Hôtel Lambert

Hôtel Lambert is a hôtel particulier on Quai Anjou on the eastern tip of the Île Saint-Louis, Paris IVème; the name Hôtel Lambert was a sobriquet that designated a nineteenth-century political faction of Polish exiles, who gathered there.

Architectural history

The Palace at the tip of the Isle Saint-Louis in the heart of Paris, was designed by the architect Louis Le Vau, and built between 1640 and 1644, originally for the financier Jean-Baptiste Lambert (died 1644) and continued by his younger brother Nicolas Lambert, later president of the Chambre des Comptes. For Nicolas Lambert the interiors were decorated by Charles Le Brun, François Perrier and Eustache Le Sueur, producing one of the finest, most innovative and iconographically most coherent examples of mid-seventeenth-century domestic architecture and decorative painting in France. Both painters worked on the internal decoration for almost five years, producing the gallant allegories of Le Brun's grand Galerie d'Hercule (still in situ) and the small Cabinet des Muses, with five canvases by Le Sueur that were purchased for the royal collection and are now in the Louvre, and the earlier ensemble, the Cabinet de l'Amour, which in its original configuration featured an alcove for a canopied bed upon which the lady of the house would receive visitors, according to the custom of the day; significantly the alcove was eliminated about 1703. All ensembles featured themes of love and marriage; the paintings have since been dispersed.

An entrance gives onto the central square courtyard round which the hôtel was built.A wing extends to the right at the rear, embracing a walled garden.At the same time Louis Le Vau constructed a residence for himself right next to the Hôtel Lambert. He lived there between 1642 and 1650. It was the birthplace of all of his children and the death place of his mother. After the architect's death in 1670 his hôtel was bought by the La Haye family, who owned the other palace as well. Both buildings were then joined and their façades combined.

In the 1740s, the Marquise du Châtelet and Voltaire, her lover, used the Hôtel Lambert as their Paris residence when not at her country estate in Cirey. The Marquise was famed for her salon there. Later, the Marquis du Châtelet sold the Lambert to Claude Dupin and his wife Louise-Marie Dupin, who carried on the tradition of the salon. The Dupins were ancestors to the writer George Sand, who because of her relationship with the Polish composer Chopin was also a frequent guest there of the nineteenth century Polish owners of the property.