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Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
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But the Dalat Palace Hotel further permits one to trace a significant shift in this regardor at the very least a divide between the
theory and practice of colonial sites of leisure and power. What was
at its outset a painstakingly planned and controlled environment
intended as a sort of colonial tabula rasa, was soon transformed by
a set of factors including triangulations of power between French,
highland minorities and Vietnamese, tensions between different
French colonial agencies, sectors, and agendas, and the dynamics
proper to this particular colonial society itself. Ultimately, when one
pushes the examination of Dalat beyond initial plans for an oasis of
France in the highlands of Indochina, one uncovers more colonial
discord and rivalry than unity of goals; thus, as we shall see, the
various strata of the French colonial administration could never
agree on which should bear the financial burden of keeping the grand
hotel afloat. Out of the lavish and overarching colonial project of
Dalat that was sketched out around 1897, there thus emerged countless competing projectsall played out in the crucible of colonial
social life and power that was the Dalat Palace Hotelat once social
club, de facto headquarters of French colonial high society, focal
point of discussions about the role of the French colonial administration, and indeed the ultimate marker of Frenchness. The Lang Bian
Palace Hotel emerged, in other words, as a site where various and
often competing French colonial ambitions, tensions and visions of
Indochina itself were negotiated.
A Colonial Tabula Rasa
The Lang Bian plateau was, by the admission of most colonial officials, a vast experiment, a tabula rasa on which the French sought to
socially engineer a white island in the tropics.10 To be sure, the
French were not alone in seeking the cooler climes of the highlandsthis well-documented phenomenon has been aptly labeled
the panacea of seeking higher altitudes.11 Indeed, the French, and
10
Gwendolyn Wright has described Dalats raison detre as follows: Dalat was to
be a model city, in the sense of a controlled environment, an urbane retreat for the
French elite. In location and in character, the town was far from the heat, the
bickering, and the industrial pollution of Saigon, far from the violence, the rivalries
and the crowded streets of Hanoi. Wright, The Politics of Design, p. 230.
11
Philip Curtin, Death by Migration: Europes Encounter with the Tropical world in the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 28.
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165
Ibid.
On some of the strategies involved in this complex game, see the following
article, which focuses on the highland minorities of Northern Vietnam (Tonkin in
colonial times): Jean Michaud, The Montagnards and the State in Northern Vietnam from 1802 to 1975: a historical overview, Ethnohistory 47:2 (Spring 2000):
3459.
18
CAOM GGI 5969, Gouverneur General Doumer to Ministre des Colonies,
April 18, 1898. Yersins travel logs are located at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.
Archives of the Institut Pasteur, Fonds Yersin, Box 3, Dossier 13651, Yersin Pays
Mo, deuxie`me expedition (1893), p. 117.
19
For general histories of Dalat in the colonial era, see Wright, The Politics of
Design, pp. 2303, and Robert Reed, From Highland Hamlet to Regional Capital.
Also see Truong Tro (ed.), Dalat, ville daltitude (Ho Chi Minh City: Peoples Committee of Ho Chi Minh City, 1993); Arnauld Le Brusq, Le Vietnam `a travers larchitecture
17
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Langsa, the French town, epitomized the French colonial administrations fantasy of finding, nearby, convenient reimmersion into the
metropole. More than this, Doumer foresaw the possibility of planning grand edifices for a future administrative centre on the Lang
Bian plateau.
The fantasy of creating a sheltered French micro-universe in the
microclimatic highlands of Indochina was shared by most of the
members of the early Lang Bian exploration missions. Some focused
upon the possibilities of importing or grafting metropolitan fruit and
vegetables on the Lang Bian plateau. Once again, authenticity was
paramount. As Erica Peters has shown, in culinary matters, it was
critical for the French in Indochina to consume the real thing.22
Thus, a station agricole was established at Dalat at the turn of the
century. The agricultural laboratory soon bore metropolitan fruit. A
1903 report reads:
coloniale (Paris: Editions de lAmateur, 1999), pp. 98108; and Crossette, The Great
Hill Stations of Asia, pp. 20719.
