The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  That night, as the Countess de Pourtalès glided away, out of the orbit of this galaxy of newborn stars and starlets, Marcel watched those two worlds on the brink of collision face each other, one taking form, the other dissolving. The fact would sear itself into his memory. He would try to remember that lost world and the scents and sounds that could evoke it. In the midst of that last season of the Dreyfus Affair, Marcel would finally make his decision.

  Soon he would again take up the pages of the novel he was beginning to shape in his imagination. He would become, he knew, a writer and an intellectual. His novel would take many forms, and its path would be circuitous. It would be the work of decades. But in that novel he would memorialize this moment—Paris in 1898—where two cultures edged up against each other in darkness. He would set that novel in this époque, in the days when France was torn apart over the fate of a Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus and over the courage of an elderly writer to speak truth to power.

  Marcel would turn the Countess de Pourtalès—along with Sarah Bernhardt and Robert de Montesquiou and Madame Arman and even some of the Hôtel Ritz’s staff members—into characters.

  He would write it, in the decades to come, increasingly ill and often isolated, in cork-lined rooms that could deaden the sounds of the urban clamor that assaulted him. It would come to be—many would say then and many still say now—the greatest novel ever written. It would be one of modernity’s greatest achievements. He would give his epic story of our search for lost time and for this lost moment particularly the title À la recherche du temps perdu. It is a story set in France in the spring of 1898, in the weeks and days when the Hôtel Ritz first opened.

  Marcel Proust—Proust of the Ritz, as some later called him—would become a name more legendary than any of those in that dying generation. Émile Zola would be his only rival in fame. The Hôtel Ritz would be his truest home while he—and the rest of those talented but sometimes fatally flawed characters that gathered around the Place Vendôme in the years to come—together wrote the new story of Paris in the twentieth century.

  It was a story that, sadly, always had war at the heart of it.

  3

  Dogfight above the Place Vendôme

  July 27, 1917

  Luisa, Marquise Casati

  IN PARIS, EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE AN ACTOR; NOBODY IS CONTENT TO BE A SPECTATOR.

  —Jean Cocteau

  In the summer of 1917, they were bombing Paris. After nearly a six-month hiatus, German air raids were once again a regular feature of nightlife in the capital.

  But you had to marvel at the calm of maître d’hôtel Olivier Dabescat, who glided unperturbed throughout the rooms of the Hôtel Ritz no matter what happened. Olivier knew where the levers of power were and how to pull them silently. Jean Cocteau saw that much plainly. There was something sinister about the power that Olivier wielded and the delight he took in it.

  It was after eleven on the night of July 27, 1917. The party in the princess’s lavish suite showed no signs of winding down early. She had been hosting a series of exclusive dinner parties like this for months, and they rarely ended until the small hours of the morning.

  Stifling a yawn, Cocteau was caught somewhere between feelings of amusement and frustration. Amusement because the dinner party could easily have been staged as a romantic comedy over at the Théâtre du Vaudeville, frustration because the romantic drama would have been more diverting if he hadn’t already seen this performance on more than one occasion. Marcel Proust and the dapper young French diplomat Paul Morand were across the room, doggedly pursuing the same woman: Hélène Chrissoveloni Soutzo, the thirty-eight-year-old Romanian princess who was their hostess.

  It was Morand’s own fault. He was the one who had introduced the bisexual writer to the princess just a few months earlier. Now the diplomat pretended not to mind the competition, though friends surely noticed the edge of bitterness in his description of Marcel Proust’s first meeting with her. It was instant bug-eyed fascination. “The writer had studied her black wrap and ermine muff like an entomologist absorbed in the nervures of a firefly’s wing, while the waiters fluttered in circles around him,” Paul remembered testily. It was just the kind of encounter that captured Cocteau’s sense of the absurd.

  Absurdity was in vogue. That year a new artistic movement had burst on the Paris scene. In his play Les Mamelles de Tirésias—“The Breasts of Tiresias”—which appeared that spring, the writer Guillaume Apollinaire had given it a name: surréalisme. The art world ever since had been caught up in a fever for new works with strange cinematic juxtapositions and with the nightmarish quality of fantasies so intense that the boundaries of the real collapsed under the weight of them. With word reaching Paris every day of renewed trench warfare and poison gas attacks and with food rationed, it was becoming increasingly difficult to make logical sense of anything. Surrealism articulated the modern condition.

