Mistress of the Ritz

by Melanie Benjamin

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.

He is arrogant in that way, her Claude; if Blanche were to be honest—something she allows herself to be at least once a day—it’s one of the things she most admires about him.

Blanche has grown accustomed, over the years, to dressing up to the Ritz.

his very livelihood depended on these gleeful foreigners continuing to wash ashore off the boats in Calais and following the Seine into Paris like rubbish.

but she’s desperate to shed her filthy refugee skin and return to herself, to the Ritz.

Now that the Great War had destroyed so many fragile empires, displaced minor European royalty roamed the earth like the dinosaurs that they were. And many lumbered into the Ritz.

the only thing Blanche had in common with her family, she’d realized with a new, heavy sadness that temporarily made her forget about her marriage, was the past. And the past was the reason she’d left New York in the first place.

disappointment that her life had not turned out to be a grand, heroic drama after all,

gone were Blanche’s writer friends, the artists, the musicians. The dabblers in life, Claude could not help but think.

Her words—of accomplishment, of pride, of bravery—flutter to the ground, unspoken. Claude can’t see them there, these broken, ruined things, stillborn. But Blanche can. She steps over them on her way to the bathroom where she shuts the door and heaves into the sink. Outside, in the bedroom, the phone rings once.

Because it is growing more and more evident that there is no room, in wartime, for tending to a marriage.

but Claude, ever the military man, the manager, recognizes that not all soldiers can be in combat; paperwork is also necessary in order to win a war.

Her interrogators exchange looks, and for the first time since 1940, Blanche sees confusion, even fear, in Aryan eyes.

What is left to the French is too enormous and complicated, a great tangle of threads of all hues and heft that one cannot begin to unravel. There was bravery, but there was also collaboration. There was defiance, but there was also acquiescence. Some people suffered, but most did not.

Because that is what the Ritz does; it causes you to forget the very last thing you saw before you entered its opulence—even if that very last thing was the worst of humanity. The Ritz will provide relief, will provide distraction, will provide the best champagne to wash down bile, will provide the softest towels to absorb despair.