Maison Colbert

The hotel takes its name from rue de l'Hôtel-Colbert. The City of Paris street register says the street was opened in 1202 and took its present name by a ministerial order of 28 December 1829. The register explains the name by a mansion that Colbert owned at no. 20, and Meliá's 2013 description of the hotel names him as Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister to Louis XIV.^[1][3]

The hotel occupies a corner house with three street addresses: 5 and 7 rue de l'Hôtel-Colbert and 11 rue de la Bûcherie. The French Ministry of Culture dates the house to the end of the 18th century. Its listing describes a ground floor, three upper floors and a fourth floor set in the pediment, with garlands of flowers above the first-floor windows. The street façades and roofs have been registered as a historic monument since 19 October 1957. Meliá's own descriptions give other dates: 19th-century in 2013 and 16th-century now.^[2][3][5]

The English poet David Gascoyne recalled in his Journal 1936–37, published in 1980, that in 1937 he rented a cheap attic room at the top of 11 rue de la Bûcherie, the house where the American poet E. E. Cummings was then living.^[6]

In October 1948 the French writer Simone de Beauvoir moved into a small fifth-floor apartment in this building, at 11 rue de la Bûcherie. In a letter to the American novelist Nelson Algren, she asked him to write to her after 20 October at "11 Rue de la Bucherie, Paris. That is my new place." Algren later stayed with her there. In the early 1950s the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann shared the apartment. Le Nouvel Observateur described it in 2008 as very small, with a view of Notre-Dame and leaks when it rained. Beauvoir worked there on her novel The Mandarins, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1954. In 1955 she moved to rue Victor-Schœlcher in the 14th arrondissement, where she lived until her death in 1986.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12][13]}

The building was a hotel called Le Colbert by 1969, when Henri Gault and Christian Millau listed it in their Paris guide. A 1996 guide describes the Hôtel Colbert as a three-star hotel with 36 rooms. Meliá's operating company, Hôtel Colbert SAS, was registered in December 2007, and Meliá says the hotel was fully renovated in 2010. It traded as Meliá Colbert and then as Meliá Paris Notre-Dame. Atout France, the national tourism agency, classified it as a five-star hotel with 39 rooms on 22 December 2022. It now trades as Maison Colbert Meliá Collection.^{[14][15][16][3][4][17][5]}