This is what the building looks like today in Google Street View. He and Kay also depicted the real owners – Monsieur and Madame Dupuis – much as they were. 35: a venerable publishing house, also vanished, but a going concern at the time. He also shows the “Librairie Académique Perrin – Éditeur” next door at No. Hilary Knight drew it from life, with its central balcony opening towards the Seine (he did take some liberties with the location of the main door). Again, Kay Thompson had wangled a free stay in return for depicting the 25-room, elevator-less hotel in the book. The hotel is no longer there, but in the 1950s it was considered quite a chic place to stay. Koki drives a Renault Dauphine (possibly another bit of product placement).Įloise stays at the Relais Bisson at No. In Paris, Eloise’s party is met at the airport by the charming Koki, a chauffeur employed by Eloise’s permanently absent – but clearly wealthy – mother.

But it was the outcome of a promotional deal with Sabena – Kay Thompson and Hilary Knight received free transatlantic tickets in return for a plug for the airline, well before the expresssion “product placement” had been coined.* If this sounds like an unusual way to get to Paris, it is. They land in Brussels and take a helicopter to Paris. The other passengers are fashionably dressed. Eloise and her Nanny sleep in berths (like the ones I have used on overnight trains in Europe). Now I have been to Paris with the irrepressible Eloise (not to mention her companions, the long-suffering Nanny, Weenie the pug dog, and Skipperdee her pet turtle), and what a whirlwind it was.įrom the moment they get on to the airplane (“Sabena is the only airline that will allow you to travel with a turtle”), I was transported back to 1957, when air travel was still a luxury. But recently, at another secondhand bookstall (a more upscale one, at the Antiquarian Booksellers Fair at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario), I found Eloise: The Ultimate Edition, with all four original books and background about the writer and illustrator. So I didn’t read the first in the series, Eloise, let alone Eloise in Paris, when I was young. A year or so later, probably in the same place, I bought Eloise at Christmastime, and discovered her natural habitat – the Plaza Hotel in New York.īy then I felt I was getting too old for picture books, particularly ones featuring rambunctious six-year-olds – I did not know then that the books were also intended for grown-ups.

It was Kay Thompson’s Eloise in Moscow, and I was captivated by Hilary Knight’s illustrations, including a fold-out view of a wintry Kremlin.

I bought my first Eloise book from a secondhand bookstall at school when I was 9 or 10.

The ultimate eloise kay thompson