20
Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, p. 147.
21
CAOM GGI 5969, Governor Doumer to Minister of the Colonies, April 18,
1898.
22
Erica Peters, Negotiating Power through Everyday Practices in French Vietnam, 18801924 Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2000, p. 140.
167
I can state that all French flowers flourish here, as you have been able to
witness for yourself . . . French vegetables have also been yielding favorable
results . . . We have now produced the following vegetables, ready to be
eaten: potatoes, cabbage, lettuce, carrots, celery, beats, parsley, sorrel,
tomatoes, turnips and onions.23
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169
ence. But in Dalat, the Lang Bian Palace was erected fifteen years
before the Governor Generals villa, and dwarfed it in stature. To be
sure, this state of affairs was partly the result of a general scaling
back from the architect Ernest Hebrards outlandish 1922 blueprint
for Dalat, that featured a projected massive administrative quarter
to the Northeast of the main artificial lake. The actual relativism of
the Lang Bian Place within such blueprints is difficult to reconstitute
today, because little else of Hebrards visionstarting with the
administrative quarterwas ever realized (and Hebrards master
plans were replaced by Louis-Georges Pineaus a decade later). In a
sense, then, the Lang Bian Palaces colossality and seeming incommensurability with the rest of Dalat in 1922 stems from its construction date: at the height of an economic boom in 1922, Dalat was
being touted by many as the future capital of Indochina, where the
French could rule from the heights in a site of their own making
hence Hebrards quintessentially optimistic project. When economic
circumstances changed later that decade, most plans for government
structures in Dalat were scrapped (villa construction, conversely,
continued unabated), leaving the town with a Palace Hotel as its
centrepiece and icon. When the Depression finally receded, only the
Palace Hotel was left as a monumental structure. However, such a
change of fortunes alone cannot explain why the Palace Hotel would
have been built first: it is striking indeed that this 1922 palace was
erected before a post-office, train station, or city halleven before
most of the citys schools (Dalat subsequently became a centre for
learning, especially for French and metis children). Certainly this
sequence must be indicative of the French colonial administrations
priorities. In 1922, the hotel stood quite literally alone in terms of
public edifices for the French (see figure 1). This clearly signals the
paramount importance, and indeed the primacy to the French colonial administration of a luxury hotel in Dalat. This, in turn, reflects
in part the social pretensions and fantasies of elite colonial leisure
and status-seekers, but also the very down-to-earth and mundane
efforts of the colonial administration to save by replacing furloughs
to metropolitan France with shorter vacations in the European comfort of Dalat.
The Lang Bian Palace opened in March 1922, after Governor General Long had made several visits to the resort to accelerate and
oversee construction in person.28 Featuring 38 luxury rooms, the
28
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Figure 1. Date unknown, but certainly from the early 1920s. A view of Dalat showing the artificial lake in its early dimensions, the Lang Bian Palace Hotel (to the
left) and in the distance the tiny native town. CAOM GGI 59873. Reprinted by
permission of the Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives dOutre-mer.
Figure 2. Postcard, dated January 5, 1928. This card shows one of the leisure activities available to hotel customers. Note the extensive hotel grounds. Authors collection.
29
Cornell University Library, Wason Pamphlets (Indochina 51) Les Hotels en
Indochine.
171
30
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Figures 3. The Lang Bian Palace Hotel in the 1920s. CAOM GGI 59873. Reprinted
by permission of the Archives Nationales, Centre des Archives dOutre-mer.
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ERIC T. JENNINGS
175
Figure 5. Lang Bian, panorama de Dalat pris de lHotelLang Bian, view of Dalat
taken from the hotel. Card dated October 4, 1924. Authors collection.
minority woman looks on, half covered by the forest canopy (see
figure 4). This advertisement is reminiscent of stereotypical nineteenth-century representations of fierce native Americans, and might
just as easily been used to sell a lodge at Yosemite or Banff.
