Given the humble origin of Cesar Ritz,it is hard to imagine that his name not only came to personify opulence in the lodging industry as the"the king of hoteliers and hotelier to kings"but that the term ritzy entered the vocabulary to describe objects of high taste. He was born in 1850 to a poor Swiss family but as a teenager managed to emigrate to Paris,where he obtained a dining room job at a fine restaurant just prior to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.