ON LEAVING THE OPÉRA, TAKE RUE DE LA PAIX TO PLACE VENDÔME AND NOTICE THE LUXURY ESTABLISHMENTS
PHOTO CARTIER
On the site itself, world-known jewelers:
 |
| Place Vendôme |
Jean Beraud painted upper-class Paris at the turn of the 19th century. Though he rarely repeated the sites, he showed fashionable rue de la Paix with the column of place Vendôme in the background at least four times:
Rue de la Paix, gone from the web
La rue de la Paix / zoom
Workers leave the Paquin establishment, rue de la Paix / zoom
Shopping on rue de la Paix / zoom
Jewelers moved there from Palais-Royal when steamships encouraged the tourism of the wealthy (toward 1880). So the great hotels sprang up in that area, starting with the Hôtel Ritz on place Vendôme itself (in 1898).
New Year's Eve at the Hotel Ritz in 1930, "The Ritz of Paris" by Stephen Watts (ed. Bodley Head) 1964
# # #
During the Occupation, those hotels were where the German officers settled:*
*But not the Gestapo, which stayed at the Lutétia across the river: Noble officers and lower-middle-class police did not mix.
Lunch menu,
four days after occupying Paris
It shows that the officers' pride in speaking French. (The writer does not know the French word for grapefruit, so says "grap fruit.")
Rommel, Commander of the forces in Normandy
Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda and a French collaborator. Notice the body language.
Goering, next after Hitler
"We must assume our past,"
said Manager Claude Roulet
when he let me use these photos
from the hotel archives.
No comments:
Post a Comment