaning buffets of elaborate dishes. And, for fine restaurant dining, Escoffier invented the prix fixe menu—and, of course, he invented several dishes that he named after his “divine” Sarah.

  From the night of its inaugural gala, the fate of the Hôtel Ritz was decided. Marcel could not defer much longer putting off his own decision, either.

  In the grand doorway of the Hôtel Ritz, as the sounds of the Place Vendôme faded away behind him, Marcel felt his coat gently borne away from him. He had not thought quickly enough to stop the porter. Things like this distressed him greatly. He liked to keep his coat on. It was something people noticed about him particularly.

  As he entered the grand room, guided by the dapper maître d’hôtel, the furious chatter of voices made him flinch again for an instant.

  One look around the room was enough to tell any keen social observer where the future of the Hôtel Ritz lay. There, to one side of the salon, stood the art-mad Middle Eastern oil magnate Calouste Gulbenkian, cutting some new deal or another. Here was the exiled Russian grand duke Michael Mikhailovich and the woman for whom he had given up an empire in an illicit morganatic marriage, the Countess of Torby. Hardly a “nobody,” she was the granddaughter of the Russian poet Aleksandr Pushkin.

  Marcel could see familiar faces from the salon circles, and there were also the familiar faces of some of the city’s most elite and desirable courtesans—the so-called grandes horizontales, or “grand horizontal women.” There was the dancing star of the Folies Bergère, Liane de Pougy, and, it was whispered, her Spanish archrival, Carolina Otero, known in Paris simply as La Belle, the beautiful. Carolina Otero and Sarah Bernhardt shared the Italian poet and playwright Gabriele D’Annunzio as lovers. Professional mistresses and tangled liaisons were calmly accepted in Paris.

  Somewhere perhaps Marcel could catch the eye of Robert de Montesquiou. One never knew for certain where one stood with the mercurial count, but Marcel had reason to be anxious. Letters between the two following the Dreyfus Affair had taken on a tone of resentment. One icy look was a fair warning.

  And there, looking haughty and somehow ancient even in her youth, no one could fail to see Mélanie, the Countess de Pourtalès, looking aloof and out of place in a world that was changing.

  She was beautiful, a society queen. Marcel had watched how her brown eyes could darken almost to purple in a certain light. Eyes were something he noticed. People often were unsettled by the intensity of his observation. Marcel was undeniably drawn to the countess. She was the epitome of the old world he had been on the brink of penetrating.

  Those changeable eyes looked out on the world coolly, and it would come only as a small jolt of pain now should they pass over him unseeing. He was watching before him that summer’s evening an era beginning to unravel slowly—the Belle Époque was already waning. He would remember later, thinking of that time, how women like the
Countess de Pourtalès were dead before they were born. What he meant was that they lived in a world closed to him—a world closed even to them already. It was the heart of any true moment of decadence: the knowledge that an époque is already slipping from us, inexorably, even in the moment of its glory.

  Marcel knew that the lines dividing him and the count and countess now were simple and absolute ones. “I do claim to move with the times; but damn it all, when one goes by the name of ‘Marquis de Saint-Loup’ one isn’t a Dreyfusard; what more can I say?” he would write later. To support Alfred Dreyfus was the ultimate treason for a man in Marcel’s position. That was how they saw it. “[H]e who has taken the side of Dreyfus . . . against a society that had adopted him,” Marcel knew, had in their minds already made the bourgeois, plebeian decision. For the word Dreyfusard one might as well have exchanged it simply with the word modern.

  There were rosy lights and soft lampshades bathing the tables in the grand dining room of the Hôtel Ritz that night, and the June air was heavy with the scent of white flowers. The light that Marcel might have imagined flickering had another source—the Dreyfus Affair would extinguish it. He watched with the opening of the Hôtel Ritz something different rising on the horizon.

  Before the nineteenth century was over, the Hôtel Ritz would be home to a new world and to a newly emergent twentieth-century France. It would be the world of celebrity of a different kind—a world where illegitimate café dancers could rewrite the history of global fashion. Where middle-class girls from America could become the new duchesses and where prostitutes could become princesses. Where young Jewish men could change the world of literature. That birth, however, would be a terrible and painful one, and it would come at a human cost that we still find staggering.