Allegations of fraud, rumors of elder abuse, a contested last will and testament: the Hotel Negresco, Nice’s crown jewel, is shrouded in controversy. The question on everyone’s mind: Did its late owner, Jeanne Augier, leave her $500 million fortune to an alleged scammer?
Where French cities are concerned, Nice has always been the redheaded stepchild. Originally part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, it joined France in 1860, and it has never dropped its Italian side: the accent, the jewelry, the perma-tan, all the way down to the boyfriend who’s probably in the Mob.
Jacques Médecin, a onetime mayor of the city, fled to Uruguay in 1990 to avoid corruption charges. In 2000, the French government investigated a criminal band of the French Masons, who was suspected of infiltrating the highest ranks of Nice’s establishment. And long before that, even our man in Havana, Graham Greene, wrote about it: in J’accuse: The Dark Side of Nice, he denounced the collusion of Nice’s police, politicians, and Mafia.
So, few were surprised that the Negresco, the city’s five-star palace hotel located on the Promenade des Anglais overlooking the Baie des Anges, has been embroiled in controversy since its longtime owner, Jeanne Augier, died.
This fall, the Cour de Cassation, France’s highest court, will decide whether former Negresco employee Pierre Couette committed abus de faiblesse (abuse of weakness), that legal grab-bag term levied in fraud cases against someone who has exploited the elderly or disabled in hopes of financial gain.
Although Couette has been acquitted twice, in 2022 and 2023, prosecutors want one more bite at the apple. They claim that Couette profited from Augier’s clouded mind to obtain an inflated salary and stock options in the Negresco and positions on crucial boards. All the while, Augier was isolated from friends and family, not leaving her apartment on the sixth floor of the hotel.
The Negresco case has called to mind the Bettencourt Affair, when Liliane Bettencourt, the heiress to the L’Oréal fortune, gave a fair amount of her $100 billion fortune to a friend, François-Marie Banier, who was ultimately convicted of abus de faiblesse.
It’s also reminiscent of the case, reported previously in Air Mail, of Nicole Tapié de Celeyran, the late great-grandniece of painter Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec. At the age of 91, she bequeathed the family château to a couple who claimed to be acting on her behalf.
Augier’s family claim that Couette drew up a will and implemented a succession plan that would see the hotel and all of Augier’s assets flow into an endowment fund he’d eventually control. Employees who worked for both the hotel and Augier say that she was visited at odd hours by unknowns wanting her to sign papers. There are rumblings up the political food chain that the ultimate endgame is to keep the Negresco owned by the French, now that it’s the last palace hotel standing that hasn’t sold to an international chain or a sovereign-wealth fund.
“The whole thing is something out of an Agatha Christie novel,” says Pierre Bord, the former director of the Negresco.
Ritz on the Riviera
The Negresco owes its name to its founder, Henri Negresco, a Romanian who worked his way up from violinist to maître d’hôtel at places along the Côte d’Azur, like the Helder in Monaco and the Casino Municipal in Nice. There, he befriended wealthy American families, such as the Singers and the Rockefellers, as well as the Aga Khan, who championed Negresco’s vision of building a palace on the Riviera that would rival the Paris Ritz.
Negresco insisted that the early 20th century was a boom time for palace hotels, with Venice’s Excelsior opening in 1908, Cannes’s Carlton opening in 1913, and the Hotel Barrière Le Normandy Deauville opening in 1912. Nice needed one, too.
He hired architect Edouard-Jean Niermans, the mastermind of Paris’s Moulin Rouge, to construct a 128-room palace in the style of the Belle Epoque. At the time, its design was described as “a white patisserie topped by a voluptuous woman’s breast,” which was represented by its striking pink cupola.
Negresco spared no expense, installing ultraviolet technology to sterilize the water, a network of pipes to deliver telegrams directly to rooms, and a lounge with a stained-glass ceiling designed by Gustave Eiffel. It’s still anchored by a 16,000-piece crystal chandelier that had originally been ordered by Tsar Nicolas II in 1917, but never delivered because, well, the revolution and all.
The Negresco opened in 1913, but it wasn’t long before France was engulfed in World War I, and it was converted into a military hospital. Crushed by debt, Negresco died of liver cancer in 1920, and afterward the hotel fell into ruin. In 1957 it was bought at “an attractive price,” as she once said—by Augier’s parents, Jean-Baptiste and Geneviève Mesnage.
