HOTELS WITH HISTORY ❘ CULTURE


This page, clockwise from this image: The Hôtel


Lutetia, where James Joyce and Albert Cohen both


worked; l’Hôtel, on rue des Beaux-Arts, where you can


stay in the Oscar Wilde suite; the bar at the Monte Cristo; (inset) peacock wallpaper in the Oscar Wilde suite


of coastline as her glamorous summertime playground, the Hôtel du Palais was already making political history. This was the first location outside the UK ever to see a British prime minister appointed within its walls. King Edward VII had a discreet meeting here with H.H. Asquith for this very reason. It was a meeting so shrouded in secrecy that not a single journalist knew of their whereabouts.


Initially built to be a summer villa for Napoleon III and the empress Eugénie, it was sold in 1880 and converted into a hotel. Despite mockery from the media, then a closure during the First World War for the building to be used as a hospital, the local mayor refused to give up on the building, and later launched a campaign under the hilariously blunt and straightforward slogan: “No Palace, No Millionaires”. When it finally reopened, Coco Chanel and other prestigious guests, such as Frank Sinatra and Jayne Mansfield, passed through its doors and its glorious reputation was restored.


Back in Paris, heroes of the literary world made history too. The Hôtel du Petit Moulin was once a bakery, which Victor Hugo would visit each morning for his daily baguette, and the original 1800s façade spelling out its status as a boulangerie is still intact.


“PARIS IS HOME NOT JUST TO THE FAMOUS, BUT ALSO TO THE INFAMOUS, AND IN 1911 THE HÔTEL DA VINCI WAS INVOLVED IN AN ART HEIST”


Sister hotel the Pavillon de la Reine, a 10-minute walk away, was once home to Hugo too, hence the suite named in his honour.


Elsewhere, the Hôtel Monte Cristo acts as an historical recreation of the world of the well-travelled Alexandre Dumas. Pick up a paperback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo and relive the 1800s, albeit in the comfort of a sumptuously modern bar decorated with Oriental wallpaper complete with mosaic-style peacock prints, before heading to the best peacock- embossed interior of all: the Jacques Garcia- decorated Oscar Wilde suite at L’Hôtel on rue des Beaux-Arts. If you’d like to, you can even sleep in the very room where Wilde died.


Then there is the Hôtel Lutetia, where James Joyce


penned Ulysses and Albert Cohen created Belle du Seigneur. And then there is Le Scribe, the location that hosted the world’s first ever motion picture, courtesy of the Lumière brothers. Yet Paris is home not just to the famous, but also to the infamous. In 1911, the Hôtel Da Vinci was involved in one of the world’s biggest ever art heists. Leonardo’s much-treasured Mona Lisa was seized by career criminal Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian ostensibly looking to reclaim his countryman’s artwork on behalf of the homeland. According to Peruggia, the painting


❯❯ Apr/May 2020 FRANCE TODAY ❘ 95


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