The affair was Paris' biggest and smartest since the liberation. In the refined splendor of the Hotel Ritz garden last week, some 1,500 diplomats and millionaires and their ladies gathered to sip champagne and nibble pastries in honor of the hotel's 50th birthday. None contributed more glitteringly to the glitter than a white-haired little woman who greeted them at the entrance in fluent French, English or Spanish. She was 81-year-old Marie Louise ("Mimi") Ritz, widow of the man who founded the hoteland thereby made his name a synonym for ultra-fashionable.
Ambitious son of a Swiss herdsman, César Ritz left home at...
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