Originally from Brittany, the Mesnages owned a portfolio of low-rent hôtels de passe that couples used for a few hours, and nobody asked questions. Legend has it that Augier convinced her parents to buy the Negresco because it had an elevator that could accommodate her mother, who was handicapped.
In the late 50s, Jeanne Mesnage married Paul Augier, a lawyer and war hero. They never had children, and, eventually, they took over the hotel. While he ran the business, she immersed herself in art collecting and hosting.
Soon, the Negresco reflected her taste and sensibility, becoming a five-star version of New York’s quirky, artistic Chelsea Hotel. Ernest Hemingway, the Shah of Iran, and Grace Kelly were frequent guests. Salvador Dalí strolled through the lobby with his pet cheetah. Michael Jackson installed a dance floor next to his suite. Paul McCartney wrote “Fool on the Hill” on Negresco letterhead, and Elton John shot the video for “I’m Still Standing” inside the cupola.
Augier’s art collection grew to include paintings by Fernand Léger, illustrations by Dali, and one of three original portraits of Louis XIV, Louis XV, and Louis XVI, by Hyacinthe Rigaud. (The others are hung at the Louvre and Versailles.)
The Son She Never Had
Following Paul Augier’s death, in 1995, Jeanne Augier, then 71, eventually moved into a 2,000-square-foot apartment on the Negresco’s top floor. Her duties became ceremonial: greeting guests, fiddling with the décor, and roaming the hotel with her two dogs, a Shar-Pei and Yorkshire terrier named, respectively, Lili and Lilou. But even then, employees noticed that things were starting to slip.
“Not only did Madame Augier not know the difference between a French franc and a euro, but she considered francs in terms of old French francs, which meant she had a parity gap of 656,” said René Pradier, who worked at the Negresco from 2005 to 2016.
In 2005, Couette, then a young student from the prestigious École du Louvre, visited the Negresco as part of the research for his master’s thesis. Couette shared Augier’s passion for the arts, and Augier admired Couette’s erudite manners and Dorian Gray looks. “I was the son she never had,” Couette told Le Point in 2016.
To the surprise of many, Couette soon moved in, living rent-free in the hotel and collecting a salary as a “cultural adviser and administrative executive.” André Ramos, the hotel’s financial director, said that he never understood the arrangement. “He was always in the hotel, but he didn’t answer to hotel management,” said Ramos, according to a transcript from Couette’s 2022 trial, in Nice. “We didn’t know what he was doing.”
Augier became increasingly isolated, and since she had no close family members, the staff and guests began to wonder about the Negresco’s future. “The hotel is my house, and the personnel are my children,” she once told friends. By 2009, Couette had drawn up a will that would direct Augier’s assets into a fonds de dotation, a privately controlled endowment fund. Its management board would be comprised of Augier, Couette, Michel Palmer (the director of the hotel at the time), Gil Florini, Augier’s longtime confessor and priest, and a friend, the artist Isabelle Planté.
Under the new plan, other assets would flow into the fund as well, including Saint Vallier, the family villa near Grasse, two apartments on Avenue George V in Paris, real-estate companies and parking lots in the center of Nice, and the contents of bank accounts in Luxembourg and Switzerland.
With this form of estate planning, Augier told Libération, she hoped to stave off an eventual sale and the “dismantling of one of the last independent palaces on the Côte d’Azur.” Calling herself a “patriot,” Augier boasted of turning down countless offers, including one from Bill Gates. She recalls telling him, cheekily, “You’re not rich enough.”
“I want this hotel to keep its spirit and stay French,” Augier said. “Here, everything is authentic and that’s not cheap.”
“Crabs in a Barrel”
On paper, the endowment fund would also allow Augier’s estate to avoid paying the French inheritance tax—60 percent of the hotel’s valuation at the time, which was likely around $250 million. She would also retain her control of the hotel during her lifetime.
But in reality, it created chaos. The fund’s goals were murky. The same could be said of the motivations of certain board members.
“I joined the foundation out of affection for Jeanne, but I started to make enemies quickly,” Father Florini told French Vanity Fair. “A priest that says nothing is what people like. A priest that speaks up and gives his opinion, a lot less.”
Florini isn’t a typical man of the cloth. He once bred horses and is the founder of Pastis de Nice, a renowned aperitif. He even managed to desacralize—and run a restaurant out of—the basement of his former church.
