by Peter Mayle
I was shown into a changing room and given half a dozen shirts to try on. When we had arrived at a body size that felt comfortable and satisfied the experienced eye of Joseph, he telephoned for the tailleur, or head cutter—a dapper, exquisitely shirted gentleman with a tape measure draped around his neck.
The tape was transferred to my neck. Then he measured the distances between shoulders and elbows, and elbows and wrists, and finally the circumferences of the wrists themselves, allowing a little extra for the left cuff so that it would accommodate my watch. Joseph noted all the measurements on his pad.
Another escorted trip by elevator down to the fabric room, and here Gatsby would have expired from pleasure. There were silks and linens and poplins and Oxford cloths in plain shades, in tiny checks, in plaids, and in every possible kind of stripe, from the barely visible to the barely bearable—bolts and bolts of fabrics, piled to head height and taking up an area as big as a millionaire’s billiard room. I have never seen so much raw shirting in my life, and I asked the tailleur how many different fabrics there were. Thousands, he said. Nobody has ever counted. It would take a week.
It could have taken me almost as long to make a choice if I hadn’t decided beforehand on a short list of colours and materials that restricted the possibilities to dozens rather than thousands. Even so, I was encouraged to spend a certain amount of time walking from one opulent pile to the next. Some shirt-makers will sit you down and bring you books of swatches, which I have never thought of as the best way to choose a shirt. A scrap of fabric four inches square is not enough to judge how the finished article will look. But with the bolts at Charvet—and a little patient assistance from Joseph—you can see how a fabric hangs and how you like the colour when you see an expanse the size of a shirtfront.
After an hour or so, I decided on some Sea Island cotton, which has the handle of silk without any of the laundering problems. Joseph approved, and took my bolts and me into a small, separate room where we could ruminate on the selection of collars and cuffs. Displayed on the wall like disembodied necks and wrists were tab collars, spread collars, collars with long or short points, with or without stiffening, barrel cuffs, French cuffs, fold-back button cuffs—once again, a variety of choices that could lead you very easily into an extended trance of pleasant dithering.
We chose, but Joseph was not quite finished with me. Would I like gauntlet buttons on the sleeves above the cuffs? These keep the opening between wrist and arm from gaping, and give a neat, flat finish. I said yes to the buttons.
And how did I feel about monograms? I said that I disliked them intensely, above all when they were displayed on a cuff, or when they were whimsically embroidered in those Japanese hieroglyphics that translate into “keep your hand off my left breast.” Joseph nodded. He had once raised the question of monograms with an American client, and the answer was a growl: “I know who I am.” No monograms.
We had one small piece of unfinished business to attend to, and that was what the French sometimes describe with pitiless accuracy as ‘la douloureuse’—the painful moment of settling up. Naturally, this required another escorted trip in the elevator. While we were waiting, I noticed a framed certificate on the wall. It was dated 1869, and it came from the Prince of Wales, who was graciously pleased to confirm that Monsieur Charvet was his official shirt-maker in Paris. (The prince evidently had a shirt-maker in each of the cities he visited regularly, perhaps to compensate for the slowness of nineteenth-century laundries.)
The payment of bills at Charvet is dealt with by a gentleman seated at a desk while a young lady at a table behind him folds shirts and scarves and ties into billows of tissue paper before laying them to rest in Charvet boxes. You can pay in cash, or with a cheque drawn on a French bank, or by credit card, but however you pay, you will need to exercise self-control to avoid a sharp intake of breath.
I have my bill in front of me. Gasp now so that you can preserve your sangfroid later. Each shirt cost 1,900 francs, or approximately £200. Admittedly, the Sea Island cotton that I chose is more expensive than poplin, and a ready-made shirt is a trifling £100. But it would be a shame to go to Charvet and not get the treatment—the leisurely tour of the fabric room, the pondering over collars and cuffs, the cosy elevator rides and the undivided attention of Joseph for most of the afternoon. That, for me, is a large and enjoyable part of buying made-to-measure clothes.
