Madeline's Reviews > Hotel Bemelmans

I'm shelving this under both "memoir" and "essays", because this is a collection of short vignettes about the staff at the Hotel Splendide, seen through the eyes of a teenage employee. Ludwig Bemelmans (most famous for the Madeline books, which he also illustrated) really was from a hotel family who was sent to work at the Ritz in New York as a teenager, and Hotel Bemelmans is a collection of his short stories based on that period of his life, collected from different sources.

One of the main appeals of this collection is Bemelemans' original drawings, which are peppered throughout and are a fantastic accompaniment to the stories, which are almost entirely character-driven. Bemelmans excels at description, both physical and personal, and the various staff members of the Splendide who inhabit this novel are all fully-formed and memorable and will almost definitely remind you of some coworkers from your past.

It's also incredibly funny, like this passage where the narrator is describing how the maitre d', Monsieur Victor, treats guests try to get sat without a reservation:

"As these intruders stand in front of him, Victor looks them over with a slow deliberate inventory of shoes, trousers, hands. He stops at the neckties: the face he has seen below, when it came in through the door at the end of the Jade Lounge. Victor has his heels together; he stands straight, then leans forward a little and turns his head in a listening gesture. The guest in front of him is now ill at ease and wishes he had not come; his is a plain, well-dressed, and respectable-looking person.
'Your name?' asks Victor. The man now has his hands to his tie, at which Victor has been looking all the while.
Victor repeats the name to his assistant, lisping it slowly. The assistant looks at the list and finds no such name.
'You have no reservation?' says Victor now, with the tone in which he might say: 'Where did you steal that watch?'
'Reservation?' says the man.
'Yes, reservation,' answers Victor. He turns to his assistant and says: 'Il n'as pas de reservation.'
'Oh!' says the assistant, regretting this on behalf of Victor. Victor, who has never once looked at the wife of the man though she has been standing beside her husband all this while, says, if he likes the look of the man, in French and to his fingernails: 'Find him a table somewhere else.' If he doesn't like him, then suddenly and with finality he looks at the man's face and tells him: 'Sorry, I have no table for you,' turns on his heel, and walks into the dining room, to bow and smile left and right to the good guests at the first tables."

Maybe that passage gave you the impression that this is a book full of snooty waiters who think they're more important than they are. It is not. This little collection of stories is full of hardworking people scraping by and being kind when they can manage it, and honestly the best way I can illustrate the sheer humanity of these stories is by sharing this passage about the hotel staff cleaning up after a debutante ball:

"Mr. Sigsag is busy collecting leftovers. No matter how tired his men are, they must help him save all the junk that can be rescued: cheesecloth draperies used in decorations, the stumps of candles, fancy lamps, Christmas ornaments, lost gloves and fans, branches of silver-sprayed smilax, empty cigar and cigarette boxes and the tinfoil therefrom, champagne corks, flower baskets. Even the oranges that were wired to trees he collects at five-thirty in the morning. The cut flowers are placed in water in champagne tubs; the rest goes up to his museum, a room filled from floor to ceiling with boxes and shelves of junk.
When this is done, he leaves orders for the next day. The flowers in the champagne tubs are to be sent to friends, or given to the lady cashiers. In the middle of all this late work he sits down and writes a rough draft of the bill, and checks over stubs, his face the color of cold salmon. Under his desk, in a tub of ice, are some bottles filled with cocktails left over from dinner. He keeps them there for the scrubladies.
...The doorman is the last person from outside; he has locked the doors and turned off the lights on the marquee. He gets a drink too, half a glass of whiskey straight; he is cold from standing all evening in the slush and rain, the snow, or just the cold wind.
When he is gone, the old scrubwomen come out of the elevator; they live in a dormitory on the top floor of the Splendide. Mr. Sigsag has fallen asleep, sprawled over his bills and the next day's orders. One of the scrubwomen knows where he keeps the drinks for them; she reaches down between his chair and the desk, careful not to wake him, and pulls the bottles out of the ice. Then they rub their brushes on brown bars of soap, tuck up their shirts, take another drink, stick into their hair flowers that have fallen off young dresses, and sing Irish melodies while they start to scrub the marble in the ladies' room."