Florini has claimed Couette had Augier signing letters she hadn’t looked at and that there were “aberrations” with the accounting. French Vanity Fair reported Couette had once pushed Augier around in a wheelchair announcing, “Madame wants to give me some stock in the hotel!”
Another member who found this all very curious was Planté, an artist whom Augier had befriended after commissioning some of her paintings. Planté said the board would meet every trimester starting in 2010 to identify various causes Augier wanted to back. “But there wasn’t much in the foundation’s account,” she says. “Normally, the foundation would donate money if there were any profits from the hotel, but we were rarely in the black. There was constant renovation, which I guess explained why. I didn’t ask questions. I wasn’t there for that. But I did wonder why make all this effort to make a foundation and then not fund it.”
Planté quickly sided with Florini. “At one point, he and I looked at each other and said, ‘Well, I guess it falls on us to look after Jeanne.’ When there’s a lot of money, not always the most honest people are circulating around.”
In 2012, Augier, then 88, was diagnosed with dementia, and Florini and Planté made a formal request to authorities to put her under tutelle (a court-ordered administrator), which they hoped would help protect her financial interests. It proved to be just in time. L’Express revealed that around the diagnosis, there had been an attempt to transform Augier’s position into a more “honorific” role, whereby she’d lose control of the hotel. “Crabs in a barrel,” according to L’Express.
Meanwhile, Augier’s cousin, Madeleine Marie, had grown suspicious when their weekly teatimes abruptly ended. Marie’s brother, George, wrote a registered letter to Augier warning her that “those she was surrounded by may not have her best interests at heart.” He never received a response.
“When you have a lot of money, all of a sudden, you also have a lot of friends,” Frédéric de Baets, Augier’s attorney, told Nice Matin in 2013.
With the tutelle in place, the Negresco management started answering to Nathalie Thomas, a judicial administrator who immediately began uncovering abnormalities.
“Of course, we did not have the means of the police, but as judicial administrator of Negresco I had the feeling that certain things deserved to be brought to the attention of the public prosecutor,” Thomas told Nice Matin in 2016.
At the time, Jean-Michel Prêtre, Nice’s district attorney, agreed. “We’re in the presence of a person, who at a certain age, finds herself in a situation of weakness because of her diminished faculties,” Prêtre also told Nice Matin. “And a certain number of close friends and acquaintances may have profited from the situation.”
In 2016, Couette was indicted. By then, he’d already been fired by Thomas for faute lourde—ineptitude and gross misconduct.
Couette fought back, insisting that his contracts were based on terms agreed to by hotel management. He claimed that his role was to ensure continuity as part of a long-term vision of the art collection he and Augier shared. “It was a way to plan after her departure, meaning her death,” Couette testified.
He also sued Florini and Planté for defamation, and won the case, claiming the endowment fund had always been a charitable structure under the control of the prefecture [an administrator for the Ministry of the Interior] and that Couette was only there in a “charitable manner.”
“It is true that Madame had for me an affection she said was like a son she never had,” Couette said in an op-ed piece in Le Point in 2016, “But never did I pretend to be the son, neither in her will nor as her eventual successor.”
Twists and Turns
Suddenly, in 2017, Prêtre, Nice’s district attorney, announced he was ending the oversight. “The vocation of justice is not to run a business,” he told Le Parisien in 2018. “They can only decide things like a good father can, not to establish an industrial strategy for the Negresco.”
The hotel management called Prêtre’s decision “incomprehensible.” According to the Journal du Dimanche in 2019, the board had just signed off on a five-million-euro renovation, and the property was earning a profit—reportedly for the first time in its history—under the care of Thomas and Bord, who had arrived in 2011. Bord refers to that period as “a very tense time.”
“Madame Augier had been told by her entourage not to listen to me, that I was irresponsible,” he recalls. “Then we got the oversight and in comes Thomas and soon we were back on track and getting better. Before the oversight, there were takeover bids swirling which also came with hints that I’d somehow be reimbursed for my efforts. Stuff like that. Not at all acceptable and professional.”
Then in 2019, news broke that Prêtre, the district attorney, was being investigated by the French national anti-corruption police (O.C.L.C.I.F.F.). Armed with search warrants, they combed through his home and office to discover if he was planning to profit from a potential Negresco sale by giving a privileged buyer an inside track. According to Nice Matin, he was not indicted, and the matter has not yet gone to trial.
