The Hotel on Place Vendome

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Except, that is, at the Hôtel Ritz. The remaining staff assembled in the dim hours of the morning to listen to the broadcast come across the radio announcing the fall of Paris and wept. Then there was work to be done. The Ritz would stay open, and there would be the same white-glove service as always.

  By the time Louis Lochner entered the capital that day, word had spread through Paris that the first German officers were dining at the Ritz in splendor just as Marie-Louise had predicted. The German lieutenant colonel Hans Speidel lunched that day at the hotel on a victory menu that included filet of sole poached in German white wine, roast chickens (presumably French), asparagus dressed in Hollandaise sauce, and fruits au choix—his choice of local fruits, now ripe for the picking. It was a darkly symbolic choice of national dishes.

  When Louis Lochner and a cadre of bedraggled American war correspondents embedded with the German army arrived looking for food and lodging, the dining rooms were shut, and the reception was less than enthusiastic. The “vain manager,” Louis recalled, “almost had an apoplectic stroke, then mumbled something about his kitchen being already closed.” That manager was a somewhat frazzled and indignant Hans Elminger. When the determined German lieutenant in charge announced that this would be no obstacle and that his men would cook their own meals, four waiters in smart coats materialized instantly and a case of champagne from the basement also. Soon, “[a]s if by magic, delicious ham, mellow cheese, tastily prepared scalloped eggs appeared. Such was our sumptuous repast on that first night”—the first night of the occupation of Paris.

  In the days to come, Paris was indeed ripe fruit for the picking. Soon German tanks would roll in a victory parade down the Champs-Élysées, past the Arc de Triomphe, and Adolf Hitler himself would come to see—for the onlyt time in his life—the tourist attractions of Paris. Among the stops on his itinerary was the Place Vendôme, where armed German sentries already guarded the monumental front entrance to the legendary palace hotel. While in Paris, the Führer made arrangements to meet one of the hotel’s regulars, Serge Diaghilev, the founder of the Ballets Russes, the Russian ballet in Paris, to ask him personally to carry on making art in Paris. After all, that was what the German conquerors wanted most: a luxurious modern playground and the ultimate Parisian experience. The disappointed ballet star managed to oversleep and miss the meeting—but he did carry on entertaining the occupiers.

  This included enjoying the good life with some of the city’s most talented and famous residents. For those who were rich and beautiful and willing to be reasonably accommodating, the occupation need not be a terrible inconvenience. In fact, there was no reason why they should not stay and enjoy the Hôtel Ritz also. The German government would soon take over dozens of hotels and private mansions across the city for use as accommodation and military offices—including other elite hotel establishments like the Crillon, the Georges V, and the Meurice. The Ritz alone among the great palace hotels of the city, however, would become a Switzerland in Paris.

  Like France, it would be partitioned. An accident of architecture made it possible. When Marie-Louise Ritz had expanded the hotel after the long madness and premature death of her husband, César Ritz, decades earlier, she had connected with a long corridor what had once been two buildings—one a small eighteenth-century palace facing onto the Place Vendôme and another, more modest set of buildings with a cozy entrance on a side avenue, rue Cambon, that ran north from the river in the direction of the Opéra. That passage would shape the destiny of the Hôtel Ritz and the destiny of those who passed the occupation in its salons and bedchambers.

  Word came from Berlin of the hotel’s unique Janus-faced future. The propaganda maestro of the Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, famously declared that the capital would be gay and happy—or else. Orders from Berlin specified that the Hôtel Ritz would be the only luxury hotel of its kind in occupied Paris. Goebbels insisted on it because, for the German invaders, Paris and the Ritz were legends that could not be easily disentangled.

