It was an unpleasantness that could be avoided by retreating inside the gilded spaces of the buildings that bore his name – a service that remained on offer long after he died, rich, bewildered and back in his native Switzerland, a few weeks before the 1918 armistice was signed. It was the conflict that he held at bay with culinary pragmatism in the months Paris spent surrounded by the armies of General von Blumenthal. Ritz – eponym, fraudster, founder of some of the world's grandest grand hotels – was a talent shaped by war. The maître d', who also drew his customers' attention to the truffled antelope and le chat flanqué de rats, was César Ritz. For Christmas dinner on the 99th day of the siege of Paris, diners at Voisin sat down to an elephant consommé. The menu of a restaurant on the Rue Saint-Honoré, however, suggests otherwise. A radical newspaper – distributed by balloon to avoid interception by the Prussian army – fixed the execution just before New Year's Eve 1870, and added that the deed was done, messily, with explosive-tipped steel bullets. N obody knows the exact date on which Castor and Pollux, the two elephants that gave rides to visitors at the Jardin d'Acclimatation, went before the firing squad.
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