Just a few weeks ago, in July, Nice Matin reported that Fabien Paul, the ex-president of Nice’s business court, was being investigated for “active corruption of a magistrate, passive corruption, influence peddling of a magistrate and criminal association in the so-called Negresco affair.” Jean-Marcel Giuliani, his successor, was also being brought in for questioning.
Board members suing board members, judges allegedly trying to pressure hotel directors, prosecutors and judges being investigated themselves: all of it felt fairly on-brand for Nice.
The real drama started once Augier died.
Family Time!
“The non-respect of the wishes of the dead brings bad luck to the living,” warned Florini during his eulogy at Augier’s funeral in 2019. “I urge you to respect the wishes of Jeanne, because they are not only legal and attested to, but they benefit others and are charitable in a world that often lies and cheats.”
What were Augier’s true wishes though, considering she may not have been all there when she made them?
Jean-Philippe Hugot, a lawyer hired by the family of Augier’s cousin Madeline Marie, has demanded police investigate Augier’s will to see how it was written and discern what her mental capacities were like at the time of signing.
Hugo Levy, another attorney for another branch of the family, claims to have a medical certificate from Dr. Merzak Chalabi, who treated Augier in October 2012. The certificate states Augier was suffering from “a significant global alteration of cognitive functions as it relates to an evolving state of dementia.”
“You’re telling me Madame Augier had all her faculties two years before a doctor diagnosed her as non compos mentis?” says Hugot. “I don’t think so.”
Augier’s doctor, Adina Richard, maintains that Augier, after turning 80, was seen monthly by other doctors as well in regards to her mental acuity and that Augier hadn’t shown signs of a mental deficit long before the court oversight. “That’s why it was planned ahead that she would diminish her activities progressively and that a court oversight would be put into place,” she says.
If the will proves to be bogus, Hugot says, his clients—the descendants of Madeline Marie, who died in 2022—according to French law, are the legal heirs.
“All the dominoes fall then, and the family inherits the Negresco—that’s why [Nice’s district attorney’s office] don’t want to examine this part of the subject,” says Hugot. “They prefer to charge Couette on the tiny things—the exit packages, the inflated salaries, the open restaurant tabs—which are just a smoke screen to avoid facing the real issue, the succession.”
Hugot says the case brings up a larger issue for French officials, the threat of losing the Negresco entirely. “Because if the family inherits, there will be a sale, because of the 60 percent inheritance tax to pay,” he says. “Those prosecuting this case are saying, ‘We prefer to have a crook running the hotel rather than an international chain or foreign sovereign wealth fund.’”
Béatrice Dunogué-Gaffié, who has overseen Augier’s foundation since 2014 and is a plaintiff in the case against Couette, disagrees with Hugot on one important point: the will.
“Unfortunately for the family, the will is legitimate, and Augier was lucid in 2009 when it was written,” says Dunogué-Gaffié. “It was dictated authentically to a real notary.”
Dunogué-Gaffié says she attended the reading of the will following Augier’s death, in 2019, and that it coherently reflected her wishes: “Her final wishes were never to sell.”
“Jeanne Augier had no affinity for her family,” she says. “That’s the hard truth. I went through her archives on the sixth floor and read the letters they wrote to her. She didn’t respond because she didn’t want to. She wasn’t kept in the dark. Deep down she didn’t trust her family in keeping the hotel running, because they would have sold it simply to pay the inheritance tax. And that was her biggest concern, keeping the Negresco as it is. For that reason, she chose to surround herself by people that shared her love of the hotel and who knew how to run it.”
“You have to watch out for the descendants of the family who arrive the last minute,” Francis Teitgen, one of the administrative board’s lawyers told Le Point in 2016.
Au contraire, says Olivia Marie, Madeline Marie’s granddaughter.
“We’re anything but ‘last minute” she says. “My family worked at the Negresco for years, and my grandmother grew up in the same house as Jeanne. She moved to Nice to be close to Jeanne, and they saw each other every week until Jeanne stopped leaving the cupola.”
Laurent and Alain Marie, Olivia’s cousins, worked at the Negresco for 30 and 15 years, respectively, but never once said they were family. “Jeanne specifically asked us not to,” said Alain Marie. “She didn’t want us to be seen as getting favors.”
That all changed one day, when Alain Marie found Augier up in the cupola in distress.