  Surrealism and the stage drew this circle together that evening. The artists, writers, and society patrons made up the kind of artsy crowd that had claimed the Hôtel Ritz as a central landmark in their Parisian geography since its inauguration. Indeed, the connection between the Hôtel Ritz and the well-heeled international avant-garde had only intensified since the days of the Dreyfus scandal. Jean Cocteau had met the cultivated and curious Paul Morand for the first time that spring, at the opening of the experimental ballet Parade, which Jean and Pablo Picasso had produced in collaboration with Apollinaire. Cocteau was in the grip of his own romantic infatuation with the famous Spanish painter at the moment. Unhappily, the attraction wasn’t reciprocated; Picasso was in Madrid planning his ill-fated marriage to a Russian ballet dancer named Olga Khokhlova.

  Since 1898, the Hôtel Ritz also had remained a favorite retreat for those with Dreyfusard credentials—those whose ranks ranged from the experimental artists and beret-clad intellectuals of Paris to the renegade aristocrats who had turned their back on old French culture and embraced the avant-garde. Dreyfusards often went on to become modernists and surrealists and existentialists. Paul Morand’s father had been a Dreyfusard—although everyone politely pretended not to notice that he refused to allow his son to bring home Jewish visitors. The Count and Countess de Beaumont were also in the princess’s suite that night. They were rich and generous patrons of the avant-garde, famous in the capital for hosting extravagant masquerade parties and for their support of innovative artists. Over in plush chairs sat the aging Princess Marat and Marcel’s old friend Joseph Reinach, the Jewish journalist who had ignited the Dreyfus controversy at Geneviève Straus’s salon the spring that the Hôtel Ritz first opened.

  When Marcel Proust thought about his passion for the Princess Soutzo—“the only woman,” he said, “who to my misfortune has succeeded in making me leave my retirement”—it was her political determination above all that he found intoxicating. “What strikes me most about this woman and her keen sense of politics,” he wrote, is “this particular force that fascinates me as much as it horrifies me. There’s always something magical about her, and especially this iron will!” Her political commitments were fierce and calculating—and not always principled.

  The First World War was all around them in Paris in 1917. Even meals at the Hôtel Ritz were occasionally curtailed by rations and shortages. Not for Marcel and the Princess Soutzo, however. Olivier Dabescat hunted down for Marcel anything that he desired through black-market channels—and at staggering black-market prices. When the writer in an idle moment longed for some of his favorite tea biscuits, Olivier found him enough, Marcel told Straus laughingly, for “thirty years’ captivity.” They dined that night on champagne and lobster, despite widespread hunger in the capital.

  Overall, it was best to ignore the war as far as possible on such occasions. This was the tacit social convention. So instead of the trenches and troops, one talked of art and travels and scandal. It was difficult, though, to evade the topic entirely. That week in the capital, a military tribunal had condem
ned the Dutch courtesan and dancer Margaretha Zelle to death. It was the talk of the city. Better known to history as Mata Hari, she had spied for the Germans.

  On a lighter note, conversation could have turned to Cocteau’s springtime tour of Italy with Picasso and the principal choreographer of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev. In Venice that spring, the three men had visited one of the most eccentric of the old Hôtel Ritz regulars—Luisa, the Marquise Casati—at her storied palazzo on the Grand Canal. She had appeared with the Russian ballet troupe as a celebrity stage attraction and had known Diaghilev for the better part of a decade. That spring she captivated Cocteau and Picasso. After all, she was surrealism—devoted to becoming the art’s living modern spirit.

  During the years before the war, when Luisa Casati had lived at the Hôtel Ritz, she had been a society sensation. The marquise was bound to be on everyone’s mind, tonight especially. She was renowned for her passion for the black arts and the occult and spiritualism, and tonight the Princess Soutzo had invited a spirit-world hypnotist as entertainment.

