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.

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Hôtel Ritz Paris

The Hôtel Ritz is a hotel located at 15 Place Vendôme, in the heart of Paris, France. It is one of the most prestigious and luxurious hotels in the world and is one of the seven recognized Parisian palace hotels. Established in 1898, it is the oldest Ritz Hotel in the world.

History

The building was constructed in the early part of the 18th century as a private dwelling. In 1854 it was acquired by the Péreire brothers who made it the head office of their Crédit Mobilier financial institution.

The façade was designed by Jules Hardouin Mansart. Converted to a luxury hotel by Swiss hotelier César Ritz, it opened on June 1, 1898. Together with the culinary talents of minority partner Auguste Escoffier, Ritz made the hotel synonymous with opulence, service, and fine dining, as embodied in the term ritzy.

The Hôtel Ritz consists of the Vendôme and the Cambon buildings with rooms facing Place Vendôme and on the opposite side, rooms overlooking its famous garden. The hotel became a favorite of many of the world's wealthiest people, with luxurious suites named for some of its notable patrons from the past. These include Ernest Hemingway, for whom a bar in the hotel was named, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marcel Proust, King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, Iranian leader Reza Shah, Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Maurice Chevalier, Jean-Paul Sartre, Elton John, plus couturier Coco Chanel who made the Ritz her home for more than thirty years.

The Ritz today

The Hôtel Ritz Paris currently offers 159 rooms, a two-Michelin-starred restaurant, two bars and a casual dining restaurant. The rooms start at €770 a night. Suites start at €1,600 and can go up to €13,650 a night for the most prestigious ones (Suite Impériale). The hotel's restaurant, L'Espadon, was awarded a second star by the 2009 edition of the influential Michelin Red Guide.

It is owned by the businessman Mohamed Al-Fayed. In 2010, many years after the death of his son, he wants to sell the hotel.

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Hôtel de Ville, Paris Reconstruction

Reconstruction

Reconstruction of the hall lasted from 1873 through 1892 and was directed by architects Théodore Ballu and Édouard Deperthes following an architectural contest. Ballu also built the Church of La Trinité in the IXe arrondissement and the belfry of the town hall of the Ier arrondissement, opposite the Louvre's east facade. He also restored the Saint-Jacques Tower, a Gothic church tower in a square 150 metres to the west of the Hôtel de Ville.

The architects rebuilt the interior of the Hôtel de Ville within the stone shell that had survived the fire. While the rebuilt Hôtel de Ville is, from the outside, a copy of the 16th-century French Renaissance building that stood before 1871, the new interior was based on an entirely new design, with ceremonial rooms lavishly decorated in the 1880s style.

The central ceremonial doors under the clock are flanked by allegorical figures of Art, by Laurent Marqueste, and Science, by Jules Blanchard. Some 230 other sculptors were commissioned to produce 338 individual figures of famous Parisians on each facade, along with lions and other sculptural features. The sculptors included prominent academicians like Ernest-Eugène Hiolle and Henri Chapu, but easily the most famous was Auguste Rodin. Rodin produced the figure of the 18th-century mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert, finished in 1882.

The statue on the garden wall on the south side is of Étienne Marcel, the most famous holder of the post of prévôt des marchands (provost of the merchants) which predated the office of mayor. Marcel came to a sticky end, lynched in 1358 by an angry mob after trying to assert the city's powers a little too energetically.

The decor featured murals by the leading painters of the day, including Raphaël Collin, Jean-Paul Laurens, Puvis de Chavannes, Henri Gervex, Aimé Morot and Alfred Roll. Most can still be seen as part of a guided tour of the building.

Political venue

Since the French Revolution, the building has been the scene of a number of historical events, notably the proclamation of the French Third Republic in 1870 and the famous speech by Charles de Gaulle on 25 August 1944 during the Liberation of Paris when he greeted the crowd from a front window.

The Hôtel de Ville was for many years the fief of Jacques Chirac, France's president from 1995 until May 2007, and was the site of a scandal centering on both illegal jobs given to Chirac's party members and an extravagant entertainment budget.

The current mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, a socialist and the city's first openly gay leader, shares some of Marcel's ambition and almost shared his fate. He was stabbed in the building in 2002 during the first all-night, city-wide Sleepless Night (Nuit Blanche) festival when the doors of the long-inaccessible building were thrown open to the public. But Delanoë recovered and has not lost his zeal for access, later converting the mayor's sumptuous private apartments into a crèche

(day nursery) for the children of municipal workers.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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