Colette declared, “Okay, now you can eat.” I took the first bite of my pain au chocolat, and it was amazing. Airy, flaky, buttery, oozing rich bittersweet chocolate. Colette explained: “These pains au chocolat are from Gérard Mulot. They are my favorite, but the problem is they don’t have a sit-down café there. And I can only eat my pain au chocolat while sipping a good cup of tea. But the decent tea places don’t have pain au chocolat as good as this, and of course they won’t allow you to bring anything in from another bakery. So the only way to solve this quandary was to resort to a switcheroo. But isn’t this perfect? Now we get to enjoy the best morning tea, with the best pains au chocolat, in the best park in the world.” Carlton shook his head and said, “You’re raving bonkers, Colette!” And then he consumed his chocolate croissant in two bites.

In the afternoon, some of the girls went to a private shopping party at L’Eclaireur while Nick and I accompanied Stephanie and her mother to the Kraemer Gallery. Nick knew of this antiques dealer and wanted to see it. He jokingly called it “the billionaire’s IKEA,” but when we got there I realized he wasn’t kidding—it was a palatial mansion by the Parc Monceau filled with the most astounding furniture and objets. Every piece was museum quality and seemed to have once been owned by a king or queen. Mrs. Shi, this mousy woman who until now hadn’t joined in the fashion frenzy, suddenly transformed into one of those QVC shopping addicts and started buying up the place like a whirling dervish. Nick stood on the sidelines, chatting with Monsieur Kraemer, and after a few minutes the man ducked away. He soon returned bearing one of their historical ledgers and, much to Nick’s delight, showed us some old receipts for purchases made by Nick’s great-grandfather in the early 1900s!

Friday, June 21

Guess who showed up in Paris today? Richie Yang. Obviously he just couldn’t bear to miss out on the action. He even tried to stay at the Shangri-La, but with all the suites booked by our party, he ended up “making do” with the penthouse at the Mandarin Oriental. He came by the Shangri-La bearing baskets of expensive-looking fruit from Hédiard—all for Colette’s mother. Meanwhile, Carlton conveniently announced that he was offered an incredible vintage sports car and had to go meet with the owner somewhere outside of Paris. I offered to accompany him, but he mumbled some quick excuses and rushed off alone. I’m not sure if I buy his excuses—it’s so strange that he would run off like this. Why would he flee the match just as his chief competitor entered the ring?

In the evening, Richie insisted on inviting everyone to “the most exclusive restaurant in Paris. You’ve practically got to kill someone to get a reservation,” he said. The restaurant was inexplicably decorated like a corporate boardroom, and Richie arranged for all of us to have the chef’s tasting menu—the “Amusements and Tantalizations in Sixteen Movements.” Despite how unappetizing this sounded, the food turned out to be quite spectacular and inventive, especially the artichoke-and-white-truffle soup and the razor clams in a sweet garlic sabayon, but I could see that Mrs. Bing and the aunties weren’t half as thrilled. Colette’s grandmother looked especially puzzled by the seafood “raw-cooked in cold steam,” the startlingly colored foams, and the artfully composed dwarf vegetables, and kept asking her daughter, “Why are they giving us all the vegetable scraps? Is it because we’re Chinese?” Mrs. Bing replied, “No, everyone gets the same dishes. Look how many French people are eating here—this place must be very authentic.”

After the meal, the elders headed back to the hotel while Pied Piper Richie announced that he was taking us to some ultra-exclusive club started by the director David Lynch. “I’ve been a member since day one,” he boasted. Nick and I begged off and took a lovely evening stroll along the Seine. Arriving back at the hotel, we passed Mrs. Bing, who was standing at the door of her suite talking furtively to a Chinese maid from housekeeping. Catching my eye, she beckoned us over excitedly. “Rachel, Rachel, look what this nice maid gave me!” In her hand was a white plastic trash bag filled with dozens of bottles of the hotel’s Bulgari bath gel, shampoo, and conditioner. “Do you want some? She can get more!” I told her that Nick and I used our own shampoos and didn’t touch the hotel toiletries. “Can I have yours, then? And the shower caps too?” Mrs. Bing asked eagerly. We gathered up all our toiletries and headed back to her suite. She came to the door and acted like a junkie who had just been handed free premium-grade heroin. “Aiyah! I should have been asking you to collect these bottles for me all week long! Wait a minute, don’t go away!” She returned with a bag containing five plastic bottles of water. “Here, take some water! We boil it fresh every day in the electric kettle so we don’t have to pay for the hotel’s bottled water!” Nick was desperately trying to maintain a straight face when Grandma Bing came to the door and said, “Lai Di, why don’t you invite them in?”

