Book review: The Hotel on Place Vendôme, by Tilar J. Mazzeo
Paris has for some two centuries held an extraordinary appeal for American writers.
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.