With its ornate facade resembling an ocean liner, gilded portholes, and fat cherubs hanging festoons of grapes, the Hotel Lutetia is known as the Left Bank’s grand hotel.The hotel’s motto, “Fluctuat nec mergitur” (“She is tossed by the waves, but does not sink”), is also the motto of Paris itself, suggesting the city’s resilience. That quality is in abundant evidence in Jane Rogoyska’s engaging new book, Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War.Rogoyska is a Polish-born British author who started her career as a filmmaker. As a writer, she has retained a cinematic eye, writing vibrant narrative nonfiction that depicts history with an emphasis on character and setting. Her scenes come alive in striking detail: “The hotel was decked out with crystal chandeliers, mosaics, frescoes, parquet floors. There were sound-proofed bedrooms with leather-padded doors, telephones connected to the maître d’ and bells with which to summon the valet or the chambermaid.”
Rogoyska is the author of several books about conflicts of 20th-century history. She has received numerous awards, including the Columbia Journalism School’s Mark Lynton History Prize for her 2021 book, Surviving Katyn: Stalin’s Polish Massacre and the Search for Truth, which probes Joseph Stalin’s 1940 execution of 22,000 Polish prisoners of war and its subsequent cover-up.
