Literary Hotels – Société des Hôtels Littéraires

Over the last ten years France has been gaining some literary hotels, thanks to the Société des Hôtels Littéraires. This privately owned hotel group has been busy creating hotels with a literary flavour, each dedicated to a particular writer. Its founder and president, Jacques Leterte, loves books and wants to share his passion with hotel guests. Each hotel is decorated according to an author’s fictional world, each has a multilingual library of over 500 books from which guests can borrow, rooms are named for various characters, and there are watercolour paintings on the walls illustrating that author’s work. Guests are invited to follow the footsteps of the author around the town, exhibition cases display rare books, and theatre nights are held regularly.

To date, six hotels have been opened. They include:

• Hôtel Le Swann, in the 8th arrondissement, opened on the 100th anniversary of the publication of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way.
• Hôtel Marcel Aymé, in a pretty street in Montmartre, celebrates the French novelist and playwright who also wrote for children.
• Hôtel Arthur Rimbaud, in the 10th arrondissement, is close to the Gare de L’Est where the bad-boy French poet first arrived in the capital.
• Hôtel Jules Verne is in Biarritz, near the Atlantic Ocean which inspired this founder of the science fiction genre.
• Hôtel Alexandre Vialatte is in a shady square of Clermont-Ferrand, a suitable location for an author best known for his writings on melancholy.
• Hôtel Gustave Flaubert is in the heart of Rouen, birthplace of Flaubert and the city where he spent most of his life.
• And soon a 7th hotel will be opening in Nancy – the Hôtel Stendhal, celebrating the famed author of Le Rouge et Le Noir.

All the hotels are four-star. They aim to make French literature more accessible to the wider public. I think this is a fabulous initiative and hope it catches on in other countries. Hotels can be such anonymous places, and I loved the idea of them celebrating writers, their characters and words, and promoting a country’s literature.