Tea at Trianon: Notorious Hotels in France

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, August 15, 2020

Notorious Hotels in France

From France Today:

Amid fury that a national icon had betrayed her country, and as her wealthiest customers fled the country to escape the destruction of the war, Chanel was compelled to close her fashion house altogether. Even after Ernest Hemingway had liberated the Ritz bar, and served champagne to soldiers there in celebration of the Nazis’ retreat (which had actually happened before he got there), Chanel struggled to regain her fan-base. She did, however, gasp her final breath in her bed at the Ritz in 1971.

A few years after that, Charles Ritz, the hotel founder’s son, also passed away. The glitz had faded and, without the presence of original family members at its helm, profits began to plummet. Once the setting of Audrey Hepburn movies like Love in the Afternoon, the Ritz was now suffering a slump. Businessman Mohamed al-Fayed purchased it in 1979 and injected a great deal of cash into reinventing its prestige, but after the symbolic dethroning of fashion royalty, tragedy struck for a real royal too. Princess Diana had been dining in the Imperial suite with her boyfriend Dodi al-Fayed, Mohamed’s son, before they met their death a mile and a half away. Fleeing with the paparazzi in hot pursuit, their driver lost control of the vehicle at the entrance to the Pont de l’Alma tunnel.

The hotel endured a turbulent time thereafter, but after a four-year, multi-million-euro renovation it reopened in 2016, to enormous acclaim. (Read more.)