Of course, touting highland minorities as fierce warriors was a
potentially perilous marketing strategy. In his article published in
the widely circulated metropolitan French magazine LIllustration,
Francois de Tessan reassured potential visitors to Dalat and its
Palace Hotel that the local minorities had been completely pacified
and that the age of heroic conquest is over. We have . . . entered
into the age of progress.43 The delicate balancing act used to market
Dalats ethnographic appeal thus consisted of piquing colonial curiosity in muscled, tanned, wild haired, wide eyed [warriors],44 while
simultaneously reassuring the everyday traveler of their complete
harmlessness, stressing that minority tribes now constituted attractions, not threats. Making the montagnards (as the French called
all highland minorities in Indochina) appear either too threatening
or too peaceful could ruin the fantasy in either direction.
43
44
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However, the noble savage did not always draw travelers. For
those preferring a replica of France over a fanciful far-west (note
that a kitschy far-western theme-park can be found at one of Dalats
lakes to this day), the highland minority presence was irritating at
best. Witness the following postcard, written to a friend in the Paris
suburb of St Cloud by a woman visiting the Lang Bian Place Hotel
on October 4, 1924. The image on the card, entitled panorama from
the Hotel, shows several minority peoplescantily clad by European
standardsand a minority village in the background (see figure 5;
one can also make out several colonial villas, recently strategically
built on the hills). On the flip side, this female traveler, no doubt a
resident of Saigon suffering from the ennui so many French women
experienced in Indochina,45 wrote:
Dear Nicette, I am sending you a card of Indochinas convalescence site,
which is a far cry from Vichy, especially with its inhabitants whose attire
leaves a little something to be desired. Nevertheless, there are two
handsome hotels, a theatre, cinema, dancing hall, tennis court, and so on.
The air is reputedly good here in the mountains of Southern Annam. Lets
face it, its not worth St Cloud either, but then again, neither is Saigon.
Yours . . . .46
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claiming to recount a true story (figure 6).47 The four captions show
two French men letting their guard down as they go for a swim; two
members of a local minority proceed to steal their clothes in a classic
gag, and an equally classic inversion of European and primitive
trappings. In the final scene, the two French men are reduced to
returning in highland native garb to the Lang Bian Palace Hotel
erected here into a monument to whiteness and civilization. The
two unfortunate swimmers look forlorn, bearing the sartorial stigma
of nativeness, while the two minority people walk back to their
nearby village wearing pith helmetsthe markers of colonial status
par excellence. Here the Lang Bian Palaces very presence as a social
marker literally shames these two Europeans. And it is precisely
because of the Lang Bian Palace that this anecdote is a nightmare
come true for them. It is not the act of losing ones clothes, so much
as the return to European high societyembodied by the Palace
47
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that creates this powerful sense of ridicule. The hotel thus provided
a relational standard or norm by which to measure ones Frenchness
in the highlands.
The Place of the Vietnamese
As Michael Vann has shown, the relationship between French colonial and Indochinese societies was strained to the limits by the question of servants. For the French, having a retinue of indigenous servants was of course a mark of power, and one of the advantages of
the colonies as it were. According to Vann, the servantthough a
necessity and indeed a token of status within the colonial hierarchy
was paradoxically a source of constant anxiety for the French, as a
potential enemy within the household.48 This fear of servants who
could communicate secretly in their own tongue, who had access to
the French private sphere, and could indeed access and shift between
both Vietnamese and French registers, served to reinforce French
racist stereotypes towards the Vietnamese, whom the French generally portrayed as venal and duplicitous.49
At the Lang Bian Place Hotel, such fears were crystallized in a
rumour which I have been unable to confirm through primary written
sources. The rumour, described by a French guide book to Vietnam
(one that usually relies upon local informants),50 and confirmed by
individual conversations I had in Dalat,51 holds that a Communist
ring operated out of the Lang Bian Palaces kitchen in the early
1930s. Though the actual existence of this Communist cell remains
in question, let me echo here Luise Whites argument that rumour
in and of itself can speak volumes, especially in a colonial context.52
This story may reveal a French hyper-sensitivity to their preserved
realm, infiltrated as it seemed by Vietnamese personnel, and this
in an areaLang Bianthat the French had chosen in no small
48
In the words of Michael Vann, The existence of the Other in the home put
the colonial on edge. Michael Vann, White City on the Red River: Race, Power
and Culture in French Colonial Hanoi, 18721954, Ph.D. thesis, University of California Santa Cruz, 1999, p. 553.
