Quotes from Tilar J. Mazzeo

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.

Gandhi, who once said, "A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history." Such were Irena and all her friends, and this is their story. Afterword Author's Note on the Story of Irena's Children

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.

Stanis?aw Krzy?anowski believed in democracy, equal rights for everyone, fair access to health care, an eight-hour workday, and an end to the crippling tradition of child labor.

I tell their stories here to do all of them some small honor. Their lives and, sometimes, their deaths speak to what we are capable of as average people in the face of evil and horror.

There is a truism in the world of architecture that design creates culture.

We can't always be unlucky in my experience. And so, my dear friend: courage, patience and resignation.

No wine in the world brings to mind so many immediate associations as champagne. The pop of a cork and the bright sparkle of bubbles mean celebration and glamour and, more often than not, the distinct possibility of romance. It is the wine of weddings and New Year's kisses. It is beautiful and delicate, and above all, it is a wine associated with women.

But one look at the business of champagne tells a very different tale. In the boardrooms and wine cellars, champagne is a man's world. Today, there are only a handful of women in senior positions in the French wine industry, and only one of the elite and internationally renowned champagne houses known as the grandes marques is run by a woman—the house of Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, headed since 2001 by Madame Cécile Bonnefond.

Even more shocking, champagne wasn't discovered by the French. It was the British who first learned the secret of making wine sparkle and first launched the commercial trade in champagne wine with bubbles. The legend of Dom Pérignon was manufactured only in the late nineteenth

By the dawn of the twentieth century, even before the Jazz Age made champagne the symbol of an era, the world was already buying twenty million bottles of bubbly a year.

For most of those who lived in Paris during the occupation, however, survival depended on how adeptly one could navigate the nuances of wartime reality. At the Hôtel Ritz, the shades of gray were at their most impenetrable. In its spaces, astonishing things happened. In those gray areas—where courage and desire collided with brutality and terror—were powerful human stories.

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.

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,

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

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.

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.

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.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, would move into a sprawling imperial suite taking up an entire floor. With him would come an entourage of German functionaries,

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,

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.

Agents and spies playing deep and dangerous games of intelligence and counterintelligence also soon made their way to the Ritz.

We do not sell lipstick, we buy customers.

A perfume ought to punch you right on the nose ... I'm not going to sniff for three days to see if it smell or not? it has to have body, and what gives perfume body is the most expensive thing there is.