Hôtel Napoléon

Avenue de Friedland was named in 1864 after the French victory over the Russian army at the Battle of Friedland on 14 June 1807. The hotel bears the name of Napoleon I but has no link to him, since he died in 1821. A 1953 Nagel guide to Paris lists it under a longer name, Hôtel Napoléon Bonaparte.^[1][2]

The hotel says the building was put up in 1928 in the Art Deco style by the architect Henri Porteau, on the site of a former mansion of the Tolstoy family. The hotel's own website said in 2003 that the building dated from the turn of the century, and the Russian historian Alexander Shirokorad wrote in 2010 that it was built in the early 1920s.^[3][4][5]

The hotel also says that a Russian businessman bought it soon after it opened, as a wedding present for his French wife. In 2003 the hotel's website named him as Alexandre Pavlovitch Kliaguine and put their meeting and marriage in 1928. Two Russian-language articles, by Shirokorad and by Larisa Steinman (Russkiy Ochevidets, 2012), give an earlier date. Both say that Kliaguine met a young French student at a literary gathering in 1926, divorced his Russian wife to marry her and gave her the hotel. Shirokorad describes Kliaguine (1884–1952) as a Russian railway engineer who came to Paris in 1916 to buy supplies for the Russian railways ministry and became one of the leading arms dealers of his time.^[3][4][5][6]

Shirokorad and Steinman also write that Russian émigré writers met at the hotel, among them Ivan Bunin, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1933. The same articles say that Ivan Makovsky, a grandson of a Russian painter, managed the hotel for 40 years.^[5][6]

The Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in his 1993 memoir, A Fish in the Water, that he spent two weeks at the hotel on his first trip to Paris. The stay was a prize from a literary contest run by the magazine La Revue française, and he named the manager as Monsieur Makovsky. In a 2010 Paris Match interview, Vargas Llosa recalled that the director, whom he described as a Pole named Mr. Makovski, took him and Annie Simplon, Miss France 1958, to the nightclub L'Éléphant Blanc.^[7][8]

The hotel lists among its past guests the Russian prince Felix Yusupov, Ivan Bunin, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Salvador Dalí, Errol Flynn, Orson Welles, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker, but gives no dates or details.^[3]