Leur Club

A wealthy French importer named Bernard Fischler and his wife used to travel abroad with their little girl. Occasionally they wanted to take short side trips by themselves, but they could never find a satisfactory place to leave their daughter. "That," says Fischler, "is when I started dreaming of a beautiful hotel just for children."

This month his dream materialized in the village of La Tretoire in the heart of the Brie cheese country 55 miles east of Paris. There, on seven acres of woods and meadows, Bernard Fischler opened a 62-room hotel, called Mon Club, designed exclusively for 220 children from ages three to 16. Adult guests are strictly off limits.

Foursomes. The hotel was aptly described by one visitor as un maxi-palace pour mini-clients. A four-story white building with a chocolate-tiled roof, Mon Club has one regulation and four practice tennis courts, a stable with eight horses, a gym, a soccer field and two heated swimming pools. For indoor fun there are two television rooms, a cinema and even a discotheque. Next year the hotel will have a skating rink, a golf course and a small zoo. Knowing that all play and no work makes Jacques un enfant terrible, Fischler also included a library, a photo lab and four crafts workshops in his blueprints. At an additional cost the hotel also provides lessons in four languages and other tutoring.

For about $15.50 a day--roughly half the cost of a first-rate French resort hotel--a regular paying guest is provided with bed and board and the use of all facilities. On hand are a doctor, a nurse, nine supervisors and 13 athletic instructors, besides the usual desk clerks, waiters and maids. The hotel is divided into three sections, one for toddlers, another for girls, and one for boys. Most rooms accommodate threesomes or foursomes, but singles are also available. Every room has original watercolors, a bathroom with fixtures sized according to age group, and carpeting that is not merely wall-to-wall but three feet up the wall. For safety's sake there are two exits from each room, ramps instead of stairs, and in the smaller-children's area, windows placed too high for adventurous climbing.

Unlike an American summer camp, Mon Club has no reveille or rigid schedule. Guests may rise any time between 7:30 and 9 and go to one of the two dining rooms (one for little children and one for big) to choose their breakfasts and have all the orange juice they can drink. After that there are only two compulsory activities: morning calisthenics and participating in one sport. The latter may include swimming, horseback riding, bicycling, fishing or kayaking in the nearby Petit Morin River, as well as more strenuous games such as soccer and tennis.

Folly. When the children's hotel opened two weeks ago, most of the guests were middle-class French children who came to stay for a day, a weekend or a fortnight while their parents went off for a holiday of their own. But many children came for other reasons as well. Catherine Fontaine, 11, is staying at Mon Club for a while because both her parents work and she is an only child. "Staying home alone is not much fun," she explained. "Certainly not as much fun as riding horses." Remy Al-lemane, 12, and his sister Helene, 11, point out the advantages of a holiday hotel over a summer camp. Said Remy: "In camp, we slept 40 or 50 to a dormitory, and the food was nothing to write home about."

Although there are other lodgings for children in Europe, none is nearly as large or as lavish as "Fischler's folly." He was called a madman by his wife and friends for spending $2,000,000 on Mon Club. Before construction was complete, he got offers for more than that amount. "The offers are reassuring, but I'm not a bit interested," says Fischler. "I am doing this for the love of children."

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