An Afternoon with Coco Chanel — Paris, Hôtel Ritz, Place Vendôme — Late Summer 1969

The doorman at the Ritz nodded to me, as if he had been expecting me. Perhaps he had. I was announced—a strange, semi-dreamlike form of appointment, the kind that seems possible only in places like this: a late afternoon in September, a curtain of warm light hanging over the Place Vendôme, and up on the second floor, behind the tall windows that a writer once supposedly called the most beautiful in Paris, waited a woman who had lived here for thirty-three years.