Hôtel de la Place du Louvre

Rue des Prêtres Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois began as the cloister of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, the church across the street from the hotel, and was earlier called the ruelle du Cloître. The present name refers to the church's priests, who lived on the street. Until 1925 the street continued east to rue de la Monnaie. A decree of 16 June 1925 removed that section to make room for the expansion of the La Samaritaine department store, and left the 70 meters that remain today.^[1][8]

The hotel describes its building as a 17th-century former private house. The Atelier parisien d'urbanisme (APUR), the city's planning agency, dates the building to between 1801 and 1850. Neither source says who built it or when it became a hotel.^[2][3]

The Café Momus, where the young writers and painters of the 1840s known as the bohème met, stood next door at no. 19, not in the hotel's building. Alfred Delvau, writing in 1862, said the café had occupied the ground and first floors of that house for twenty years, facing the presbytery, and had closed about a year earlier. Henry Murger, one of its regulars, made it the meeting place of the four friends in his book Scènes de la vie de bohème: the poet Rodolphe, the painter Marcel, the musician Schaunard and the philosopher Colline. They are fictional characters, nicknamed the four musketeers in the book because they are always seen together. Giacomo Puccini's opera La Bohème (1896), which takes its story from Murger's book, sets its second act outside the Café Momus, moved by the librettists to the Latin Quarter. No. 19 is now a different hotel, the Hôtel Le Relais du Louvre.^{[4][5][6][7][8][12]}

The hotel belongs to Esprit de France, a hotel group founded in 1981 whose first property was the Hôtel des Saints-Pères in Paris. The hotel's own website in 2006 listed it among the group's Paris hotels, with three stars and 20 rooms, and said breakfast was served in the Cave des Mousquetaires, a vaulted cellar it described as once connected to the Louvre. The current website still says the cellar was once connected to the Louvre, but no longer uses the name Cave des Mousquetaires. Atout France, the agency that runs the official French hotel classification, awarded the hotel four stars on 4 July 2022, for 20 rooms and 45 guests.^{[9][10][11][12]}