Hotel La Louisiane | Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris | Simone de Beauvoir / Miles Davis / Juliette Gréco / Albert Cossery / Lucian Freud, 1940s-1960s
from following him back to the U.S., where he feared their interracial relationship.
“I suddenly understood that I’d made a terrib.le mistake, from which came a strange
feeling of humiliation that I’ll never forget. In America, his color was made blatantly
obvious to me, whereas in Paris, I didn’t even notice he was black.”
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“Juliette was probably the first woman that I had loved as an equal human being. She was
a beautiful person. We had to communicate with each other through expressions and
body language… It was April in Paris. Yeah, I was in love.”
Miles Davis
Juliette and Miles Davis (room 76), her lover during her stay at hotel La Louisiane.
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It is most associated with jazz musicians of the 1950s and 1960s. Oscar Peterson,
Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey,
Chet Baker, Billie Holiday, Lester Young and Charlie Parker all stayed at the hotel.
Albert Cossery
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In 1945, an Egyptian writer came to Paris, to the land whose language he could read and write. The writer was Albert Cossery, and he had one thing on his mind: seducing pretty young women. He moved into an apartment building in Montparnasse, but soon tired of the constant to-ing and fro-ing between his lodgings and the hotel room in Saint-Germain where he took his conquests and eventually moved into the Louisiane in 1951. He would only write when he had absolutely nothing better to do. As far as he was concerned, the pleasures of living were far more important than writing, which wasn’t a source of pleasure. He had no possessions and spent his time idling: “You have to earn idleness…If other people like working, then let them get on with it”, he said somewhat cynically and philosophically. “But by idleness I don’t mean just doing nothing, but thinking and reading. Reading is the most extraordinary thing in the world.”
Nathalie de Saint Phalle, Hôtels littéraires, 1991
David E. Scherman, Hotel La Lousiane, 1946
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La Louisiane became a special meeting place for Salvador Dali and Amanda Lear,
Bernard Buffet, Alberto Giacometti, Vassilakis Takis, Dennis Oppenheim,
Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring and many more.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p009y5cb?fbclid=IwAR3AcBB0OQJrOE_0Rmx_gx0XNsCKeoEy_xkUSWemyffSRfcV2Bupngs8eMc
Juliette Greco / Desert Island Discs / 08 Jul 1963
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