Dear Reader,
Summer is here! The usual cloudy skies hovering over Paris have all but disappeared. The days are warm and long — though perhaps a bit too long as I prefer darkness when it’s time for bed — and the rows and rows of trees at my favorite park, Parc de Saint-Cloud, are showing off their glorious foliage. It’s an inspiring and hopeful new season.
Today’s issue features the story of a haunted Parisian hotel, a long-forgotten Victorian poem and a spotlight on a favorite book.
They say that old mansions and grand hotels are haunted by ghosts. If that’s true, then Hotel Lutetia1 in the 6th arrondissement of Paris is the most haunted of them all.
The hotel was built in 1910, towards the end of France’s Belle Époque. It’s a beautiful building; the style mimics the elegant architectural style of Le Bon Marché, Paris’ first department store. (When Émile Zola wrote about department stores in his novels, he took inspiration from Le Bon Marché.)
If ghosts exist, then the corridors of this storied hotel must be filled with the spirits of cabaret singers, socialites, artists and writers. Over the years, the architectural gem hosted James Joyce (he wrote parts of Ulysses here), Josephine Baker, Picasso and Ernest Hemingway, just to name a few.
In 1921, a young Charles de Gaulle stayed at the hotel after his wedding. And it was this fortuitous visit that would change the course of the hotel’s history.
Years later, during the occupation, the Nazis requisitioned the hotel to house and feed their officers and French collaborators.
When the war ended, hundreds of thousands of former prisoners and Holocaust survivors began to make their way home to France. Charles de Gaulle, now a general and victorious leader of the Free French Forces, remembered his luxurious stay at the Lutetia. He, too, requisitioned the hotel. He wanted to house the survivors of the Holocaust in comfort after the horrors they had suffered.
And this is how it came to be that the grandest hotel in Paris opened its doors to displaced persons and Holocaust survivors. The first survivors arrived at the hotel in April 1945. They received food, shelter, money and clothing. The Lutetia became the Paris headquarters for those searching for loved ones or waiting on Red Cross updates of family members sent to camps. An entire wall of the hotel was filled with photographs of missing persons. Relatives desperate for reunification with their loved ones regularly stopped by to see whether missing family and friends had arrived from the camps. By early September 1945 de Gaulle’s mission must have been completed because the last displaced person left the hotel. Soon thereafter, the hotel reopened its doors. And celebrities once again flocked to the grandest hotel in Paris.
If only these walls could talk.
As for the ghosts, I’d like to think they still roam the halls.
“To A Lady Who Declined An Invitation” by F.J.F.2 was originally published in The Sixpenny Magazine in July 1868. At first glance, the poem appears to be light-hearted. Each stanza has a rhyme, which tends to make a poem feel lighter and livelier.
But after a second or third reread, the reader might notice dark undertones. There appears to be criticism of the oppressive social norms Victorians lived through. The narrator can’t enjoy an outing with the lady he likes without gossip mongers ruining their lives. The narrator hints at the “strange, stiff world” they endure. The poem ends with a resolution to not care what “babbling neighbours think or say.” Brave and daring, considering that it was easy to be thrown into an asylum (mostly for women) or lose your job if your employer felt that you were a liability to the company.
Or perhaps F.J.F. was a woman, writing about another woman…
To A Lady Who Declined An Invitation “You would not go with me,” you said; It would not do, it was not proper; Which put to my request a stopper. I went alone–at home you stay’d. Yet, thinking afterwards upon it, I voted it an awful bore, That you, and I, and many more, Without a world to quiz and con it; Could not a simple journey make, Could not a trifling visit pay; That we should be constrained to say, In whispered words, with hearts that quake– “How would the babbling neighbours talk? How would each gossip shake her head? Just think of all the scandal bred, If you and I should–take a walk!” A strange, stiff world, that every act Must thus be measured out and weighed; That we should have to be afraid, Of how our neighbours take the fact. That men may not say, “This I do, Because I will, and it is right;” But ask, in a perpetual fright, “How will the world the action view?” That we may not in word and thought, Be governed by an innate sense Of right and wrong, and so dispense With all the puny trammels brought. By a close keeping to the way Which custom marks. That we may not Leave it behind, unheeding what The babbling neighbours think or say. F.J.F.
What do you think the poem’s message might be?
In The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, John Sutherland attempts to summarize the plots of approximately 3,500 Victorian novels. This book is such a treasure because it is helping me discover obscure Victorian fiction that I would otherwise never have known about. It is interesting to learn that the 3,500 books summarized are only a tiny fraction of the approximately 60,000 novels that were published during the Victorian period. Most of them are out of print and probably lost to history. While the authors and book titles are listed alphabetically, the companion is not a comprehensive encyclopedia. It just serves as a very good starting point. I’m very pleased with this purchase.
As always, thank you very much for being here and reading. I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
The hotel’s name, Lutetia, stems from the Roman name of the city that we know today as Paris. Paris’s early inhabitants were a Gallic tribe called Parissi.
While some poets published under their names, the majority of Victorian poets found in Victorian periodicals were published anonymously. At least for this poem we have the initials of the poet. It’s possible to ascertain who an anonymous poet or writer might have been by reviewing the periodical’s accounting documents to figure out who was paid for what.
Have you looked at the Wellesley Index to see if you can identify the poet? I'd love to know, man or woman!
Very interesting newsletter. I love John Sutherland’s writing and have thought about getting a copy of the Longman Companion for a while now. Thank you for recommending it, I might just take the plunge and buy it.