Snow yesterday, freezing today. Dreaming of Èze.
Tags: Èze France Frence Riviera
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Tags: Paris Jardin du Luxembourg Pantheon
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This fell out of an old Baedeker for Paris. I stayed there just over fifty years ago.
"The Lutetia was built in 1910 in the Art Nouveau style to designs by architects Louis-Charles Boileau and Henri Tauzin. It was founded by the Bon Marché department store, which sits opposite it facing Square Boucicaut. The Lutetia is located at the intersection of Boulevard Raspail and rue de Sèvres, adjacent to the Sèvres-Babylone Métro station. The hotel is named for an early pre-Roman town that existed where Paris is now located.
Famous guests over the years have included Pablo Picasso, Charles de Gaulle, Marianne Oswald, André Gide, Peggy Guggenheim and Josephine Baker (and me). James Joyce wrote part of Ulysses at the hotel. Dawn Powell lived at the Lutetia for three months in the fall of 1950, during her only visit to Europe."
"The hotel itself was requisitioned by the Abwehr (counter-espionage), and used to house, feed, and entertain the officers in command of the occupation, such as Alfred Toepfer and the French collaborator Rudy de Mérode."
"As Paris returned to normality, the Lutetia was restored to its previous state as a luxury hotel. It was acquired by the Taittinger family in 1955. In the late 1980s, designer Sonia Rykiel opened a boutique in the building, and supervised a major redesign intended to recreate the Art Deco style of earlier decades."
Tags: Paris Hotel Lutetia ephemera
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