Hôtel de Crillon

The place, briefly

The building came first and the hotel much later: Ange-Jacques Gabriel designed the colonnaded palace as one of the two matched façades framing the rue Royale on Louis XV's great square, finished in 1758 and passed to the Crillon family. It opened as a luxury hotel in 1909 and entered history ten years later, when the American delegation to the Paris Peace Conference made it their headquarters — for a season in 1919, the Crillon was effectively America's address in Europe.

That is precisely the register the novel uses it in. The Crillon is the Right Bank of money and appointments, as far from the saucer-stacked terraces of Montparnasse as Paris allows. Jake Barnes turns up at five o'clock, kills time writing letters — reasoning that Crillon stationery can only help them — and goes down to the bar for a Jack Rose mixed by George, the barman fashionable memoirs of the decade mention by first name, as if everyone knew him. Then a taxi back across the Seine, barges riding high on the current, to the Select and the other life.

The Crillon has spent a century being exactly what the novel needed it to be: the fixed point of Right Bank grandeur. It closed in 2013 for a four-year restoration and reopened in 2017 under Rosewood; the Gabriel façade is protected, the bar still pours, and the stationery is presumably still worth borrowing.