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Georges Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935) was born the son of a blacksmith at Villeneuve-Loubet, near Nice, where, at 13, he went to work in his uncle’s Restaurant Français. At 19 he became the chef at the Petit Moulin Rouge in Paris. (He was so short that he had to wear built-up shoes to reach the stoves.) During the next eighteen years he was chef to a Russian grand duke, chef de cuisine to the general staff of the French Army of Rhine at Metz (and later at Mainz) during the Franco-Prussian war, and worked at three great Paris hotels, and at the Grand Hotel, Monte Carlo, and the Hotel National in Lucerne, whose manager in 1884 was César Ritz.