The Hotel on Place Vendome Quotes

“It was the heart of any true moment of decadence: the knowledge that an epoque is already slipping from us, inexorably, even in the moment of its glory.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Everyone knew that Chanel was willing to play dirty when it came to the Jewish question. Her lawyer, René de Chambrun, the husband of Pierre Laval’s fashionable daughter, Josée, was already helping her try to have her perfume company taken from the Jewish business partners to whom she had sold a majority stake in the early 1920s.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“In the gray areas of the French occupation, there is always this complication: the bad guys weren’t always German. Sometimes they were French. Or British. Or American.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“For those who had lived as guests at the Hôtel Ritz during the German occupation, the liberation was the end of one story about luxury and modernity and Paris. It was the passing of the generation that had changed the shape of the future in the 1910s through the 1930s.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“In fact, fashion had flourished under the occupation, and a good part of the luxury industry, in one way or another, had made its peace with life under the Germans.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Not everyone in Paris was awed by Sartre’s wartime politics. “Some wits,” as one historian puts it, “remark[ed] later that Sartre joined the resistance on the same day as the Paris police.” In other words: ten days before the liberation.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Lighting the fuses shouldn’t be taking this kind of time. Furious with the delays, Hitler was screaming to his staff in Berlin, “Brennt Paris?”—“Is Paris burning?”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Adolf Hitler wanted the capital of France razed to the ground before the Germans retreated. Destroying one of the great cities of the world would be a powerful “moral weapon” against the enemy, the Führer declared. He ordered von Choltitz to leave the city “a field of ruins.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“The Ritz bar—Frank’s domain—had been a center of the German resistance in Paris, almost since the war began.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Even as late as the end of June, astonishingly few French citizens were actively resisting the German occupation. Before the summer ended, the organized resistance would swell to perhaps a couple of hundred thousand people in all of France—less than 3 percent of the population, no matter what tales of bravado anyone told later.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“While there was champagne and oysters at the Ritz, during the occupation much of the city suffered from devastating food shortages and malnutrition, perhaps as many as 20 percent of the inhabitants.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Without fanfare or ceremony, Laura Mae Corrigan began funneling all her money—an average of two thousand dollars a month—into her charity for wounded French soldiers. She would earn among those veterans the title of the “American Angel.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“He already knew that, “[i]f we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“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.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“It was a story that, sadly, always had war at the heart of it.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“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.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“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.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“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.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“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”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“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.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Agents and spies playing deep and dangerous games of intelligence and counterintelligence also soon made their way to the Ritz.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“needed million-franc credit line at the Bank of France, required to keep the business up and running. As Hans Elmiger 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.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“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,”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, would move into a sprawling imperial suite taking up an entire floor. With him would come an entourage of German functionaries,”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“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.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“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.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“In the morning would come the last possible moment to flee Paris. That June evening, though, the party went on at the hotel like always.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“As the word came of the German advance, there were hushed and frantic conversations at the hotel during the second week in June 1940. To stay or to go was the pressing question”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Since the end of the nineteenth century, this palace hotel on the spacious Place Vendôme in the city’s first arrondissement, or “district,” had been an international symbol of luxury and all that was glamorous about modernity,”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris

“Most of those who tell you they were in the resistance are fabulists at best. The worst are simply liars. It was a frighteningly small movement, covert, secret, and the price of discovery was monstrous. After the war, everyone wanted to believe that they had supported it. It is a collective French national fantasy.”
― Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Hotel on Place Vendome: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris