Still the sole grand luxe hotel gracing Paris’s Left Bank, the Lutetia opened in 1910 on the Boulevard Raspail. A gaudy showpiece of Art Nouveau splendour, it aimed to attract customers of the neighbouring department store Le Bon Marché, whose owners built it. Throughout the Jazz Age, its bars and restaurant were also patronised by the fashionable intelligentsia – Gide, Joyce, Hemingway, Picasso and Matisse among them – but its first flush of glamour gradually faded. 

As owners came and went after the Second World War, the hotel sank into shabby gentility, a decline arrested when it was revamped and rebranded as part of the globalised Mandarin Oriental ‘collection’ a decade ago. A night in one of its lavishly furnished suites can now empty you of as much as €6,000 but might leave a rather soulless impression. The building’s darker history, explored in this new study by Jane Rogoyska, has been almost erased, visibly acknowledged only on a modest plaque on an exterior wall, easily ignored by its heedlessly wealthy clientele.

Rogoyska starts by reminding us that a certain mystique hovers around all hotels: offering temporary welcome and shelter, as well as anonymity and locked doors, they are liminal places where no questions are asked and no judgements made. At the Lutetia, these qualities would come into sharp focus through the