  Cocteau could regale them with stories of Marquise Casati’s palazzo parties if he wanted. Witnessing Luisa’s performances—because there was no other word for it—was the only time, Jean confessed, that he had ever seen Picasso astonished. Casati had greeted them at her palazzo wearing wild creations, usually made for her by the avant-garde ballet-set designer Léon Bakst. Sometimes she appeared in costumes with a neckline cut to her navel. Sometimes she dressed only in furs to walk her pet cheetahs on jewel-encrusted leashes through the midnight streets of Venice, to the spontaneous applause of late-night revelers.

  The marquise wore a gold-painted snake, drugged into submission, around her neck as a living necklace and dangerously tinctured her eyes with drops of poisonous belladonna to dilate her pupils enormously and create an effect that was half satanic. She dyed her hair the color of flames. Her eyes were painted in dramatic black kohl shadow. Her naked footmen—gilded alive, like all her creatures—silently tossed copper filings into the fires to make them burn blue and green and hellish while the guests smoked opium. Around them, rites of the occult and hints of the sadomasochistic pleasures she openly enjoyed with her lover, the promiscuous Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, unfolded in the backdrop of the evening.

  They had all seen the same performance, albeit on a smaller scale, played out right here on the Place Vendôme. Olivier—who told Marcel Proust everything—vividly described a scene that had taken place at the Ritz one afternoon three summers before, in 1914, the week the First World War started.

  Luisa Casati turned her suite at the Hôtel Ritz in those years into an exquisite stage setting. Her daring sense of fashion was a source of inspiration for the young designers who clustered around the Place Vendôme, including a young woman named Mademoiselle Coco Chanel, who recently had moved into a modest atelier on a side street just across from the Hôtel Ritz’s back entrance.

  In the marquise’s luxury suite, the signature French sofas and elegant armchairs that Marie-Louise Ritz selected with such care and an eye for detail were soon covered with exotic animal skins. But the animals that everyone remembered were the live ones: in the marquise’s rooms at the Ritz, she kept her half-tamed pet cheetahs and (to the periodic terror of the other hotel guests) a freedom-loving boa constrictor, which Olivier patiently fed with a diet of live rabbits.

  It wasn’t just her penchant for snakes that earned her the nickname “Medusa of the Grand Hotels.” Like the Gorgon of Greek myth, she could be positively petrifying, especially in her rages, which were legendary among the hotel staff. A small delay or minor mishap in service could leave her hurling jewels out onto the Place Vendôme—sending the frantic staff out to retrieve the treasures. And her hours were notoriously unpredictable.

  Late in the afternoon of August 4, 1914, Luisa Casati decided that she wanted her breakfast. When she rang, no one came running. The marquise stepped into the hallway to collar an unlucky maid to see to the matter. The halls were unaccountably deserted. The elevator boy had fled his post. The gilded cage whose speed had caused Oscar Wilde such consternation remained stubbornly motionless. The marquise was furious.

  What had escaped her notice was the fact that Germany had declared war on France. That morning, Belgium had been invaded. The Germans were on the march to capture the ultimate prize of Europe: Paris.

  When the marquise descended the hotel’s grand staircase that afternoon in 1914, the world that she knew was in chaos. Olivier did not come running; he barely seemed to notice her presence. As another guest, the sculptress Catherine Barjansky, later recalled: “I found the Marquise Casati screaming hysterically. Her red hair was wild. In her Bakst-Poiret dress she suddenly looked like an evil and helpless fury, as useless and lost in this new life as the little lady in wax. War had touched the roots of life. Art was no longer necessary.”

  The marquise vowed that she would return to the Hôtel Ritz and take up her old residence when the war ended. But the roots of life had been more than touched in what followed. Food shortages and the Spanish flu combined with tanks and guns and missiles to kill nearly a million French citizens before the Americans ended their neutrality and joined the war in April 1917. Because of those cumulative losses and crippling deprivations, the French would insist that the treaty signed in Versailles to end the First World War, still two years in the future, shame and impoverish the Germans, unwittingly laying the foundation for a second terrible conflict and a vindictive Germany.