49
Ibid., p. 550.
50
NA Le Guide du Routard, Vietnam (Paris: Hachette, 1999), p. 309.
51
The most reliable confirmation came from Mrs Huynh Thi Thanh Xuyen who
works at the hotel, and whose father did as well.
52
Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
179
part because the Vietnamese were absent from it. Indeed, some sixty
Vietnamese worked at the hotel, a figure to be contrasted to the
establishments six European employees, or its thirty-eight rooms for
that matter. The facile and stereotypical association of Vietnamese =
covert political subversion (to be distinguished from the French stereotype of highland minorities as straight-forward, frank, and
simple) could well be behind this urban legend. Conversely, if one
were to read this account as historically accuratewhich would not
be surprising in itself, save for the absence of any written records in
the many files I consulted on the hotelit would reveal an interesting degree of political militancy amongst the personnel of the elite
hotel, catering to the colonys wealthiest patrons.
If fears of Vietnamese servants and Communist subversion were
perennial concerns for the French in Dalat, this is not to suggest
that the highland resort remained a playground for the French alone.
Vietnamese elites soon found their place side by side with the French
colonial plutocracy. Emperor Bao Dai took a liking to the highland
town, and held banquets at the Lang Bian Palace.53 As Bruce Lockhart has suggested, Bao Dais predilection for Dalat in itself reveals
more than his legendary passion for hunting and diversions: it
implies that the emperor felt estranged from his capital Hueand
even more so from his future capital by default, Saigon.54 This alienation drew him to a Europeanized highland resort, whose urban layout
was arguably more segregated than any other Indochinese city, and
where his palace stood atop a hill overlooking the European and
administrative quarters.
Clientele
Throughout the hotels colonial existence, its managers and the
Indochinese tourism agency made concerted efforts to woo foreign
visitors to Dalats Palace Hotel. An English-language brochure from
1933 advertised: the Lang-Biang Palace and the Grand Hotel de
Dalat . . . offer every modern comfort, and diversion, including concerts, tennis, golf, walking tours and motor excursions. The sports53
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man will find plenty of game, large and small, in the nearby hills.55
Rich adventurers and big game hunters were particularly targeted
for attention. Maurice Rondet-Saint, the head of the Ligue maritime
coloniale, remarked upon the prominent place of hunting in Indochinese tourism, noting that some 50 million piastres a year were spent
by big-game hunters in Indochina. Stressing that Europeans could
kill two birds with one stone, Rondet-Saint repeated the balancing
act of selling the Palace Hotel as an embodiment of both the exotic
and the familiar: In the mountains of Annam, at Dalat, there is a
sanitarium where Europeans who cannot spend their holidays in
Europe come to refresh and reinvigorate themselves in the pure and
healthy mountain air. It so happens that Dalat and its Palace are
also in the heart of hunting country.56 This passage underscores the
diverse makeup of the Palaces clientele: while some customers were
wealthy outsiders visiting Indochina to bring home big game trophies, others were high-ranking administrators on furlough or longweekend visits. Unwittingly, Rondet-Saint may also have pinpointed
the Palace Hotels problematic marketing position: as a resort for
those who could not afford to return to Europe, colonial Dalat
defined its identity in part as a cheap substitute for France. With
wealthy colonials heading back to France at the earliest possible
occasion, this left Dalat with middle-ranking administrators, the vast
majority of whom could not afford Palace prices. In the early 1930s,
the Lang Bian Palace Hotel cost 6 piastres a night, while the towns