And I never have to go shopping again; not for shirts, anyway. I have Charvet’s telephone number. Charvet has my pattern and measurements. If I want, I can sit here in Provence and spend thousands of dollars in the course of one short and reckless phone call, and three weeks later the mailman will stagger up the drive with an armful of Charvet boxes. On the other hand, going up to Paris is no hardship, and that fabric room deserves a second investigation.
Joseph wished me a pleasant evening and showed me out. The sun was going down behind the Place Vendôme, and I realised that Charvet possesses a unique advantage over other shirt-makers, one that has nothing to do with shirts. It is two minutes from the Hemingway bar at the Ritz.
17
New Year’s Resolutions
It is 11:30 on New Year’s Eve, and you’re feeling wonderful. The vintage Krug is fizzing through your veins, beautiful strangers are lining up to kiss you at the stroke of midnight, and the New Year, as full of promise as a rich and indulgent uncle, lies ahead. A fine old time is being had by all. And then someone—there is always someone, and he or she is always drinking Perrier with a twist—comes up to you and asks:
“What are your New Year’s resolutions?”
Oh, God. Who is this voice of doom, this hideous reminder of real life and restraint, just when the party is getting nicely out of hand? Well, if you don’t recognise the voice tonight you certainly will tomorrow morning, because it is none other than your conscience, disguised in human form and waiting for you to renounce at least one of your reprehensible but highly enjoyable habits.
I don’t know how it all began, or when that awful dose of self-denial was added to our otherwise carefree genes, but every New Year’s Eve, all over the world, enough resolutions are made to render life on earth as much fun as a series of undertakers’ conventions. Fortunately, as we shall see later, sanity eventually returns. But not before our resolutions have cost us dearly.
The second mistake (the first being to consider any resolutions at all) that most of us make is to broadcast our intentions. We can’t keep our ghastly plans for self-improvement to ourselves. We have to tell everybody within conversation range what we have decided to do, and New Year’s Eve being New Year’s Eve, we are frequently drunk when we tell them. Not a good start, although the thought behind it is, in its own twisted way, commendable: we know that the flesh is weak, and so for moral support and as an aid to rubbery willpower, we commit ourselves publicly. Failure to deliver will result in the scorn and disapproval of our friends. Failure is out of the question. Failure is for wimps.
To make matters worse, it is not enough to make small, unobtrusive resolutions. Giving up trashy books, late-night television, banana fudge sundaes or yelling at cabdrivers may require a measure of self-discipline, but these sacrifices are all too private; nobody else will know. And since one of the traditional horrors of resolutions is that they should have a visible effect, we once again fall into the trap (we are still in our fuddled New Year’s Eve euphoria, remember) of making a Major Resolution.
This is not to be confused with business. Announcements about your next dazzling career move don’t count, unless they involve a painful change in your circumstances, such as giving up Wall Street to become a monk. Otherwise, trying to pass off your ambitions as resolutions won’t wash. So, what are we left with?
In nine cases out of ten, the Major Resolution has something to do with physical appearance or health. (The mind takes a back seat on these occasions because mental achievement is not sufficiently visible.) In many of these cases, obeying the natural law that says every vacuu
m must be filled, the resolution requires two steps: give up a pleasant but unhealthy habit, and replace it with a healthy alternative. If this were as simple as cutting out ice-cream and taking up jogging, the financial side effects would be minimal. But it never is that simple.
Let’s say you’ve really gone to town on New Year’s Eve. You’ll give up smoking and drinking, and you’ll lose ten pounds by the time you hit the beach in the summer. You see the new, improved you in your mind’s eye—a muscular, unpolluted Adonis, the envy of the wheezing, overweight wrecks around you.
The first day of January is no problem, since you have the mother and father of a hangover and all you can think of is to find the top of your head. As the month wears on, however, your resolutions begin to bite back. The bottle beckons, the very idea of a smoke is enough to make you giddy, and a large can of foie gras seems to follow you round the apartment. Stern measures are required if temptation is to be overcome.
