Hotel · Quai Saint-Michel · 5e arrondissement

Hôtel de Suède

Name: Hôtel de Suède
Address: 15 Quai Saint-Michel, Paris, 75005, FR

The buildingStanding, much changed

Getting inIn, as a customer

What's there nowHôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame

The hotel closed in 1993 and its interior was gutted for conversion — the building was not demolished. The site operates today as the Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame, at the same address.

The small Left Bank hotel on the quai Saint-Michel, facing Notre-Dame, where Godard shot the long bedroom scene of Breathless in Room 12. The hotel closed in 1993; the site is now the Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame.

Address: 15 Quai Saint-Michel, 75005 Paris
Years: until 1993

Illustration Present-day view of the former Hôtel de Suède building at 15 quai Saint-Michel, now Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame

The Hôtel de Suède name is gone, but its seventeenth-century building survives as Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

The Hôtel de Suède stood at 15 quai Saint-Michel, on the riverfront where the Latin Quarter meets the Seine, with Notre-Dame directly across the water. Jean-Luc Godard is reported to have lived here in the early 1950s, after returning from South America — a young critic's cheap room in the quarter of the ciné-clubs. The claim comes from a single source and is recorded here as such.

In 1959, making his first feature, Godard brought his two stars back to the hotel. Room 12 became Patricia's room in Breathless, and for close to twenty-five minutes of screen time — nearly a quarter of the film — Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg talk, smoke, quarrel, and circle each other inside it. The crew was minimal and the lighting mostly what the windows gave. The cramped real room, chosen over any set, is as clear a statement of the New Wave's method as the jump cuts.

In 1993, the filmmakers Claude Ventura and Xavier Villetard checked into Room 12 during the hotel's final week of operation and made Chambre 12, Hôtel de Suède for Arte — a nine-day investigation that tracked down the film's surviving participants, Belmondo, cinematographer Raoul Coutard, and Claude Chabrol among them, from inside the room itself. The interior was gutted the day after they checked out. The building survived the conversion and reopened as the Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame, which operates at the address today; the room the documentary preserved no longer exists.

Key facts

Address: 15 quai Saint-Michel, 5e — facing Notre-Dame
The film: Breathless (1960) — the bedroom scene, shot in Room 12 in 1959
The resident: Godard, in the early 1950s (single-sourced)
The documentary: Chambre 12, Hôtel de Suède (Ventura & Villetard, 1993)
Closed: 1993 — interior gutted for conversion
The site today: Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame

In images

Black-and-white present-day view of the surviving Hôtel de Suède building at 15 quai Saint-Michel — The surviving building at 15 quai Saint-Michel, now Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame, in black and white.Editorial illustration

Present-day view of the former Hôtel de Suède building at 15 quai Saint-Michel, now Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame — The Hôtel de Suède name is gone, but its seventeenth-century building survives as Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame.Editorial illustration

Present-day guest room at Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame with a pink toile headboard and window toward the Seine — A present-day room in the successor hotel — not the vanished Room 12, whose interior was gutted in 1993.Editorial illustration

The vaulted stone breakfast room inside the present-day Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame — The successor hotel's breakfast room preserves the building's low stone vaults beneath a modern interior.Editorial illustration

Notre-Dame seen across the Seine from an upper window at 15 quai Saint-Michel — The enduring geography of the place: Notre-Dame and the Seine seen from the quai Saint-Michel address.Editorial illustration

Jean Seberg laughing in a bathroom mirror in Room 12 of the Hôtel de Suède, from Breathless — Room 12 as the world knows it: Patricia in the mirror, in the scene Godard shot here in 1959. Film frame, used under fair use.Archival photograph, c. 1959

Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg on the bed in the Hôtel de Suède room, she wearing his fedora — The bedroom scene — nearly a quarter of Breathless, shot in this small room with a crew of almost no one. Production still, used under fair use.Archival photograph, c. 1959

Timeline

early 1950s
Godard reportedly lives at the hotel after returning from South America.
1959
The Breathless bedroom scene is shot in Room 12 — minimal crew, window light.
16 March 1960
Breathless opens in Paris; the small room enters film history.
1993
Ventura and Villetard shoot Chambre 12, Hôtel de Suède in the room during the hotel's last week; the interior is gutted the day after they leave.
1990s–present
The building is converted; Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame reopens in spring 2002.

On the map

Questions before you go

Can you stay in the Breathless hotel room?

No. Room 12 was gutted with the rest of the Hôtel de Suède's interior in 1993, when the hotel closed for conversion. The building at 15 quai Saint-Michel now operates as the Hôtel Les Rives de Notre-Dame — same site and view, different rooms.

Where was the bedroom scene in Breathless filmed?

In Room 12 of the Hôtel de Suède, 15 quai Saint-Michel, in 1959 — a real hotel room, not a set, shot with a minimal crew and mostly natural light.

Where did Michel die in Breathless?

Not near the hotel: the death scene was shot on the rue Campagne-Première in the 14e arrondissement, across the river in Montparnasse.

Film movement · c. 1958–1968

The French New Wave was seen here first

The young Paris critics who became directors after 1959 — Godard, Truffaut, Varda, Resnais — and the fast, cheap, personal filmmaking that changed world cinema.

Enter the movement

Within walking distance

The weathered green and gold Shakespeare and Company storefront today, a reader browsing at the window, the rue de la Bûcherie sign above

Bookshop · Latin Quarter

Shakespeare and Company (Rue de la Bûcherie)

George Whitman's bookshop by the Seine — opened as Le Mistral in 1951, renamed Shakespeare and Company in 1964 with Sylvia Beach's blessing, and still sleeping writers among its shelves.

Visit the place

Apartment · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

4 Rue de Savoie

The attic room where Blaise Cendrars settled in 1912, back from New York — his home, the address of the one-man publishing house that issued La Prose du Transsibérien, and the room he came back to after losing his arm in the war.

Visit the place

The Seine at dusk, lamps glowing along the tree-lined quai and Notre-Dame lit above the water downstream

Landmark · Île de la Cité

Notre-Dame de Paris

The cathedral seen at night from the wooden footbridge off the Quai de Béthune — the still point of the finest walk in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, answered a decade later from the same river in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.

Visit the place

Apartment · Saint-Germain-des-Prés

3 Rue des Grands-Augustins

Robert and Sonia Delaunay's apartment and studio from 1910 to 1935 — where La Prose du Transsibérien took its colors, and whose key Blaise Cendrars held while the couple waited out the First World War abroad.

Visit the place

The Friday Letter

Paris, one address at a time.

The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.