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Hotel de Lauzun

Hotel de Lauzun (9)

Very close to the Pont Marie metro station, the Hôtel de Lauzun will surprise you. Curiously, this 17th-century building was not built by the Duke of Lauzun but was a commission from Charles Gruyn des Bordes, a prosperous arms trader and son of an innkeeper, to the architect Louis Le Vau, one of the architects of the Court of Louis XIV.

The mansion took its name from the person who it is now known was the next owner after 1682, the Duke of Lauzun, commander of the French army, protégée of Louis XIV and known lover of the Duchess of Montpensier, the king’s cousin. After changing owners several times, it ended up becoming one of the centres of literary and artistic life in Paris. 

The famous artists and art theoretician Charles Le Brun was responsible for its wall coverings as well as the paintings on the ceilings, before moving to Versailles. On looking at the mansion and its rooms it is easy to imagine what bourgeois life was like in 17th-century Paris. Without doubt, an important example of Parisian Baroque.

Among its most illustrious inhabitants, we can state that here lived the poet Théophile Gautier, who made this place the meeting point for the Club des Haschischines or Hashish Consumers Club. Among its leading members were Alexander Dumas and Eugene Delacroix.

Later, in the 19th century, the poet Charles Baudelaire also lived here for a while, on the third floor to be precise. Here he wrote a large part of his most famous work, “The Flowers of Evil”.

Other guests were the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the English artist Walter Sickert and the German composer Richard Wagner.

The property is currently used for official receptions but can be visited if you make a prior booking.

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