Rêve Parisien
Nos jours. The late great chanteuse Marianne Faithfull latterly lived in a lateral apartment on Boulevard du Montparnasse. She once shared, “I have some lovely paintings and photographs and furniture. All things that have been passed down by my family. But actual decorations are absurd!” Hôtel Le Littré is on a quiet side street off the southern end of Boulevard du Montparnasse, under the shadow of the famous Montparnasse Tower.
Rue Littré fortunately isn’t named after rubbish but rather the multihyphenate Émile Littré. This politician, philosopher and linguist Left Banker fulfilled his aptronym by writing an etymological dictionary, published in 1841. A few copies of the Littré Dictionary are in the Winter Garden of the hotel which opens onto that most Parisian of spaces – the courtyard. There has been a hotel behind the Haussmann façade of 9 Rue Littré since 1967. Full French breakfast is served in the lower level dining room.
Keeping to the literary theme, the hotel stocks Le Littré News (April 2025 edition) and La Gazette de Littré (timeless edition). One of the recommendations in Le Littré News is for a restaurant across the road from the hotel called Le Petit Littré. Jean-Baptiste Bellecourt opened the restaurant in 2012. On a rainy Saturday evening, it’s at full capacity. The convivial owner explains that the waiter cut his hand earlier and had to go home. So Jean-Baptiste is acting as receptionist, maître d’, waiter, sommelier … a one man machine (presumably there’s a chef hidden away somewhere). Dinner of risotto and Tarte Tatin is an essay on perfect French cuisine.
“Madame de Pompadour ate four meals a day: breakfast, dinner, a late afternoon snack (goûter) and supper,” the much missed Dame Rosalind Savill records in her 2022 double volume literary masterpiece Everyday Rococo: Madame De Pompadour and Sèvres Porcelain. Madame de Pompadour would have adored the French fries and shrimp parcels lunch in a casual café on Boulevard du Montparnasse.
A short stroll past the glasshouses of Jardin Botanique de l’Universitie Cité leads to Jardin du Luxembourg. The world and its beautiful partner are playing boules, sunbathing, promenading. All 25 hectares are brimming with life. The ghost of Louis XIII’s mother, the Regent Marie de’ Medici, must be looking down in wonder at the bourgeois from her top floor bedroom in the 17th century Palais du Luxembourg. The balustrades and pedestals and statues and urns are all still very recognisable from John Singer Sargent’s 1879 painting In the Luxembourg Garden.
Getting ever closer to the River Seine, past the scent of Goutal perfumery (a modern day maker of myrrh), is the city’s third largest church: St Sulpice. Construction of Daniel Gittard’s neoclassical design began in 1646 and its 21 chapels were decorated over the following decades as the architecture evolved. Most splendid of all is the Virgin Chapel started by Giovanni Nicoli Servandoni in 1777 and completed 48 years later by Charles de Wally. “She was perfectly in tune with the rococo period in which she lived, and enabled it to evolve and flourish,” Ros comments. Madame de Pompadour would feel very at peace under the rococo golden dome of the Virgin Chapel.
A visit to San Francisco Books literally continues the literary theme.
