Quotes from Tilar J. Mazzeo

Had they been living in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Angelica would have been Jane Bennet and Eliza, Eliza.

Panicked, Charles de Gaulle fled the country, heading for refuge at French military bases in Baden-Baden, Germany. Half

While there was champagne and oysters at the Ritz, during the occupation much of the city suffered from devastating food shortages and malnutrition, perhaps as many as 20 percent of the inhabitants.

Even as late as the end of June, astonishingly few French citizens were actively resisting the German occupation. Before the summer ended, the organized resistance would swell to perhaps a couple of hundred thousand people in all of France—less than 3 percent of the population, no matter what tales of bravado anyone told later.

Oscar Wilde might have despaired of the modern plumbing, but the early American visitors praised the Hôtel Ritz as the pinnacle of new luxury hotels.

Auguste Escoffier modernized dining in Paris. With the help of Lady de Grey, he had already popularized high tea and made it fashionable—and accepted—for women to dine in public

Auguste Escoffier modernized dining in Paris. With the help of Lady de Grey, he had already popularized high tea and made it fashionable—and accepted—for women to dine in public in London. He intended to do the same in the French capital.

It was the heart of any true moment of decadence: the knowledge that an époque is already slipping from us, inexorably, even in the moment of its glory.

But in that novel he would memorialize this moment—Paris in 1898—where two cultures edged up against each other in darkness. He would set that novel in this époque, in the days when France was torn apart over the fate of a Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus and over the courage of an elderly writer to speak truth to power.

It was a story that, sadly, always had war at the heart of it.

They dined that night on champagne and lobster, despite widespread hunger in the capital. Overall, it was best to ignore the war as far as possible on such occasions. This was the tacit social convention. So instead of the trenches and troops, one talked of art and travels and scandal.

He already knew that, "[i]f we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

Without fanfare or ceremony, Laura Mae Corrigan began funneling all her money—an average of two thousand dollars a month—into her charity for wounded French soldiers. She would earn among those veterans the title of the "American Angel.

Adolf Hitler wanted the capital of France razed to the ground before the Germans retreated. Destroying one of the great cities of the world would be a powerful "moral weapon" against the enemy, the Führer declared. He ordered von Choltitz to leave the city "a field of ruins.

Lighting the fuses shouldn't be taking this kind of time. Furious with the delays, Hitler was screaming to his staff in Berlin, "Brennt Paris?"—"Is Paris burning?

Not everyone in Paris was awed by Sartre's wartime politics. "Some wits," as one historian puts it, "remark[ed] later that Sartre joined the resistance on the same day as the Paris police." In other words: ten days before the liberation.

lobster salad and champagne were the only things a woman should ever be seen eating.

fact, the battle continued less than fifty miles out of the city, and it would be more than a year still before there would be peace in Europe.

Today, Champagne Veuve Clicquot is owned by the luxury conglomerate LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, acquired 1987), which also owns Champagne Moët et Chandon.

In fact, fashion had flourished under the occupation, and a good part of the luxury industry, in one way or another, had made its peace with life under the Germans.

story was being broadcast over the British radio, and those with hidden transistors were finally learning the tale in tantalizingly vague bits and

For those who had lived as guests at the Hôtel Ritz during the German occupation, the liberation was the end of one story about luxury and modernity and Paris. It was the passing of the generation that had changed the shape of the future in the 1910s through the 1930s.

The first thing they heard was the voices of an angry mob shouting "Salope! Salope!"—the

In the gray areas of the French occupation, there is always this complication: the bad guys weren't always German. Sometimes they were French. Or British. Or American.