Hotel Bristol often crops up in fiction. In Roald Dahl’s short story ‘Skin’ a man with a valuable painting tattooed on his back is offered free board and lodging for life by the owner of the Hotel Bristol in Cannes. The pay-off in the story is that there is no hotel Bristol in Cannes.
Ah, but there was once. The archduke and archduchess Ranier of Austria stayed there in March 1911, and Arnold Bennett writes of lunching there in the 1920s with Sholto Johnstone Douglas — not the Sholto Douglas, son of infamous Norman. I have just come across this undated illustration of L‘Hôtel Bristol in Cannes, attributed to A. Advier.
