Sofitel Paris Le Faubourg

According to the hotel, Sofitel Paris Le Faubourg occupies two neighboring buildings on rue Boissy-d'Anglas: the former Hôtel Vouillemont at number 15, and a building that housed the offices of the women's magazine Marie Claire. The street was named in 1865 after François-Antoine Boissy d'Anglas (1756–1828), a politician of the French Revolution. Before then, the stretch between Place de la Concorde and rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré was called rue des Champs-Élysées.^[1][2][4][5]

An 1890 guidebook advertisement placed the Hôtel Vouillemont at 15 rue Boissy-d'Anglas, with apartments for families. The 1903 Almanach de Gotha gave the hotel as the Paris address of Marie, the former Queen of the Two Sicilies and widow of King Francis II. A 1927 advertisement called the hotel "known since 1830".^[7][8][6]

Marcel Proust named the hotel in Swann in Love, part of his novel Swann's Way (1913). The historian Henri Raczymow writes that Albert delle Donne, a Sicilian, bought the hotel in 1912. A 1913 advertisement in the Italian weekly L'Illustrazione Italiana called it "entirely rebuilt", with 150 rooms and salons and 120 bathrooms. The hotel today describes the building as an 18th-century mansion.^{[9][10][11][3]}

During the Paris Peace Conference, the American delegation was based at the Hôtel de Crillon, at the Concorde end of the street. Its accounts, published by the US Senate in 1920, show that it paid the Hôtel Vouillemont to lodge 30 staff from 24 December 1918 to 6 January 1919, and later to house couriers, because the Crillon had no rooms free. Letters place the American actress Ruth Draper at the Vouillemont in June 1921 and the art historian Bernard Berenson there in October 1932. The English novelist Radclyffe Hall and her partner Una Troubridge stayed there on a visit to Paris in the 1930s, according to Diana Souhami's biography.^{[12][13][14][15]}

Jean Cocteau's biographer Francis Steegmuller writes that Marie and Robert delle Donne, the owner's children, persuaded their father to hire their friend Maurice Sachs, a young writer, as receptionist. Cocteau stayed at the hotel himself. The journalist Robert de Saint Jean wrote in his diary that on 2 February 1935 he collected Cocteau there, from an attic room decorated in blue and gold. The hotel says Luigi Pirandello and Francis Picabia also frequented the Vouillemont in the 1930s.^[16][17][1]

In September 1944, after the liberation of Paris, the US Army's 2nd Military Railway Service took the Hotel Vouillemont, "adjoining the American Embassy", as quarters for its officers and enlisted men. From 1988 to 1995 guidebooks list the Pullman Saint-Honoré hotel at number 15. Sofitel Le Faubourg opened in 1999. Marie Claire's offices were at 11 bis rue Boissy-d'Anglas in 1994, and in the 2000s the hotel's restaurant, Café Faubourg, used the same address.^{[18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]}