Hôtel de Condé

The Hôtel de Condé ["Hôtel de Condé" would ordinarily refer to the principal residence of the House of Condé in Paris. At the time this "hôtel particulier" was built, Louis Joseph de Bourbon, prince de Condé was living at the Palais Bourbon with his mistress, the princesse de Monaco. The former Condé hôtel occupied the site where the Théâtre de l'Odéon now stands. The hôtel gave its name to the present rue de Condé, on which its forecourt faced. On 26 March 1770, an order in council authorized the execution of the Odéon project, designed by Charles De Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre on the grounds of the garden of the hôtel of the prince de Condé, who expected to be rid of the property in expectations of setting up more grandly in the Palais-Bourbon.] was built for Louise-Adelaïde de Bourbon-Condé , styled the princesse de Condé, by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart. In 1780 Mlle de Condé requested permission to leave the convent of Panthémont, where she had been educated, to live in the world. To suit her station in life a generous site was purchased situated on the Left Bank (in the present VIe arrondissement), where Brogniart erected a splendid house, behind an enclosed court entered through a central carriage passage, and facing a garden, into which the central oval salon projected. By 1782 the "menuisier" Georges Jacob had delivered seat furnishings to the amount of 13,958 "livres" and Jean-François Leleu, a prominent "ébéniste", had rendered a bill for veneered case-pieces, [James Parker, "Clodion's Bas-Reliefs from the Hôtel de Condé" "The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin" New Series, 25.6 (February 1967, pp. 230-241) p 232.] but no detailed contemporary description of the interiors survives: Horace Walpole mentioned the Hôtel de Condé in passing as an epitome of the latest French neoclassical taste, after he first saw the Prince of Wales's Carlton House, London, in September 1785.

The garden was landscaped in the "genre pittoresque", the informal "picturesque genre" that was one aspect of French Anglomania in the 1780s. From the boulevard garden side, an open iron fence gave passersby a view of the principal facade, the garden front in its landscaped setting.

In the forecourt, long stucco panels in low-relief of children engaged in Bacchanalian procession were supplied by Claude Michel, "Clodion"; [Clodion is known to have supplied stucco reliefs for several of Brogniart's schemes (Parker 1967:] they have been conserved at the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1959 (Parker 1967).

Considerations of rank prevented the princesse de Condé from marriage, and in 1789 she escaped the first stages of the French Revolution; in 1802, in Poland she took the veil, and returned to Paris in 1816, to consecrate the rest of her life to religious work. She died in 1824, but she never again resided in Brogniart's Hôtel de Condé. The structure remains, at 12, rue de Monsieur, Paris VIe.

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