“She called me out of the blue and asked me to come up to her apartment,” he recalls. “She hadn’t been doing well since they’d taken her dogs from her. And when I saw her, she was besides herself, haggard and breathless. ‘Alain!’ she was crying, ‘They want to kick me out of the hotel!’”
Alain insists that he filed a report with Nice’s police, but he never heard back. To this day, he wonders why the investigative team never followed up. “If you are building a case against someone who’s committed abus de faiblesse,” he wonders, “wouldn’t you want other witnesses?”
Marie claims the person most surprised by his presence was Couette. “He was shocked,” she says. “He didn’t know Jeanne had family, and that some were in the hotel! He was initially nice, but then I watched as they limited my hours. Then my seasonal contract wasn’t renewed. Soon, I was gone.”
“Strange Things Happen in Nice”
Another employee who found herself on the outs was Raby Ba, who worked as a private governess for Augier from 2009 until her death. Until 2012, when her second child was born, Ba lived with Augier in the cupola and states that when she arrived, her patronne was lucid. “In 2009, she was très bien in her head,” she says. “It was in 2012, 2013 that she started to go downhill.” (The court oversight started in March 2013.)
Ba recalls noticing several strange things after she returned from maternity leave in 2012. “Jeanne was having visitors late around eight P.M., when she was tired and wanted to go to bed,” she says. “And the people would arrive and head directly into her room for her to sign documents, sometimes, and they’d cut the baby [monitor], so you couldn’t hear what was going on.” Sometimes, Ba attests, there were two or three people. On other occasions, there were groups including lawyers, notaries, and hotel personnel.
“She treated all the workers with kindness—the plumbers, the bellhops, the electricians. Anyone who worked with their hands she liked,” Pradier says. “I even heard about a horror story of her sending an executive to the toilet to clean it with a toothbrush.”
One former employee recalls a colleague lamenting, “Poor Madame Augier. I was upstairs and passed by a room and Madame Augier was in her wheelchair just facing the wall. Someone had just parked her there and left her.”
Ba, whose uncle, Zacharia Ba, served as Augier’s butler for 42 years, until 2009, claims Augier left her uncle an apartment near the Negresco as a gift for a lifetime of service. She says this donation was handwritten and dictated by Augier in front of her in 2011, but it is not represented in the current will, nor is another apartment Augier donated to her as well. “I called the notary and said Madame Augier had given me a studio and he said I wasn’t an heir and au revoir,” she says.
Ba doesn’t believe Augier would cut her own family out of the will. “She was made to feel paranoid,” she says. “It’s sad, because her cousin Madeline never asked Jeanne for anything, and they never talked about business nor the hotel. I was with them often during their teas. That’s why I don’t understand why Jeanne would suddenly suspect Madeleine unless she’d been told something differently. Jeanne was very influenceable. But once she thought you were taking advantage of her, she’d turn on you.”
“When they say Jeanne never had family, that’s not true,” says Laurent Marie, Augier’s godson and the cousin of Olivia and Alain who worked at the Negresco for 30 years. (He offered to show me a genealogical report, which took two years to verify, that proves their relation.) “Everyone from our various families chipped in to give Jeanne’s father seed money to buy up tiny hotels and start his real-estate business, which eventually led to the Negresco. You could say we were ground-floor investors. Now, they say we don’t exist.”
“I was in the audience at one of the trials,” said Alain Marie, “and I watched Couette’s lawyers tell the court, ‘Madame Augier has no family, but there are people who have arrived last minute to steal her money. They are vultures.’ I wanted to stand up and scream.”
Ba says she is haunted by her uncle’s death in 2009, which she always found suspicious. “He was working in the Negresco that morning,” she recalls. “And all of sudden, he doubles over with severe stomach pain. By the evening, he’s in the hospital in Monaco.”
Ba claims her uncle was very agitated in the hospital about a letter he had written. “He called a friend of our family, saying there was a letter next to his bed at the Negresco in the cupola that needed to be passed on to the family. But when the friend called the hotel to retrieve the letter, the hotel said they couldn’t find anything.... I found that bizarre because not many people had access to his room, and the room itself is only 100 square feet. Nobody knows where [the letter] is or what was inside, but it was important enough for my uncle to call his friend from his deathbed saying it was urgent the family get the letter. Now I guess we’ll never know.”
Laurent Marie says that lawyers in Nice refused to take his case out of fear of reprisals. He’s witnessed investigations fade away inexplicably, not to mention strange sounds emanating from his cell phone, which he suspects is bugged.
