Free Lost in Hotels by M. Martin Page B

very much.”
    He responds immediately, looking up to gaze through those midnight eyes that have yet to see very much of the world outside this city. However, I guess if you’re going to be untraveled, there are worse places than Paris is.
    With a pull of the door, the Ritz comes alive as my black Valli boot extends out the car door and struggles just a bit on the cobblestone landing. I look up, staring in the eyes of architectural greatness, the aged masonry details of the square enveloping my soul and washing away any trepidation I had about the trip. The scent of wet Paris asphalt from a morning rain mixed with auto exhaust fills the air. I make my way under a buttoned trench to the plush red carpet and through the revolving Ritz doors that seem to connect to a different era.
    I sometimes wonder if Saudi princesses who call the hotel home or better fashion editors are ever as humbled as I am walking through the entrance, each pacing footstep meeting the royal blue Oriental rugs as endless candelabras, scones, and statuary glisten in perfect gold. Ornate Louis XIV furnishings are everywhere, beckoning another time when women would sit for daily tea and businessmen would gather near the largest lighting fixture that was among the first in Paris to be electrified.
    You don’t stay at the Ritz because you like the endless gold decor that would look garish in almost any other setting, or the crystal chandeliers polished almost daily to give them that impossible luster. You stay because of the people. Since the beginning, scenes have included the likes of Marcel Proust pursuing handsome waiters at grand dinners in the hotel dining room. And Coco Chanel living out the war years in her apartment while taking a Nazi lover. Or modern-day fashion alum like Valentino or Karl Lagerfeld opting for the terrace at lunch or evenings at the lobby bar in lieu of their usual creative isolation.
    When it comes to rooms at the Ritz, I’ve learned it’s a bit of a mixed bag given the hotel’s history as a one-time private residence turned hotel in the late nineteenth century. Opened in time for the 1900 World’s Fair, it was the first hotel in the world to have a private bathroom in every guest room, and you could bring your household staff, which many people did during the rationing war years, storing them away on the hotel’s top floor made almost entirely for maids. These days, an ideal room would be on the lower floors. Ideally, the second or third floors are home to the best rooms like the Imperial Suite that Dodi and Princess Diana were living in at the time of their accident, or the Windsor Suite, where Wallis the duchess of Windsor would take many of her arranged interviews while her former king languished over his memoirs.
    Hotels upgrade B-list magazine editors like me, even the Ritz. A bellman opens my third-floor room facing Vendôme Garden seen through arched windows hidden behind swags of plush drapery tasseled to an inch of their life next to beds tucked in Wallis blue-quilted coverlets under robust gold headboards. Upon opening the door, I’m usually greeted with a small floral arrangement from the Parisian florist Djordje Varda or a bottle of Moët that’s the standard greeting from the manager. The decor is still rooted in pieces from another era, like desktop makeup mirrors in lieu of functioning business desks and boudoir side tables with lighting better for mood than practicality.
    “There you go.”
    A quick €10 tip rids me of my fatherly bellman and casts me alone in the room to prep for my interview. At the beginning of my journalistic career, I would have researched a subject for a good week before ever sitting down for a sixty-minute interview that would lead to a national cover story. These days, however, I’m rarely as prepared. I rely on a quick read of a Wikipedia page and a wing-it attitude that relies mostly on my remarkably accurate tabloid knowledge. The results are a more interested interviewer who