Untitled

Stephen L. Harp
Although the newlyweds were more preoccupied with their first evening together rather
than with dinner, they did however notice that the food was abominable. They could not
even finish their dinner before retiring to their room . . . [After encountering a bat] it took
a quarter of an hour and all of the eloquence that M. de la Ribaudière had in order to
calm down Giselle. However the little viscount did not waste any time, and he quickly
addressed his very imminent wife [sa très prochaine femme] the most legitimate
compliments on the beauty of her legs and the finesse of her ankles, when suddenly he
cried out in distress. “Ah! my God, what is the matter?” Giselle asked him. “Nothing, I
. . . [elipses in original], but you my darling, where did you get this bit of red on your
shoulder which was so white a moment ago?” The same exclamation came out of both
of their mouths, “Bed bugs” . . . They killed 10, then 100, then 577; they could not have
fought off the yellow invasion with more ardor. Finally, overtaken by sleep, Giselle
resigned herself to stretching out on her uncomfortable and hard bed. And the viscount
wanted to begin the conversation again. “Oh, no, my dear,” she told him; “we are
both way too ugly [nous sommes bien trop vilains tous les deux!]” . . . When the
sun rose, Giselle was still not yet Madame de la Ribaudière, though she looked like
cream with strawberries [that is, her cream-colored skin had red marks resembling
strawberries]. 27
By playing on the notion of a legal consummation of the marriage, Michelin could
politely make the point that the viscount, however desperately he may have tried,
did not get to have sex with his new wife because he had not ordered a copy of the
red guide, so he did not realize there was a fine hotel nearby. The idea, no more
unfamiliar to an early-twentieth-century reader than to a late-twentieth-century
adolescent one, that men wanted sex and delicate women were more reluctant, was
thus confirmed. Having not fulfilled his role as good provider, the viscount could
not fulfill his role as a man in the act of sex. Thus, the red guide – which began
ostensibly as a list of mechanics and places to buy gas – could assert certain
assumptions about the appropriate behavior of men and women in French society:
men were supposed to take care of the practical details while traveling, by buying
a red guide and handling the chauffeur, and women were to worry about their
appearance.
In 1908, Michelin completely reorganized its presentation of hotels, eliminating
some of the uncertainty of the earlier rating system. Rather than divide the hotels
by the average price of daily room and board as had been done since 1900, the
guide began to place hotels in one of five categories from “the most sumptuous
palace to the good village inn,” thus admitting that the better and cleaner hotels
might cost less. Then, as the Touring Club had done since the late 1890s, Michelin
engaged listed hotels to set a minimum price for each room and each meal, prices
that anyone possessing the Michelin guide would be charged. Thus the tourist
knew in advance how much room and board should cost in a given hotel and could
ask Michelin to intervene should the hotel not honor the published prices. The
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