Page 326 - Livre Beau Rivage Palace

few exiled Russian aristocrats have found their way into the memoirs Between 1898 and 1900, you could meet the entire spectrum
of André Muller: the Princesses Gortchakov, Galitzine and Engalichev, of the nobility here: British society, the great families of Naples and
Prince Lobanov, the Comte de Zoubaloff, together with the splendid Rome, the whole of Central Europe, from the Imperial nobility and
names of the maharajahs of Baroda and Kapurthala. Hungarian tycoons to the lesser nobility of the Eastern European
The interwar years are remembered by the Beau-Rivage Palace and Balkan countries, the German-speaking world with its landed
as the time of major international conferences, as related in this book nobility and industrialists, America with its wealthy families and
by John Walton and Bertrand Müller. disconcerting style. And even, on 29 April 1900, Mr and Mrs Stewart
Who could be found at the Beau-Rivage a century ago? and their daughter, all the way from Australia. A writer, the young
Thanks to the Livre des Étrangers, we have the names of all the foreign Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Edmond, the father of the writer Alfred
guests. They add up to thousands of entries each year. It would be a Fabre-Luce, who was a banker Edmond Fabre-Luce; and a certain
disproportionately large task to sift through them all in detail. Random Jules Renard with his wife: the writer?
checks quickly reveal one fact: a name, by itself, gives no indication. Going back still further, to the time when the hotel was brand
Who is this Mr Gillette, who came from the us with his family in new, when the nineteenth-century adventurers and travellers were
1900? Does he have anything to do with a certain brand of razors? gradually being succeeded by holidaymakers, we find the same
We shall never know. Sometimes a little additional information results noble titles, the same names to conjure with. Princess Marie of
in disillusionment: Mr Ibsen, who came to the hotel several times in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, for instance, who arrived in May 1879,
1879, would that be the playwright? Alas, no, a note one day indicates and a certain Mr Churchill, a few days later. Loyalties are revealed:
that he is a consul. A pity. we have seen that the Princess Gortchakov lived in exile at the
The random checks highlight another fact, reinforced by Beau-Rivage Palace in the 1920s; the Livre des Étrangers indicates
– and reinforcing – the knowledge generally available about these the arrival of a Princess Gortchakoff on 26 June 1899 and that of
remote times. At the time, the Beau-Rivage was frequented by the a Prince Gortchakoff in 1879. Empires collapse, generations pass
distinguished members of the international cosmopolitan set, the away, but the Beau-Rivage remains.
fashionable people, those who referred to themselves as La Société,
dubbed by the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen in 1899 as the
leisure class. They stayed at the Beau-Rivage because it was part of
the European network of places of rest, leisure and, when necessary,
treatment and convalescence. They stayed there because they were
rich and it was a suitable place, because they spent each year and each
season moving between similar luxury establishments, because their
families, friends and acquaintances lived in the same surroundings,
and because, ultimately, that was where life went on. Neither utopia
nor object of nostalgia: they lived there in the present. Members of
this society only spent a few winter months in their castles, mansions,
or apartments in London, Paris or Saint Petersburg. The rest of the
time, they moved around. During the late nineteenth century and the
belle époque, a stay at the Beau-Rivage was an absolute must.

Following pages: signatures in the Beau-Rivage Palace’s first guestbook, 1939-80.

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