  The “Hôtel Ritz,” the order read that summer, “occupies a supreme and exceptional place among the hotels requisitioned.” The Place Vendôme side of the hotel would be, according to the official documents, the sumptuous residence of the German high-ranking officers and “occupied by the German army.” There, “[i]n the entry of the Hôtel Ritz on the Place Vendôme and in the interior hallway, immediately on the stairs giving access to the Hotel [will be] two German sentinels with weapons over the shoulders who present arms to the military chiefs who enter and leave the hotel. Further within, in the gilded salons and on the other floors, in the corridors and lobbies . . . all civilians [are] excluded.”

  Soon Adolf Hitler’s second-in-command, the corpulent Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, would move into a sprawling imperial suite taking up an entire floor. With him would come an entourage of German functionaries, including Hans Speidel, the newly appointed chief of staff of the military governor of Paris and the man in charge of making sure life went on smoothly for the hotel’s resident Nazi dignitaries.

  For those rooms at the Hôtel Ritz, the Germans would take a 90 percent discount—paying a mere twenty-five francs a day on average. As “guests” of the French people, they would ultimately send even that reduced bill to the new French puppet government of the occupation, the Vichy regime, named after a spa town south of the occupied territory.

  Marie-Louise Ritz and the hotel’s investors would not be seeing any vast windfall profits. Quite the opposite: only with the grudging help of the German officials did the Hôtel Ritz arrange the desperately needed million-franc credit line at the Bank of France, required to keep the business up and running. As Hans Elminger explained to the commandant of Paris, surely Adolf Hitler would be unhappy if the hotel were to go bankrupt and could not host dignitaries and Nazi celebrities as Berlin ordered.

  If one half of the Hôtel Ritz was an exclusive retreat for German private indulgence, on the rue Cambon side of the ancient palace and in the bars and restaurant the hotel remained open to the public—to the citizens of France and of neutral countries and to that select group of artists, writers, film stars, playwrights, entrepreneurs, and fashion designers allowed to stay in residence.

  Many of those in that group were familiar faces already. Arletty and Coco Chanel soon returned to Paris and to the Ritz. So, too, did the young Anne Dubonnet and her parents, Jean and Paul. Even with the help of an antifascist Austrian officer, the Dubonnet family had been unable to cross the border from Biarritz, and it would take them more than a year to obtain the visas from the American embassy needed to flee, at last, to New York City.

  Those faces that were not familiar should have made the Germans wary. The hordes of American journalists who arrived at the hotel were not the only ones looking to get to the bottom of the story. Agents and spies playing deep and dangerous games of intelligence and counterintelligence also soon made their way to the Ritz. After all, where else in all of Europe could one sit down to dinner in the same room with Hermann Göring?

  Only here, in the public spaces of the Hôtel Ritz, could the silent combatants of occupied Paris come together under the guise of neutrality. Here, the façade at least was unchanged and glittering. As Josée de Chambrun, the titled daughter of a leading French collaborator, remembered of the parties during those years in Paris, “Champagne flowed, and the German officers, dressed in white tie and splendid uniforms, spoke only French. Social life had returned with friends and our new guests, the Germans.” In the dining rooms and bars at the Ritz, it happened nightly.

  “The occupiers,” to everyone’s astonishment, were blatantly uninterested in keeping secrets: they “made little use of the [private] first-floor lounges; everything took place in public.” No German officer was permitted to appear in uniform in those public spaces, and all weapons were checked at a kiosk just beyond the Place Vendôme entrance. No low-ranking German officer was admitted at all. Illicit love affairs and tawdry passions unsurprisingly flourished. Art dealers in
tent on looting Paris and garnering vast fortunes hawked their wares to ready German “buyers,” and, before the war was over, there would even be one or two private prisoners locked in suites on the upper stories. Within weeks of the fall of Paris, Hans Elminger could report to his uncle in Switzerland that at the Ritz they were all on good terms with the high officials and that life was nearly back to normal.