The Nice municipal police have declined to comment.
The Heir Returns
Ba no longer works at the hotel. Neither does Pradier nor Alain and Laurent Marie. Neither attorney—Hugot or Levy—says he has been contacted by the prosecution about providing witness statements. The Negresco Hotel has declined to comment. The office of Christian Estrosi, Nice’s mayor, has yet to comment to Air Mail.
The response of Sophie Chas, who is Couette’s attorney: “The procedure to contest the acquittal from which Mr. Couette benefited is still in progress. As long as this is the case, Mr. Couette is not able to answer your questions.”
In 2021, Florini, in a separate case, was found guilty of abus de faiblesse having diverted 57 pieces of gold, a gift bequeathed by a parishioner, to Saint-Pierre-d’Arène. He was given a suspended sentence of seven months in prison and a fine. Since then, he’s been transferred to another parish in Nice, far from his restaurant and far from the Negresco. When contacted by Air Mail, he declined to comment.
Jean-Michel Prêtre, Nice’s former district attorney, was transferred to Lyon, where he serves as general counsel. Pierre Bord and Nathalie Thomas have since left the hotel.
“There were a lot of profiteers and parasites circling when Madame Augier was still alive, each of them wanting a piece,” said Dunogué-Gaffié. “But unfortunately for them, the Negresco isn’t an oil well.”
But maybe it is? Currently three other people, aside from Couette, also own stock in S.A. Negresco, its holding company: Nicole Spitz, its former director, Danielle Curty, Augier’s ex-secretary, and Michael Palmer, another former director. Dunogué-Gaffié confirms that Augier issued stock to all of them, as thanks, in part, for their service. According to Dunogué-Gaffié, Spitz, who started her career as a housekeeper at the Negresco, is currently its president.
“Perhaps he [Couette] felt entitled to the same options the others received. I don’t know. I can’t speculate on that,” says Dunogué-Gaffié.
Although the Negresco’s Web site states that the hotel is currently owned by the endowment fund, Dunogué-Gaffié claims it has no real power today. But she does admit that if Couette is acquitted, he could return to the board for life, given that he is a former member and one of the fund’s founders. That’s why she’s pushing to convert the fund into a public foundation as quickly as possible, which she claims was Augier’s wish all along. In that outcome, Couette’s power would be diluted by a simple increase in the number of seats on the board.
Hugot takes a different view. “I predict if Couette is found innocent, he’s going to come back and take over the foundation he set up, because according to the bylaws of the foundation, he’s a member for life,” he says. “And since the foundation is considered the universal legatee and owner, it’s he who will inherit the Negresco and its 500-million-euro value.”
“In a way [the board] was a pack of wolves who at the beginning had convergent, then divergent goals,” Hugot continues. “What is sure is that nobody was really looking after Jeanne Augier. Everyone thought they were smarter than Couette, but he was the one who outmaneuvered everyone. And he’s a lot younger than them, so he can outlive them, and then it’s his. The whole thing. He will move into the cupola where Jeanne once was.”
A Haunted Legacy
There is a sort of Saltburn quality to the Negresco story—if it’s all true. Young interloper manages to infiltrate a heralded house, cleverly dispatching his enemies while isolating the widow, so he can eventually inherit the château left to him in a will. Whether Couette will be running through the Negresco naked as “Murder on the Dancefloor” pipes through the walls is anyone’s guess, but all the swirling scandals contribute to the hotel’s haunted feeling. It almost feels like a fitting conclusion for the hotel whose owner died, tragically and bankrupt, before ever seeing its success.
In 2016, along the promenade, directly in front of the hotel, more than 90 people were mowed down by a truck-driving terrorist during Bastille Day celebrations. The famous choreographer Isadora Duncan died in 1927 when her scarf was caught in the rear wheel of her convertible, right after she had checked out of the Negresco.
And now, although there’s a trophy case of photos featuring Augier posing with Bernadette Chirac and other French luminaries in the lobby, the mystery of what really happened to her on the sixth floor swirls like the French flag perched on top of the cupola.
“On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel.” Nobody could have known, not even F. Scott Fitzgerald, that the opening sentence to his book describing the dark side of Nice would be so prescient.
John von Sothen is a Paris-based writer, a frequent contributor to AIR MAIL, and the author of Monsieur Mediocre
