La Demeure Montaigne

Rue Clément-Marot was opened in 1881 and named in 1883 after the French poet Clément Marot (1496–1544).^[1]

By 1890, number 18 was a boarding house, the Pension de Famille Française, run by Madame Le Chauff. Its advertisement that year offered room and board from 50 francs a week, with a French teacher attached to the house. The 1913 Baedeker guide to Paris listed Madame Condat's boarding house at the same address, with 30 rooms.^[2][3]

The Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók, then 24, lodged at a pension at 18 rue Clément-Marot in 1905 and headed his letters from 15 August to 10 September with this address. He had come to Paris for the Rubinstein Competition, where the German pianist Wilhelm Backhaus won the piano prize and Bartók came second. His biographer Halsey Stevens wrote that at the pension Bartók met people from many other countries.^[4][5][6]

In 1940 the Spanish novelist Pío Baroja moved into the Pension des Champs-Élysées on rue Clément-Marot, which a 1932 listing placed at number 18.^[7][8][9]

During the German occupation of Paris, the Société générale immobilière, a property company that owned number 18 and six other buildings on the street, was bought for 139 million francs by Mendel Szkolnikoff, whom the historian Pierre Abramovici describes as a financial agent for the Germans, notably the SS, from 1941. Abramovici's 2014 biography says all of Szkolnikoff's property was placed under sequestration after the Liberation of Paris in 1944. In March 1948, numbers 16, 18 and 20 were put up for auction at the Paris law courts under a notice headed "Séquestre de profits illicites" (sequestration of illicit profits).^[10][11]

The Hôtel Franklin Roosevelt was operating at number 18 by 1950, and a 1964 guidebook gave it 44 rooms. From 2014 the City of Paris approved plans to extend the hotel into number 16 next door, a building of shops, offices and apartments. The works joined numbers 16 and 18 on every floor and added a second basement level and a swimming pool. The owners, the Thomas family, set the opening of the enlarged hotel, renamed La Demeure Montaigne, for November 2021. The national tourism agency Atout France classified it five stars in February 2022.^{[12][13][14][15][16]}