lesser hotels charged a mere 1.20 and 1.75 piastres, to give a sense
of scale.57
The Lang Bian Palace was already caught in a price gap, itself the
reflection of an expectation gap: the hotel offered a replica of Europe
at European prices, when those who could only afford replicas of
France could not pay European rates in the first place. To compound
the problem, the proliferation of villas in Dalat between 1922 and
1945 meant that the ultra-elite courted by the Lang Bian Palace
already possessed cottages of their own in Dalatthemselves styled
to resemble regional architecture of the Landes, Brittany, Savoy or
the Basque country.58 In 1929, the Governor General of Indochina
synthesized the marketing conundrum of the Lang Bian Palace
55
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the hotel should have either a French matre dhotel or a French head
cook on hand.63 In France in 1920 Mr Desanti, the very first (and
short-lived) manager of the Lang Bian Palace, recruited a chef from
Pau in Southwestern France. This chef, Henri Passiot, signed a threeyear contract to serve as head chef of the Lang Bian Palace starting
on January 1, 1923. This cuisinier cum war veteran and amputee
proceeded to sue the Lang Bian Palace Hotel and Mr Desanti when
the establishment failed to open on schedule in 1921. In October
1921, seeing that the hotels interior was far from completed, Passiot
sued Desanti, who in turn sued the Government General of Indochina.64 Passiot filed for his 25,000 franc salary for 1923, plus 1000
piastres for housing and food, as well as travel expenses to Indochina
and back to Pau for himself and his wife.
In-fighting and recrimination within the insular French colonial
community of Dalat also led to a series of technical catastrophes
shortly after the Hotels opening in 1922. In a livid letter dated
March 12, 1923, the Commissary delegated to Dalat by the Governor General wrote to Hanoi concerning insubordination, incompetence and bickeringall of this stemming from a problem with the
plumbing of the Lang Bian Palace Hotel. The head of Dalats engineering team, Mr Jumeau, was bluntly accused of insolence toward
the hotels second manager, Mr Frasseto, and toward Commissaire
Garnier himself. Garnier speculated that Jumeaus bitterness and
stalling in conducting plumbing repairs came from having been publicly rebuked by Garnier in the Cafe of the new Palace Hotel. The fact
of having been publicly scolded in the most public of placesindeed
in the towns only equivalent of a colonial club (the likes of which
Orwell describes in Burmese Days), was thus identified as grounds not
just for shame, but for professional vendetta. Whatever the engineers motives, Garnier bemoaned, his de facto work-to-rule campaign
was having terrible consequences; Garnier and Frasseto had complained regularly of plumbing leaks since January, and by mid March
the leaks persisted, now threatening to leave permanent damage.
As for Jumeaus rebuttal that paid customers occupying rooms had
prevented him from making repairs, Garnier replied that the handful of customers in the hotel would not have opposed being inconvenienced, had they been told of the urgent necessity for these repairs.
63
VNNA, GGI 5034, Cahier des Charges pour lexploitation des hotels du groupe
de Dalat, p. 9.
64
See CAOM GGI 38218 for all information regarding Passiot and his lawsuit.
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As the Depression hit Indochina, the Dalat Palace Hotel was increasingly castigated as a white elephant by the administration, and its
manager portrayed as out of touch with, and insensitive to, the fiscal
belt-tightening required around the world at the time.
The hotels manager in the 1930s, Edouard Feraudy, an Italian
with years of experience in the hotel sector in Indochina, appears to
68
VNNA, GGI 5014, Resident Superieur dAnnam to Gouverneur General
dIndochine, May 14, 1928.
69
CAOM, GGI 59875, Inspecteur des finances to Gouverneur General,
December 8, 1931.