  Yet, behind the façade, everything was not always so genteel or so neutral. The Hôtel Ritz was a wartime hotbed of espionage and resistance. In the kitchens, some on the staff were running a dangerous resistance network smuggling information out of the capital. Others were hiding refugees in secret rooms built among the roof beams. The part-Jewish bartender passed coded messages for the German resistance, and the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler took shape over some of those celebrated Ritz signature cocktails, all under the nose of the Gestapo. These were high-stakes games, and not everyone who was there at the beginning would survive the occupation.

  One of those who did survive, the hotel’s chief director, Claude Auzello, later put it bluntly: “You didn’t hear cannons in the Ritz, but the war was fought there too.” Under one roof—a roof like no other place in Europe during the Nazi period—a dozen astonishingly powerful stories of personal courage and stunning betrayal played out together, in the crucible where the future of postwar France—and the future of all of postwar Europe—was transmuted. In the spring of 1940, those stories were only beginning.

  By the spring of 1944, as the war drew to an agonizing close, those stories were all coming to their dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking conclusions. Some whose stories started there on the Place Vendôme were en route, at long last, back to the Ritz and to a shattered life in Paris. Others who had passed the war in opulence at the palace hotel were just coming to grips with the stain of luxury. And some, faced with the impossible intensification of death and horror that summer, could not finally avoid the agonizing eleventh-hour crises of conscience that would lead them to confront the inhumanity of their actions and inactions.

  The result was a singular season at the Hôtel Ritz—and an intimate portrait of the last days of the Second World War and of the destiny of the world that would survive it. This is the story of the last months of the Nazi occupation and of how the Hôtel Ritz, from its beginnings decades earlier, was destined to be the meeting place for the people who made Paris modern.

  2

  All the Talk of Paris

  June 1, 1898

  Courtroom trial, the Dreyfus Affair, 1896–99.

  THE PRESENT CONTAINS NOTHING MORE THAN THE PAST, AND WHAT IS FOUND IN THE EFFECT WAS ALREADY IN THE CAUSE.

  —Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, 1907

  That story of twentieth-century Paris and the Hôtel Ritz all started much, much earlier, on a warm and rainy June night in 1898, at the tail end of another century entirely, in the midst of a political scandal that cleared the space for the emergence of modern France. It was the night that the Hôtel Ritz first opened its doors to the public, with a lavish gala celebration.

  For the hosts of this inaugural event—the hotel’s founders, Marie-Louise and César Ritz—the off-and-on drizzle that evening was problematic. One never knew beforehand whether inclement weather would keep the guests away in numbers, and the list of those invited that evening included the most elite and finicky of all Parisian social circles. It was a crowd that liked to think of itself not just as the crème of society, but as its gratin—the perfect, deliciously thin layer of crust on the top of something already rich and wonderful. Considering that the man said to be the finest chef in the world—another of the hotel’s founding partners—would be showcasing his talents that evening, it was a particularly apt image for the occasion.

  On damp evenings, the hard pavements and the worn stone façades that encircled the Place Vendôme, an octagonal circus in the city’s ultrafashionable first arrondissement, sent the sounds of wheels and horses’ hooves and shrill women’s voices off in clattering echoes that seemed to come back from all directions like a surprise assault on the senses.

  For one of that evening’s guests, the racket of an increasingly urban Paris was unbearable. Marcel didn’t like noise. In fact, he found it painful. But he had come to the Place Vendôme this evening because, at just this moment, the imposing building at No. 15 was the epicenter of a closed and ancient world of which he had struggled to become a part for more than six years now—ever since, at the age of twenty-one, he started frequenting the exclusive intellectual salons of Paris as a law student at the university.

  His father, a wealthy doctor in the capital and a man honored with the ribbon of the French Legion of Honor and not a little fame, had put Marcel’s fragile nerves and his persistent troubles with asthma down to an illness that was fast becoming the modern condition. His father had published, with a colleague, just that autumn, in October 1897, an expert tome on the disease, called neurasthenia.

