It’s ten after six in the afternoon and the piano player has just left the gallery lounge at the Four Seasons George V, signaling the end of tea time in one of Paris’s leading palace hotels.
An attendant waiter, whose smooth, beatific smile I have become accustomed to while sitting here for the past hour and a half, offers to pour me more tea. “Non merci,” I tell him, “I’m just about to leave.” “Take your time,” he replies and he gives what I’ve come to recognize as the secret nod of staff at the George V, a slight movement of the head and a twinkle in the eye that says whatever makes you happy.
I think they put some kind of drug in the drinks here so that when you sink into one of their armchairs you forget that you have anyplace to go. My watch is telling me that I should be in a hurry—I have a 7 o’clock appointment across town, then an 8 o’clock dinner invitation for which I’ve promised to bring desert—but my posture is telling me otherwise. And I’ve already abandoned my appetite for the evening to a three-tier tray of finger delicacies.
I landed in a similar predicament during a happy-go-lucky day with an amiable family from Dallas several months ago. The fact that we’d finished three courses of lunch less than an hour earlier is apparently irrelevant when an easy-going man’s wife enjoys high tea in a fancy hotel—“and it won’t hurt the boys none to see what good living is like.” So off we went to the George V, one of the gems of Paris’s Golden Triangle, a zone that glitters between the Champs-Elysées and the river. And what do you know? It didn’t seem to hurt the boys one bit. And for another of life’s lessons their father proudly held up the bill and said, “Boys, you’ll be happy to know that tea at the Four Seasons costs more than our lunch.” Their mother and I, meanwhile, leaned back on the couch as though settling into an opium den for the night.
Taking high tea at the Four Seasons George V is luxury soft and sweet. But taking high tea at the George V with Jean-Pierre Soutric is soft, sweet luxury with the kindest of human faces.
But Jean-Pierre left me about 20 minutes ago. The staff probably didn’t expect me to take his “stay as you long as you like” so seriously, though they would never say as much. Now that I’m alone I’m trying to act legit but taking notes about the 18th-century tapestries and pendulum clocks, the scaly crystal of Murano glass chandeliers circa 1928 overhead, the Aubusson Savonnerie rug underfoot, the violet-blue hydrangeas overflowing large vases, a signature of the house’s master florist Jeff Leatham.
See that? Spend an hour or two in the comfort of a top-notch hotel and you start dropping names. It must be the drugs in the tea, for I have lost my natural suspicion of Planet Luxury and my sense of the ridiculousness of fashion and figures in such settings. How else could I be so unfazed by the fact that the woman who has just been seated nearby has a striking resemblance to Bon Jovi in low drag? I think of her as Bonne, but other than that the drugs have cut the synapses in my irony. She is, however, accompanied by a well-bellied man whose multitasking (he’s at once fondling a Blackberry, ordering a Beefeater martini, and telling Bonne that they can always push back their dinner reservation) is making me self-conscious about my spiral notebook.
I didn’t actually need the notebook during my interview with Jean-Pierre. Having known him for five years now, both in and out of the hotel, I am already well aware that he is as in tune with his job as any man can be. Slight and finely pressed, Jean-Pierre, 46, is completely at home in this environment, an ecosystem that both feeds off and nurtures prestige and self-worth. The pressure, stress, frustration, and emergencies that come with the job are actually a perfect foil for his natural compulsive tendency to want everything just right and in its proper place. He seems to bathe in the status offered by his position and surroundings and in return he brings to it the humanity that high luxury often lacks and desperately needs.
Jean-Pierre is not only an ideal spokesman for travel in style and for catering to the whims and needs of the well-to-do, he is a natural poster child for good manners, discretion, and generous hosting. While that may read like a recipe for pretension, it is a pretension tempered in Jean-Pierre by his natural inclination to self-mockery and his evident pleasure at helping others, both on and off the field.
Jean-Pierre grew up in Lourdes, the town in the Pyrenees that has been a major pilgrim/tourist destination ever since word got out of Bernadette Soubirous multiple visions of a Lady in White in the winter of 1858. As a teenager he considered attending the seminary but instead packed his faith and his bags, left Lourdes, and moved into hotel marketing and beyond that to peddling high-end travel. It’s difficult to think of traveling around the world to promote the George V as a form of Christian charity, but Jean-Pierre manages to pull it off. And that, I believe, is at the heart of his professional talent.
Jean-Pierre worked with Intercontinental in Paris and in Cannes for 10 years then with Hilton for a year before joining the George V as marketing director in 1995. The hotel, which first opened in 1928 and was enlarged through the 1930s, was bought in 1996 by Prince Al Waleed of Saudi Arabia, grandson of the kingdom’s founder. The prince, Jean-Pierre tells on good authority, had been coming to this hotel ever since he stayed here with his mother when eight years old—and one day he bought it. The following year saw the start of a two-year renovation to give new luster and then some to the hotels 1930s grace. The hotel is now operated by the Canadian group Four Seasons. (Since Jean-Pierre is a friend, I will refrain from recommending lodging at the hotel on his account.)
As we had tea together it struck me that I was unable to distinguish Jean-Pierre the marketing director from Jean-Pierre the friend. Such an impression could mean that he never lets down his guard, but I think rather that it means that he’s brought his values and personality to the job and in the process raised the standard for hotel salesmanship. “Il n’y a pas d’image,” he told me, and it seems to be true; he remains consistently himself: warm, gracious, compulsively orderly, forcefully tolerant of ethnic and religious diversity, a defender of French republican and cultural ideals, a strong advocate of the benefits of work and wealth. He’s an elitist, no doubt, but an elitist who would give every man his chance.
I don’t think that’s the drugs of Planet Luxury talking, but you never know. The stuff that Jean-Pierre deals in is pretty pure. Eventually I’ll have to brace myself for the comedown.
For now, though, it appears perfectly normal that Bonne’s 16 and 17-year-old daughters arrive sporting large Dior sunglasses and bearing the fruits of credit card heaven, that a coterie of glittering hijabs floats by like exotic birds, that a golden-haired woman is telling a thick-thighed man in shorts that she’ll meet him after her massage, and that a waitress catches my eye to give me the secret nod.
I lean back into the armchair. Let teatime turn into cocktail hour, let cocktail hour segue into a parade of well-dressed diners on their way into Le Cinq, the hotel’s high-style restaurant, let the dinner hour fade into the after-dinner hour of whiskeys and cognacs and romancing bottles of champagne. Let me sit until the drugs wear off.
Four Seasons George V, 31 avenue George V, 75008 Paris. Metro George-V. Tel. 01 49 52 70 00
High tea is served in the gallery lounge 3-6pm daily. If high tea sounds like too many goodies you can always opt for tea or coffee with pound cake, scones, muffins, cookies, or almond biscuit cake. Or give up teatime altogether to head into the bar for an early aperitif.