Hôtel de Lauzun

The Hôtel de Lauzun on the quai d'Anjou, Île Saint-Louis, Paris, is the rival of the Hôtel Lambert among the few "hôtels particuliers" that retain their rich carved, painted, mirrored and gilded interiors of the time of Louis XIV.

The "hôtel particulier" was not built by the duc de Lauzun, whose name it bears, but for a rich financier, Charles Gruyn des Bordes, [His name des Bordes derived from a domaine he possessed at Noizières, near Lagny (Fournier 1864).] the son of an inn-keeper grown rich in his trade and richer, according to a pampleteer, ["Les Gruyn, frères et fils du maistre du cabaret de la Pomme de Pin, à force de pillages, qu'ils ont faits dans la subsistance, lors de l'établissement d'icelle, ont acquis de grands biens et possèdent des charges de finances très considérables." quoted by Fournier 1864).] through speculations enabled by his office of general commissioner of cavalry during the civil disorders of the Fronde.

M. Gruyn des Bordes had purchased the lot in 1641, but by the time he was prepared to build, he had new neighbors in the Île Saint-Louis to emulate, in the Hôtel Lambert de Thorigny. His new wife hastened the completion of the house, completed in 1657 to designs by Louis Le Vau; Gruyn's initial G is interlaced with her M for Geneviève de Mony on chimneybreasts and throughout the decor. Gruyn, however, had Nicolas Fouquet as a patron, and shared in Fouquet's disastrous fall, with an inquest into his financial dealings, which found him guilty of fraud; he was clapped into prison, and there he died. His widow, having kept her financial affairs separate from his, survived his ruin, and left the hôtel to her son who sold it to Lauzun— who had fallen from Louis XIV's favour and had spent a decade in prison— as soon as his lover, La Grande Mademoiselle, who had wed him in a clandestine marriage, had ransomed him from the King. Lauzun enriched many of the interiors. The Hôtel de Lauzun passed to the great-niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who eloped to London from the convent of Chaillot with the marquis de Richelieu, and married him there. Inm 1709 he sold the house to M. Pierre-François Ogier, "receveur du clergé" who further enriched its interiors,

In the eighteenth century, as fashionable new districts drew aristocrats to the west of Paris, the Île Saint-Louis, in the heart of medieval Paris, became a backwater, then declassé. The Hôtel de Lauzun, which retained its aristocratic owners, the marquis de Pimodan, until the Revolution, then saw, like many of its once-grand neighbors, its upstairs apartments and attics divided into apartments and rented by successful artisans. In the nineteenth century, when the house belonged to the bibliophile and collector baron Jérôme Pichon, auditeur au Conseil d’Etat, upstairs flats were rented in the 1840s to Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier, who formed their Club de Haschichins where they experimented with hashish. While here Baudelaire wrote the first poems of "Les Fleurs du Mal".

The Hôtel de Lauzun, though presently owned by the City of Paris, has been restored and is open to the public for guided visits only on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Notes

External links

* [http://ssa.paris.online.fr/pages/4thLauzun.htm Hôtel de Lauzun] ]
* [http://www.paris-pittoresque.com/monuments/43.htm Édouard Fournier, "Chroniques et légendes des rues de Paris", 1864]