  At least Marcel could be flattered to know that the cause of his cutting-edge pathology came down to having a sensitive aristocratic temperament that was rattled by the fast-paced metropolitan changes that were already reshaping Europe and North America. His father reasoned that, as the upper classes used their intellect more than their muscles, so they were naturally prone to these kinds of rarefied neuroses. That part of things, at any rate, had a certain appeal to a young social climber.

  Marcel was undoubtedly less flattered to know that, along with the hypersensitivity to noise, his asthma, and his chronic insomnia, the other symptoms of his newfangled disease were eccentric phobias, a crippling lack of self-will, and a tendency toward abusive masturbation.

  The only cure, the doctor emphasized, was a complete avoidance of the kind of frenetic Parisian high society that had turned young Marcel into a playboy and a spendthrift. But avoiding the high life of the French capital city would have required willpower that Marcel could not have possessed, by definition, so he cheerfully ignored this boring parental prescription.

  Thus, on the evening of June 1, 1898, dressed in the flamboyantly fashionable attire that he made his personal hallmark as a man-about-town, Marcel joined a select group of several hundred of the late nineteenth century’s most influential trendsetters.

  Marcel was not an aristocrat—except perhaps in temperament. His father was simply talented and rich. But for Marcel, the world of counts and countesses drew him strangely and powerfully and expensively—as his father reminded him, to little effect—to it. For years he had desired little more than entrée to their rarefied circle, the only circle that mattered in Paris during the 1880s and 1890s.

  At last he had gained a toehold in this strange old world. It was all thanks to the influence of a few noble patrons, the women and mostly the men whom he cultivated with sycophantic poems and embarrassing public devotion. He still inhabited, though, only the outer reaches of this social world, and behind his back those who professed to be his new friends mocked him, calling him a “little flatterer” and “a vulgar little creature, uncivil in his bourgeois plebeian politeness.” That meant that evenings like this one were always high-stakes auditions. And his relationship with his most important patron, the count Robert de Montesquiou, was deteriorating alarmingly, a result of the scandal gripping French society that season.

  The Parisian upper classes were on the brink of a civil war from which there would be no returning. It was a war that was still playing out, in one fashion or another, decades later on the eve of the German occupation. Some say that France, in fact, has never recovered from its ravages. That night would determine which faction in the cultural battle would claim the Hôtel Ritz as its unofficial headquarters.

  The opening of the Hôtel Ritz in Paris was the society sensation of June 1898. As the newspaper Le Figaro reported that morning, “Everyone is talking about the Ritz hotel, inaugurated today.” But that little column appeared squeezed between news of the controversy gripping the nation—the scandal already known as the Dreyfus Affair.
It had rocked the nation to its foundations. It divided the glittering society of the French aristocracy and government from the ranks of the country’s greatest writers and thinkers and artists. It also divided the aristocracy against itself. On the one side were the noble traditionalists, people whose inherited wealth and privilege epitomized the so-called Belle Époque—the golden age of prewar France in the 1880s, 1890s, and in the first decade of the twentieth century. On the other side were the artists and intellectuals, the champions of a new and as yet uncharted vision for the country’s future.

  Marcel, then, would have to come to a decision. He would have to choose between being a society playboy in the old mold of the Gilded Age or an artist devoted to breaking down the boundaries of an ossified culture and embracing the tumult of modernity. The events of that week had made any middle ground impossible.

  From the perspective of the ruling elite, the scandal never should have been a scandal at all. In 1894, the military discovered that someone was passing secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Someone had to be brought to justice for this act of treason, and in a rush to find an unpopular scapegoat, the court charged a young artillery officer named Alfred Dreyfus with the crime. They had selected him for one simple reason: he was Jewish.

  That might have been the end of the matter. But in 1896 evidence emerged that pointed to the innocence of Alfred Dreyfus. A second inquiry was ordered. Now the senior officers and the government, determined to prove that they had condemned the right man to a brutalizing solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, found a new solution to their dilemma: they forged and fabricated evidence against the unlucky officer and whipped up an anti-Semitic fervor that drew on deep prejudices in French culture.