I do not expect hotels to be exceptional. I want them simply to be functional, a comfortable base from which to explore. The luxury hotel, by that measure, is a nonsense, because it could be anywhere. You must want to get out of your hotel as much as you hope to like staying in it.
But where we stayed in Rouen recently was different. The Hôtel Littéraire Gustave Flaubert is a museum, archive and temple to the French author Gustave Flaubert, masquerading as a hotel. Located off a back street in the centre of old Rouen (where Flaubert was born), the place looks conventional enough on the outside, but the moment you step inside things are different.
To your left as you enter is a small library of books by or about Flaubert, including translations of his works in assorted languages. To the right, beyond a stall of Flaubertian souvenirs, there is a study area with rare books in a tall cabinet, including assorted collected editions, a statue of the author and a model parrot in a cage. The parrot, Loulou, is a prominent character in Flaubert’s Un Coeur Simple, and of course the inspiration behind Julian Barnes’ wry combination of novel, academic study and literary game Flaubert’s Parrot. A row of plaster parrots is lined above the reception desk. Around a corner you can settle down with a book in Emma Bovary’s boudoir.
On the walls there are framed letters and other manuscripts relating to Flaubert, some of them copies but others, rather startlingly, originals. Explore further, and you find each of the floors is devoted to a particular theme associated with Flaubert. The ground floor is dedicated to his native Normandy, location for Madame Bovary. Other floors focus on Paris, ancient Carthage (the setting for his novel Salammbô) and his friends. These associations are marked by further framed reproductions and original documents on the walls and by each room being named after a work, a character or a person associated with Flaubert (our room was named for Maxime Du Camp, writer, photographer and travel companion of Flaubert’s). Within the rooms there are commissioned watercolours that expand on the themes, while on each bedhead there is a quotation from the great man’s works.
You have come to stay in a curated hotel. The seriousness of the endeavour is clear not only from what you see but what is avoided. There is nothing so kitsch as faux nineteenth-century bedding, for example. This is a modern hotel with all of the expected comforts and fittings. It is just that it is a literary hotel.
The Gustave Flaubert is not alone. There are a number of Hôtel Littéraires now dotted across France. In Paris the same chain offers the Hôtel Littéraire Le Swann (targeting Proustians with madeleines in the Céleste Albaret café), the Hôtel Littéraire Arthur Rimbaud (a poem in every rooms and an absinthe bar, should you wish to follow the hotel’s inspiration into ruin) and, more obscurely, the Hôtel Littéraire Marcel Aymé, dedicated to the twentieth-century novelist, playwright and screenwriter. In Biarritz there is the Hôtel Littéraire Jules Verne, in Clement-Ferrand the Hôtel Littéraire Alexandre Vialatte, and opening in September in Nancy the Hôtel Littéraire Stendhal.
The Hôtel Littéraire chain is the creation of Jacques Letertre, collector and bibliophile. There is a collector’s passion behind each of the hotels, evinced not least in the choice of the relatively obscure Aymé and Vialatte, which one suspects were personal passions or at least formed out of special collections that Letertre was able to get his hands on. It is not a solo endeavour, however. A Société des Hôtels Littéraires lies behind the chain (of which Letertre is the president), which organises literary evenings, prizes and exhibitions, and says grand things about its social and cultural missions.
Despite the artefacts, the events and the mission statements, it did not look as though many of those staying in the Hôtel Littéraire Gustave Flaubert had come there for Flaubert. They were there for the location, the comfy beds, the handsome breakfasts and other such petty luxuries. Myself, I have only read Madame Bovary, which did little for me, and Julian Barnes’s witty encouragement to admire the inventor of the modern novel (or so some say). I did at least leave with a sense of guilt and a promise to try again, maybe with Sentimental Education. Perhaps other guests felt a similar combination of guilt and weak determination. Or maybe, like me, they simply thought that the Hôtel Littéraire Le Swann sounded like fun.
What to make of the Hôtels Littéraires? It is very French, of course. What other country could come up with so literary and idealistic, and yet commercial an enterprise? The Société des Hôtels Littéraires states that its ambition is that each hotel “provides creative cultural content to disseminate the works of leading French writers to its visitors and to make them aware of new artistic worlds, thus participating in the development of the common good and sustainable tourism.” You don’t get that with Premier Inn. I can’t quite see such an initiative appearing, or lasting, in any other country. Here, back in Rochester, I could imagine someone coming up with a Charles Dickens-themed hotel, maybe with each room named after Sikes, Nancy, Oliver, Pip, Pickwick and so on. Maybe similar hotels could spring up for Samuel Johnson in Lichfield, Virginia Woolf in Bloomsbury or D.H. Lawrence in Nottingham. There is a Wordsworth Hotel in Grasmere and a Shakespeare Hotel in Stratford upon Avon, but they offer little beyond the name and place. And where would be the vision to link such temples together?
We, in Britain, love the idea of our writers, but do we want to stay with them? We tiptoe through their original homes, of course, marvelling at the creaking floorboards, the chairs, the very desk at which such and such was written, but it’s not the same as getting into bed with them. Of course reading the books is what is most important, but there is also making them a part of us. Slightly absurd as the Hôtels Littéraires may be, somewhat old-fashioned in their romantic understanding of literary culture, they nevertheless express a passion that makes you want to travel in mind as much as you have travelled in space. They live for the word and make you want to live that way too.
Links:
- Each of the hotels hyperlinked in the post has details of the contents and goals of that particular hotel, as well as the collective mission statements of the group, all in French and English:
Hôtel Littéraire Marcel Aymé
Hôtel Littéraire Gustave Flaubert
Hôtel Littéraire Arthur Rimbaud
Hôtel Littéraire Stendhal - The central site of the Société des Hôtels Littéraires, hotelslitteraires.fr/en, has background concept, blog, map, summaries of the libraries held, illustrations of some collection items, a YouTube channel, key personnel (there is an interior designer, a sustainable development officer and a fitness sales manager expert, but seemingly no one on the curatorial side of things), and links to individual hotels
Hôtel Littéraire Le Swann
Hôtel Littéraire Jules Verne
Hôtel Littéraire Alexandre Vialatte
