The Hotel on Place Vendôme: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris by Tilar J. Mazzeo Harper 4.5 stars Nick Walker Paris has for some two centuries held an extraordinary appeal for American writers. The long list of scribes from across the Atlantic who chose to live or spend a creative sojourn in the French capital includes Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton and Henry Miller. To this illustrious list we can add a professor at a college in New England whose bestsellers The Widow Clicquot (2008) and The Secret of Chanel No5 - The Intimate History of the World's Most Famous Perfume (2010) have, in recent years, placed her in the premier league of literary American Francophiles. Tilar Mazzeo became intrigued by the Hotel Ritz in Paris while researching The Secret of Chanel No5 . On leafing through declassified documents on the wartime activities of style icon Coco Chanel, she felt another book coming on - and The Hotel on Place Vendôme is the gratuitously fascinating result. If the truth is the first casualty of war, this is doubly true in enemy-occupied cities. The "collective French national fantasy" is that everyone aided and abetted the Resistance. The reality is that only a few brave souls did. The hotel's second world war years, when it was something of a giddy collaborationist playground, constitute most of the book. However, the timeline runs from the establishment's 19th-century construction right up to today. This story is told in a rather intimate tone, giving it an engaging warmth rarely found in such historical non-fiction. It's also cinematic, a film noir in many shades of grey, and swarming with dramatis personae and their endless intrigues and betrayals. During the second world war, German troops occupied their own wing of the hotel. (One such "guest" was Gestapo founder general Hermann Göring.) Nazis, moneyed expatriates, war correspondents, spies and assorted Parisians all managed to co-exist in this parallel universe through Europe's darkest years. The hotel also became a hub of illicit commerce with perfume, jewellery and furs being sold for francs and reichsmarks. We also read of the ferocious competition for scoops among the press corps stationed at the hotel. The notion of fair play swiftly went out the window once the guns started firing on various fronts around Europe. Inevitably, one of the larger-than-life characters here is Hemingway, and his passion for the hotel's wine cellar, which he basically drank dry before other war correspondents could get to it. A whole chapter is given to the liberation of Paris and the desperate dealings and double-crossings that ricocheted around the hotel in its aftermath. "We all live in the long shadow of this history," Mazzeo states, after illustrating how the many weird vignettes told here shaped the future. And her remarkable history of the hotel on Place Vendôme drives this truism home with élan.
