Paris Ritz: Last News

A Saint from Texas bemoans resembling a “cow” next to the waifish movie star. Such casually fictionalised cameos are the hallmark of a delectable seam of literary fiction: inside jobs about high society by gay male authors with the gimlet eye of a gossip columnist.Often pressing the maître d’ at the Paris Ritz for titbits about socialites, Marcel Proust alchemised gossip into the elegant ruminations of In Search of Lost Time (Proust argued that gossip prevented the mind from “falling asleep” over misleading outward appearances).

record-breaking £9m furniture auction when a desk set from Coco Chanel’s suite sold for 300 times its estimate, the Ritz Hotel in Paris is to sell over 1,000 lots of tableware, glassware, silverware and linen from its collection.The auction, orchestrated by Paris auction house Artcurial, will be streamed live online from June 21-23, 2020.Going under the hammer will be crystal Martini glasses from the hotel’s legendary Bar Hemingway (€400-600) – Ernest Hemingway once said “When I dream of afterlife in heaven, the action always takes places in the Paris Ritz” – the blue and gold Limoges porcelain ‘Marthe’ service commissioned by César Ritz himself for the hotel’s launch (€400-600), and a magnificent silver carving trolley by Christofle