Читать книгу Love at The Ritz - Барбара Картленд - Страница 2

I have been visiting the Ritz Hotel for sixty-six years and it is without exception the most comfortable and, I think, the most attractive, hotel in the world.

It always delights me to think that it is really unchanged since it was designed by César Ritz and opened in June 1898.

César Ritz was, in fact, a genius and far in advance of his time.

Nobody had ever envisaged a hotel with a bathroom to every bedroom and one that was decorated in such perfect taste.

When I lie in bed in the Ritz, looking at the plain walls, which were a great innovation in César Ritz’s day, the fine silk curtains with no frills or furbelows and the beautiful chandelier that is part of the story I have just written, I think how lucky we were that César Ritz created a revolution in the hotel business.

He had an obsession with cleanliness, which again was new, and he was later to make the Carlton Hotel in London, which now has been demolished, a replica of The Ritz in Paris.

The Ritz has a history of its own, from the time that the Prince of Wales became its most important client to when the Germans took it over as their Headquarters when they reached Paris in World War II.

I have spent some of the happiest days of my life in the Ritz, as I stayed there on my honeymoon. Every year my husband and I went back for a second honeymoon to revive our romance and to keep our love even more entrancing than it had been when we first married.

If we ever lost the Ritz, it would not be only a loss to France but to all the people like myself who have enjoyed it generation after generation.