We entered her massive suite and discovered Auntie Pan Di, Mrs. Shi, and Mrs. Wen huddled over a large portable hot pot in the dining room. On the floor was a huge Louis Vuitton trunk filled with packets of ramen in all kinds of flavors. “Shrimp and pork ramen?” Auntie Pan Di asked, stirring a big batch of noodles with a pair of chopsticks. Mrs. Bing whispered conspiratorially, “Don’t tell Colette, but we do this every night! We’re so much happier eating ramen than all this fancy French food!” Mrs. Wen said, “Aiyah, I’ve had constipation every single day from all this cheese we’ve been forced to eat.” I asked them why they didn’t just go downstairs to Shang Palace, the hotel’s Michelin-starred Chinese restaurant, for dinner. Mrs. Shi, who earlier today bought an antique clock*2 for €4.2 million at the Kraemer Gallery after looking at it for less than three minutes, exclaimed, “We tried going there after that awful French dinner, but all the dishes were so expensive we walked out! Twenty-five euros for fried rice? Tai leiren le!”*3

Saturday, June 22

Colette knocked on our door at the crack of dawn and woke us up. Had we seen Carlton? Had he called? Apparently he didn’t return to the hotel last night, and he wasn’t answering his phone. Colette seemed worried, but Nick didn’t think there was anything to worry about. “He’ll turn up. Sometimes it takes a while to negotiate with these car collectors—he’s probably still in the middle of doing his deal.” In the meantime, Richie invited everyone over to his penthouse suite for sunset cocktails on the roof terrace. “A little party in Colette’s honor,” he called it. While the girls spent the afternoon getting spa treatments, Nick and I took a blissful nap on the grass at the Parc Monceau.

In the early evening, we arrived to Richie’s party at the Mandarin Oriental only to find that the security men posted by the VIP elevator wouldn’t let us through—our names were apparently “not on the list.” After a phone call to Colette, we managed to clear things up and were whisked to the roof terrace, where we discovered that this wasn’t just a “little cocktail party” for our group. The penthouse was packed with an extremely glam crowd and decorated like a high-tech product launch. Giant obelisk topiaries festooned with lights lined the parapet, an elaborate stage was set up on one end, and along one side of the terrace stood half a dozen celebrity chefs manning different food stations.

I immediately felt underdressed in my cornflower blue silk shirtdress and strappy sandals, especially when guest of honor Colette made an entrance wearing the enormous canary diamond necklace her mother had just bought and a stunning black strapless Stéphane Rolland gown with a long ruffled skirt that seemed to go on for miles and miles. Mrs. Bing, meanwhile, was virtually unrecognizable with her expertly painted face, her hair swept up into a beehive do, and the biggest set of sapphires set against a red Elie Saab cocktail dress with a plunging neckline.

But the biggest surprise of all—Carlton was there! He made no mention about being MIA for twenty-four hours and seemed his usual charming self. Turns out he knew plenty of people at the party—many friends from the London-Dubai-Shanghai party axis had flown in, and soon I was swept up in a frenzy of introductions. I met Sean and Anthony (two charming brothers who were DJing the party), an Arab prince Carlton knew from Stowe, some French countess who wouldn’t stop telling me how disgusted she was with U.S. foreign policy, and then things really got crazy when some famous Chinese pop star showed up. Little did I realize the night was about to get a whole lot crazier.

* * *

*1 Actually, it was Prince Roland Bonaparte, and he was Napoleon Bonaparte’s grandnephew (Rachel is still too hungover to get her facts straight).

*2 An exceptional Louis XV long-case clock by Jean-Pierre Latz, almost identical to the one made for Frederick the Great of Prussia at Neues Palais in Potsdam.

*3 Mandarin for “That’s insane.”

17

THE MANDARIN ORIENTAL

PARIS, FRANCE