And so you give temptation away to unbelieving but grateful friends: the case of 1955 port, the precious half-dozen bottles of ancient cognac, the humidor filled with the best that Alfred Dunhill can supply, the foie gras—get thee behind me, all of you.
This noble but costly gesture is soon followed by the realisation that you have abandoned one set of crutches and are in urgent need of another. Don’t worry. The health and fitness industry is ready for you, flexing its pectorals and holding out the promise of cardiovascular bliss. All you need to do is choose your particular form of exercise and arrange a bank loan.
I suspect that one of the prime reasons for the spectacular increase in expenditures on fitness that we have seen over the past few years is the irresistible appearance of the equipment. The stuff looks terrific, all the way from aerodynamically designed sweat socks to the 135-station closet-sized gym. Training shoes look like sculptures. Tennis racquets could have come straight out of the Museum of Modern Art. The lowly dumbbell, once a dull lump of iron, is now chromed, striated and burnished until it resembles the crankshaft from the engine of a £100,000 Ferrari.
Very quickly you find out that none of it is cheap. But, you say to yourself, if you’re going to take your resolutions seriously, you must be seriously equipped. It’s not extravagance; it’s self-improvement. In any case, buying the equipment can be fun. (A lot more fun, you soon discover, than using it.) And while you’re at it, why not join other clean-living, iron-willed people in a gym or racquet club? And you do, in spite of the savagely expensive enrolment and membership fees.
Several hundred dollars lighter, you can now get down to work. It hurts. It is, as so often is the case with exercise, monotonous. After each session, the body aches, so presumably some beneficial changes are taking place, but there’s no visible difference, no gasps of admiration from the women in the office, no dramatic or even faintly encouraging signals from the tape measure. The head torturer at the gym, a young man who appears to be made of polished marble instead of flesh and bones, insists that there’s nothing to worry about. All it takes is time. How much time? Oh, three months, maybe six. Let’s have another hundred sit-ups and then we can move on to the bench press.
Six months! They stretch before you, painful and alcohol-free, and you begin to wonder if the end is going to justify the means. If there is a hint of doubt in your mind, you’ve had it. I have no formal statistics on the resolution-failure rate, but personal experience and observation lead me to believe that it is at least as high as that of first novels or attempts on Mount Everest. As a general rule, trying to give up what you like to take up what you think you ought to do is a doomed endeavour.
Someone, I think it might have been Oscar Wilde, said: “Moderation in all things—including moderation.” The wisdom of this is that it recognises man’s natural instinct to lurch off the rails from time to time and go on a glorious bender; most resolutions refuse to take this into account. They are all or nothing, abnormally severe and, in their own way, a form of excess. That is why, sometime around mid-February, millions of people with varying degrees of guilt or self-justification return to their old ways. The equipment is a daily reminder of non-achievement, so it is hidden or given away. And that, until next New Year’s Eve, is that.
After many years of going along with this ridiculous nonsense, I have now kicked the resolution habit. I do have resolutions, but they are the same each year and so far I have managed to keep them. I offer them to you in the hope that they will do for you what they have done for me—that is, avoid unnecessary expense, banish guilt, and make it possible to face the New Year with a clear and untroubled eye.
Resolution Number 1
I never, ever go out on New Year’s Eve. Instead of the forced merriment and the consequent liver damage, I eat dinner at home with the most expensive bottle of wine I can lay my hands on. I take a glass of champagne to bed, and if I’m still awake when the New Year arrives I toast it. On New Year’s Day, when the rest of the world is feeling terrible, I go out and have a very long lunch.
Resolution Number 2
I try on last year’s trousers. In fact, I have a pair of trousers, now seven years old and part of a seldom-worn suit, that I keep as a benchmark. If they start to feel tight, I do something about it—nothing more excessive than a few days of reduced bread consumption (which, as I live in France, is usually at least a baguette a day) does the trick. The secret is to nip any expansion in the bud, when there’s less to lose. It’s easy, and it works. As my tailor can verify, my measurements have stayed the same since 1973.