  When the remains of the dinner had been carried away, the Princess Soutzo’s hypnotist began her strange performance. Psychological automatism held an intense fascination for the avant-gardist. Like the Marquise Casati, the Princess Soutzo found the new field of psychoanalysis fascinating, and she spoke of a doctor in Vienna named Freud who had recently published a book on the theory of dreams and the unconscious. Ironically, it was here on the Place Vendôme that hypnotism had been invented. Just next door—at No. 16—the German physician Franz Mesmer founded his clinic in the 1770s and gave his name to mesmerism. Marcel Proust’s current work in progress—a third volume of his long-delayed novel about the search for lost time—was very much about the workings of the mind, memory, time, and fantasy. One by one, the hypnotist asked for volunteers, and the guests took turns exploring the suggestive realms of their unconscious in trances.

  The most dramatic unconscious act, however, was the one still playing out between Paul Morand and Marcel Proust as they pursued the affections of the Princess Soutzo. Jean Cocteau could only watch in wonder. Marcel had retreated years ago to his cork-lined room, where even the hum of the outside world had been deadened. Now his infatuation with this princess had done what no one had imagined possible: brought him back into the whirl of high society. But it was a bizarre triangulation. Marcel Proust’s most recent lovers had been not society women but louche playboys and handsome young Hôtel Ritz waiters.

  The bronze clock on the wall of the suite now chimed precisely half past eleven, but its sound was quickly lost in the shrill blast of the air raid siren on the Eiffel Tower. They were once again bombing the capital. The sirens wailed into the darkness. Cocteau, sardonic and weary, quipped lightly to the room, “There goes the Eiffel tower again, complaining because someone’s trodden on her.” The politely appreciative laughs sounded hollow.

  Overhead, German planes appeared in the heavens, engaged in a perilous chase with a French squadron. By the summer of 1917, the “Red Baron” was already a fearsome legend, but the young Luftwaffe pilot who was making a name for himself over northern France in those months was a German officer named Hermann Göring. Since June, he had shot down more than ten Allied pilots.

  The stars seemed unnaturally bright against the darkened city, and the falling bombs and machine-gun fire lit up the air in punctuated bursts of terror. The crowd gathered in the princess’s salon went quietly out onto the open-air terrace looking out over the Place Vendôme, where a silent crowd was gathering below
them to witness the apocalyptic drama. “We watched,” Marcel wrote to Geneviève Straus in a description of the night, the “sublime mid-air spectacle from the balcony.”

  In the shadows of the Place Vendôme, “ladies in night-dresses or bathrobes roamed . . . clutching their pearl necklaces to their bosoms.” The hotel staff ushered the more cautious and sensible of their guests into well-appointed cellar shelters. Late-night patrons of the hotel bars stood warily in the doorways, with the small red embers of their cigarettes burning. The scent of tobacco—a luxury in wartime—wafted lightly.

  On the horizon two pilots appeared in desperate dogfight in the skies above Paris. For one of those pilots it would end in victory; for the other, in conflagration.

  Cocteau watched a strange battle unfolding before him on the balcony, too. Marcel edged toward the princess, wrapped in his hulking overcoat even in the summer. There was the murmur of his quiet voice. “Just as the voice of a ventriloquist comes out of his chest,” Cocteau remembered, “so Proust’s [voice] emerged from his soul” in conversation. Marcel was unfailingly, even oppressively, solicitous and flattering. The princess—a cold and controlling mistress—encouraged his attentions. Paul Morand gazed off into the far distance.

  Paul could afford a secret smile that warm July evening as the skies above Paris exploded. Proust had already lost the battle. The princess soon would divorce her husband. She would marry Morand as soon as she had her freedom. They were almost certainly lovers already. Let her make her little conquest.

  When dawn came, Marcel—perhaps tormented, perhaps unfazed—would return to his cork-lined room and once again resume writing. He already knew that, “[i]f we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.” In the afternoons, he would summon Olivier to bring him beer and cold chicken and tell him all the Hôtel Ritz gossip. Everything was fodder for his grand Parisian novel, the work that would soon win him the most coveted literary prize in all of France and make him famous. Soon counts and princesses would be courting him. Soon others would be the flatterers.