The Lutetia was opened in 1910 to vie with the George V, the Crillon and the Ritz on the Right Bank. It was an ocean liner of a hotel, with crystal chandeliers, parquet floors and 200 bedrooms.

As Lyse Doucet has shown in The Finest Hotel in Kabul, hotels are rich repositories of stories, blank slates on which the history of an era can be etched. In a great hotel, the staff are imperturbable, often invisible, allowing guests to act out their lives and their fantasies with utmost discretion, provided their bills are paid. Hotel Lutetia in Paris, the only really grand hotel on the Left Bank, was one such: the neutral stage on which prominent pre-war German exiles, German wartime intelligence and, ironically, surviving victims of the Nazi camps duly took their turn.

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