If you’ve ever strolled around the Île Saint-Louis, you may have noticed a particularly beautiful building with a gilded balcony and drainpipes shaped like fish. Its name is the Hôtel de Lauzun, and in my opinion it’s one of the most beautiful buildings on the island. And if that isn’t enough, if only its walls could talk, they would have some truly fascinating stories to tell.
An Express Route from the Mansion to French Prison
The mansion I’m talking about was built in the 1640s by Charles Gruyn, the son of a wealthy innkeeper. Like any good nouveau riche, Charles decided to fill the house with treasures so that not a single corner would be left bare. Wherever you look you’ll find eagles, seashells, cupids holding medallions, bundles of arrows and more. And if you look up at the ceiling, you won’t be bored there either, thanks to the paintings of Charles Le Brun, one of the greatest French painters of the 17th century, whose work also adorns the Palace of Versailles.
Découvrez l’Hotel de Lauzun lors des Journées… by mairiedeparis
But despite all this splendor, the mansion’s occupants didn’t get to enjoy it for long, and bad luck seemed to cling to the place. Just a few years after the mansion was built, Charles Gruyn was sent to prison for embezzlement, after it turned out that as the food supplier to the royal army, he’d been helping himself to more than his fair share.
The next owner of the mansion was the Duc de Lauzun (Antoine Nompar de Caumont, duc de Lauzun, 1623-1723), the man the mansion is named after. He, too, didn’t get much time to enjoy it: he spent 10 years in the Pignerol prison, after daring to ask for the hand of the Duchesse d’Orléans (Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, 1627-1693), the cousin of Louis XIV. The king of France had his own eye on her fortune, and he had no interest in seeing her married off and bearing children. The duchess met the Duc de Lauzun in 1666 and fell head over heels for him, despite his famously unimpressive height (at the royal court, people called him “the smallest man God ever made”). But in 1670, Louis XIV refused the duchess’s request to marry the man she loved, and rather than accept it quietly, Lauzun said a few choice words to the king that earned him an express ticket to the Bastille, and from there to the fortress of Pignerol, where he shared a cell with Fouquet, the former finance minister of Louis XIV.
The Duchesse d’Orléans did everything she could to get her beloved released, and eventually agreed to give up a large share of her fortune so that the king would set him free. That finally happened in 1681, and the happy couple married at last and moved into their home on the Île Saint-Louis. But the happiness didn’t last long, and the couple soon began to fight bitterly. After about three years they were forced to divorce (the Duc de Lauzun was particularly nasty to the duchess, and would often shout at her, “Granddaughter of Henri IV, bring me my boots right now!”). The duchess moved to the Luxembourg Palace, while Lauzun left for England, where he became close to James II (r. 1685-1688), who was later forced to flee to France, where he lived out his days until his death in 1701.
The mansion later passed to the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, a relative of Cardinal de Richelieu, who had to kidnap her from the convent where she was studying in order to marry her. The couple loved to spend money, and their parties became famous all over Paris. This emptied their pockets fairly quickly, but they weren’t worried, because their relative, the Duc de Richelieu, had no children and was expected to leave them a large inheritance. To their great surprise, though, the duke suddenly managed to produce an heir of his own, and the couple had to flee all the way to London to escape their creditors.
And Don’t You Dare Smoke Hash in There!
The owners who came after them were a far less colorful bunch, so if you’ll allow me, I’ll skip their biographies and jump straight to the year 1842. That year, the mansion was bought by Baron Jérôme-Frédéric Pichon (1812-1896), who rented out rooms in it, including one to the famous French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). The poet’s small apartment was on the second floor, and he furnished it entirely to his own unusual taste. Baudelaire was, as far as we can tell, history’s first truly “total” artist: a man who lived, designed and wore his own art. That’s why his room was filled with objects that were considered quite strange for the time (emerald wine glasses, medieval-style furniture, a Japanese-style table and more). It was in this apartment that Baudelaire began writing his famous book “Les Fleurs du Mal” (“Flowers of Evil”), which would cause a massive scandal within the decade.
We’ve all heard some version of a parent’s classic warning: don’t you dare do drugs! Well, Baudelaire certainly listened to his mother, in a manner of speaking: he didn’t smoke hashish. Instead, he turned it into a kind of greenish jelly… and ate it. That’s how his apartment became home to the “Club des Hashischins,” where quite a few of the era’s leading minds came to visit and try the substance with him. Among the intellectuals who took part in these hashish evenings were the poet Théophile Gautier (1811-1872), the writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) and the painter Édouard Manet (1832-1883), joined by a string of women of varying degrees of ill repute.
One of them was Baudelaire’s lover, Jeanne Duval (1820-1862), who was known as the “Black Venus” because of her Creole roots. Jeanne lived on the “street of the headless woman”, not far at all from the mansion, and it was with her that Baudelaire spent the happiest years of his life. But in September 1844 that chapter came to an end, after Baudelaire’s mother discovered that her son had managed to burn through 44,500 francs of his inheritance in just two years (a very significant sum at the time). She decided to hand over what remained of the inheritance to a notary, who doled it out to him in very small monthly allowances. In response, Baudelaire tried to take his own life by cutting his wrists, and was lucky enough, or unlucky enough, depending on who you ask, to be saved by Jeanne Duval. A few months later, he was forced to move back in with his mother. The glory days of the Île Saint-Louis were over.
Hôtel de Lauzun Today
In 1928, the city of Paris bought the mansion and turned it into a historic monument, open to the public. But since 2013, the building has belonged to an institute for advanced studies, so getting inside, let alone seeing the rooms in their full glory, isn’t easy at all. So how can you still get in? One option is to try to get an invitation to one of the conferences regularly held there. An easier option is to come to Paris in September and visit the mansion during the European Heritage Days (“Journées du Patrimoine”). If you manage that, you’ll get to walk through the rooms, admire the beauty and hear the stories. Just remember: don’t you dare smoke hash in there!
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