Sharp-Edged

L’Hôtel de Massa should never have found itself in the fourteenth arrondissement.
It had been constructed half-way down the Champs Elysées in the late eighteenth century when the roadway was lined with pleasure gardens, orchards and fields rather than showrooms for global brands. A luxurious residence of generous dimensions, the hôtel attracted a slew of aristocratic tenants and its fair share of scandal, mostly thanks to the various mistresses entertained within its walls. It made it to the twentieth century largely unscathed, despite the urban transformation that took place around it, but by the 1920s it had fallen into the hands of investors whose desire to cash in on the prime commercial location it occupied was stymied by its status as a historical monument. A deal was struck – the building was gifted to the state on the understanding that it be moved elsewhere, freeing up the ground beneath it for more lucrative uses. The centuries-old stones were numbered, dismantled and transported to a site carved out from the gardens of the former Royal Observatory in the southern half of the city. A suitable tenant was found for the vagrant hotel in the shape of the Société des Gens de Lettres, a well-meaning but ineffectual group committed to the defence and promotion of all things literary, who were given a lease at a symbolic rent.