Down and Out at the Hotel de Crillon

One lovely April day in Paris, I got all dressed up in my best black suit and went to the Hotel de Crillon for tea. The Hotel de Crillon faces the Place de la Concorde. The President of France has an official residence next door. You get the idea. Nice neighborhood.

The hotel is easily confused with a palace. No doubt, although I haven't check, it was. And what a nice view of the guillotine it must have had. Today, it is remarkably discrete. The major door is a tiny one on the left of the frontage. No big, gaudy, gold-paned windows and concrete lions here. Just a doorman and a welcome.

Naturally, I arrived an hour too early. Disappointed, I was going to get up out of the comfy chair near the Baccarrat glass table and wander around this lovely marbled palace until the time was right. But the waiter took pity and served me tea early.

I love to go for tea. I don't actually like tea. I love the idea of tea. Lovely scones with Devonshire cream, finger sandwiches, pasteries, all served on lovely tiered china, with napkins, and flowers, and a harpist. It's a girl thing.

So I ordered my tea at the Crillon. Marco Polo tea, described in glowing French on the tea time menu. The tea was marvelous. It tasted like Tahiti. It was the best tea I had ever had. The finger sandwiches were dry, the pastry was nothing to remember, but this tea was remarkable. Luckily, my friend found it at the Grand Epicerie a few days later, or I would have been wandering for the rest of my days looking for this marvelous tea.

While I was enjoying myself, two French women of a certain age came in for tea. You could tell they were French by the scarves. They looked over at me - and smiled! I passed! I can't tell you how happy this little thing made me.

So I enjoyed my $57 dollar afternoon and cherished a smile.

Seventy years earlier, George Orwell wrote about a completely different aspect of the Crillon in his book, "Down and Out in Paris and London." Describing what is argueably the Crillon (what he called the Hotel X near the Place de la Concorde), his character applies for a dishwashing job and has to deal with the Italian manager:

"He led me down a winding staircase into a narrow passage, deep underground, and so hot that I had to stoop in places. It was stiffling hot and very dark, with only the dim yellow bulbs several yards apart. There seemed to be miles of labyrinthine passages - actually I supppose, a few hundred in all - that reminded one queerly of the lower decks of a liner; there were the same heat and cramped space and warm reek of food, and a humming, whirring noise, just like the sound of engines. We passed doorways that let out sometimes a shouting of oaths, sometimes the red glare of fire, once a shuddering draught from an ice chamber. As we went along, something struck me violently on the back. It was a hundred-pound block of ice, carried by a blue-aproned porter. After him came a boy with a great slab of veal on his shoulder, his cheek pressed into the damp, spongy flesh..."

And there you have it. Two views of the Crillon. One dainty and refined and elegant. The other hot and sweaty and disgusting. The difference between them merely a sliver of luck. If I ever really do become a bag lady (my longtime nightmare), I would hope to bag it by the Crillon. Anybody can be down and out. Only a few can do it with style.