Resolution Number 3
I never drink before breakfast.
These annual resolutions have now become habits, and for once in my life, they’re not expensive. A prosperous New Year to you all.
18
The Handmade Hotel
I think it was Conrad Hilton who first had the idea that travel would be greatly improved if as much of it as possible were spent in familiar surroundings. Faraway places with strange-sounding names are all very well, provided there are scrambled eggs for breakfast, air-conditioning, brisk and efficient plumbing, and people who speak English, even if they speak it with a curious accent. Let us, by all means, explore the native bazaars of Paris and penetrate the upper reaches of the Via Veneto. But what the weary traveller needs after being up to his neck in foreigners all day is a drink with plenty of ice, a straightforward dinner menu that doesn’t require an interpreter, a decent bathroom, and a king-sized bed. Just like home.
The Hilton theory was, as everyone knows, a worldwide success. And this was for one very simple reason: even if you didn’t always know where you were, you always knew what to expect. There were no surprises. A few touches of local colour would creep in from time to time—mangoes instead of orange juice, waitresses in sarongs instead of skirts—but for the most part it didn’t really matter whether you fell asleep in Tokyo or Mexico City. There was a certain standardisation about the board and lodging that provided comfort and reassurance and familiarity even in the heart of the most exotic locations.
If the idea had stopped there—as one among many travel options—it would have been fine. Unfortunately, it proved to be so popular that it was adopted by one hotel chain after another, with varying degrees of local camouflage designed to add personality to a multinational formula. With loud protestations that they were preserving the special character of each hotel they gobbled up, the new owners standardised everything that could be standardised, from bathroom fittings to colour schemes, until the only sure way of knowing which city you were waking up in was to consult the phone directory as soon as you got out of bed.
All this might have disappeared as travellers became more sophisticated and adventurous, had it not been for the emergence, about twenty years ago, of an affluent and influential patron in the hotel universe—a new breed of nomad who now pops up everywhere on the urban world’s surface. He is the ultimate guest, the big spender, the man who calls room service or Rio with no thought for the cost, the single most important and
profitable customer a hotel could wish for. He’s the busy, successful and generously funded globetrotting executive, and most hotels today are designed for him.
As we live in an age when every aspect of human behaviour and preference is fed into the maw of a computer and analysed, there is no doubt that the new nomad’s whims and fancies have been researched and studied down to the last detail. I myself have never seen the conclusions of this research on paper, but who needs a document? The evidence is clearly displayed in hotels all over the world. After doing some research of my own in America, Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland, I feel that I know exactly what our corporate hero requires from a hotel.
First, he needs a grandiose lobby, preferably an atrium with a young forest sprouting up around the furniture. This is not for aesthetic reasons, nor is it to make him feel that he has entered an oasis of sylvan calm after a day of savage cut and thrust. No. It is because he can use the lobby as a giant office. There is room to swing his attaché case. He can hold a conference beneath the ficus trees, order drinks, take calls, make presentations and generally treat the place like a temporary extension of Wall Street or Madison Avenue.
He needs several bars: one for business, with sufficiently good lighting for him to be able to read sales figures and contracts; one for dalliance (you never know who you might run into), with sufficiently bad lighting to ensure that there is no chance of being recognised by anyone more than ten feet away; and one in his room.
The room itself should be equipped with a variety of accessories and gadgets and forms that reduce the need for any personal contact with the hotel staff to a minimum. Instead of having to communicate by old-fashioned word of mouth, the executive can write memoranda to the hotel on the lists and pads provided: the laundry memo, breakfast memo, the bar-consumption memo, and so on. (One day, this will be superseded by an electronic command system which will enable the guest to punch into the breakfast mainframe or the dry-cleaning data bank, but the end result will be the same: modern, impersonal efficiency.)