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The mayor of Dalat and Feraudy also clashed over the hotels very
function. They were at odds over both the Palaces mission and its
market. The level of vitriol contained in their correspondence suggests that petty rivalries so common in closed colonial circles were
rampant in Dalat. Thus, in March 1933, the mayor wrote to the
Governor General of Indochina:
Mr Feraudys tenure as manager expires on June 30 1933; the running of
the Lang Bian Palace, as it presently stands, leads to monthly losses usually
in excess of 2,000 piastres, and this in spite of a subvention of 1,000
piastres. This situation is not surprising: it is the result of the special rapports between Mr Feraudy and the clientele he deigns to accept in his
Palace. On several occasions, I have received complaints from customers
who, after having been the victims of haughtiness, or even insolence on the
part of the manager, vowed never to return to the Palace.73
The mayor flatly accused Feraudy of driving away customers, attributing this situation to Feraudys own conception of the hotel as a
preserve of the elite. In the fractured and hierarchical colonial
system, the Lang Bian Palace had emerged not as the playground
for all Europeans in Indochina, but as the domaine reserve of a minute
elite, described by one source as Indochinas grands pontesor bigwigs.74 Intimidation, haughtiness or whatever other character traits
the mayor saw in Feraudy, were no doubt radiated by the manager
so as to maintain the hotels standinga perennial obsession which
completely superseded economic viability. No doubt in the world of
1930s French customer relations, Feraudys distance and haughtiness would actually have been perceived as desirable attributes by
the cre`me de la cre`me of French colonial society. In Indochina, of course,
an already hierarchical French social universe was bent and distorted
to a paroxysm. Here, after all, the veneer of equality in liberty,
equality and fraternity was absent, while a correspondingly distorted
and inflated sense of self-importance seemed de rigueur, no doubt
stoked by the presence of cohorts of servants, boys and con-gas.75
73
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Ibid., p. 130.
CAOM, GGI 59875, Feraudy to Governor General, July 4, 1931.
83
CAOM, GGI 59873, Mr Courtinat to the mayor of Dalat, January 21, 1932.
84
VNNA, GGI 5034, Cahier des charges pour lexploitation des hotels du groupe
de Dalat, p. 1.
85
Duron, The Dalat Palace, p. 6.
82
189
tion, based on its location, its offerings, its celebrations and social life, in
short Dalats main selling point, would disappear, leaving a vacuum that
would hamper the citys development.86
Ibid., p. 67.
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191
has nothing to fear, but when one has a family and personal stakes, it is
preferable in my opinion, to be polite . . .90
Marius Borel, Souvenirs dun vieux colonialiste (Borel, Rodez, 1963), p. 282.
Ibid., pp. 2925.
92
See Adam Schwarz, Beaches and Sand Traps, Far-Eastern Economic Review, 159
(February 29, 1996), p. 41.
91
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Figures 7 A and B. The Dalat Palace Hotel today. Top: a room on the hotels second
floor. Bottom: a view of the hotels facade, taken from the gardens. Photographs by
the author (March 2001).
193
[In the early 1990s, the Dalat Palace Hotel] was remade to evoke a time
of brilliantined hair, Vuitton trunks and tennis whites all set in the luminous and mythical landscape of Indochine, a place as distant from the realities of French colonialism as it was from contemporary Vietnam. The
original hotel had never taken off, indeed the grand building overlooking
the towns lake was a mirror of the economic dreams and failures of French
colonialism in Indochina.93
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legend encapsulated by Marguerite Duras; to some extent, each represents the flip side of an Indochic phenomenon94 which is beginning
to draw French tourists to Vietnam in droves, through tours organized by the Maison de lIndochine in Paris. And the appeal of Indochic
has begun to extend well beyond the French-speaking world. Take
for instance this glowing report of the Dalat Palace Hotel by an
American guide-book:
[The Dalat Palace Hotel is] a truly divine establishment with spacious,
elegantly furnished rooms to kill for. If you stay in only one grand hotel, it
should be this one. The empty corridors seem to echo with ghosts from the
days when dressing for dinner was de rigueur and ballrooms came alive
every Saturday with full orchestra.95