Hotel D'Avaray. Paris.

Hotel D'Avaray. Paris.

85 Rue de Grenelle.

The  Hotel D'Avaray  is a mansion  located at 85 Rue de Grenelle  in the  7th arronsissement of Paris. . It was built in 1723 by the architect  Jean Baptist Leroux  on behalf of Claude Théophile de Bésiade, the Marquis of Avaray. It remained the property of the Dukes of D'Avaray until 1920  when it was bought by the Dutch government which made it its embassy in France . It is still owned by the Netherlands and is used mainly for diplomatic receptions and as Franco-Dutch exchanges.

Entrance courtyard  to the Hotel D'Avaray.

 

Garden of the Hotel D'Avaray.

The Hotel d'Avaray was built in 1720, at a time when the Faubourg Saint-Germain began to be covered with private mansions: there were about 60 on the plan of Jaillot in 1775. 

Claude Théophile de Béziade  (1701 -1746), Marquis d'Avaray, entrusted the work to the architect Jean Baptiste Leroux  (1677-1746) .Claude Théophile de Bésiade, first knight lord and then marquis of Avaray, descended from an old Béarnaise family of good nobility of sword, and his wife, born Catherine Angélique Foucault .

The construction budget of the Hotel d'Avaray was reconstructed thanks to research carried out in 1866 by Count Audéric de Moustier, husband of Antonie d'Avaray. The amount came to 194,000 pounds.The work lasted about two years.

 Jean-Baptiste Le Roux (b c. 1677; d July 13, 1746).French Architect and designer. He was a pupil of François d’Orbay and had some early success as an interior designer and decorator, publishing with Jean Langlois before 1705 a series of six prints entitled Nouveaux lambris de gallerias, chambres et cabinets. He also developed a thriving architectural practice in Paris. His earliest surviving town house is the Hôtel d’Avaray (85, Rue de Grenelle; now the Dutch Embassy), a restrained three-story building. The garden façade has a slightly projecting central pavilion of three bays, with wide quoins and a pediment enclosing the owner’s coat of arms. Le Roux employed the mason Charles Boscry to work on the house from 1720 to 1721; during the same period he built the Hôtel du Prat (1720; 60, Rue de Varenne)

 

Partial view of the great room with Regency-period wood paneling dedicated to the art of music and with over door paintings  showing pastoral scenes ascribed to François Boucher (1703– 1770)

 

King Louis X of France .
 

 The Béziades were  natives of Béarn. As early as the twelfth century, the family was known; The affiliation goes back to Amamieu de Bésiade, to which Louis X, shortly before he became king of France  granted, on 5 January 1314, "a donation of thirty pounds tournament reward for his military services "

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the name of Avaray, borrowed from a seigneury of Orleans,in the Loire Valley  was joined to that of Bésiade. The members of this family were among the most loyal  partisans of Henry IV..One of them, the first Marquis of Avaray, was a great bailiff of Orleans, and it became a hereditary function of the family.

 

King Henry IV of France.
 

It was Claude Theophile de Bésiade, knight lord, then second marquis of Avaray, who had the mansion built.on the Rue de Grenelle. Born in 1655, lieutenant-general and knight of the order, the marquis made war on Holland and Spain. In 1707 he commanded the left wing of the army of Marshal the first Duke of  Berwick at the battle of Almanza, and the victory which secured the throne of Spain to Philip V., grandson of Louis XIV., was largely due to him .



James Fitz-James  1st Duke of  Berwick.

 

King Philip V of Spain.

  

 Flemish  D'Avaray tapestry.
"Presentation of the Keys".
 Francois Tons 1576 -1633.

These tapestries were woven and possibly designed by Francoise Tons whose weaver's mark consisting of a F S and T and a 4 appears on the selvage.This is one of the four work that survive from Tons's Brussels period. The tapestry shows a surrender scene.On the left a victorious army general, holding a baton and wearing  a laurel crown. He is seated on a throne placed on a platform.
His opponent kneels in front of him and offers him the keys of the city.
Documents show that Tons produced several series dedicated to stories from ancient history including the  history of Scipio and of Troy. The borders consist of flowers and female virtue


This tapestry was sold by Christie's on a auction of the Duc D'avaray in New York in 1915.
 At present it  is in the Harvard  Art Museum in the USA .

François Tons

"Antique Battle Scene"  c. 1615/1622

Another one of the Duke d'Avaray's tapestries.

Today in the Detroit Institute of Art in the USA .

He was then appointed governor of Flanders and Hainaut, which no doubt explains the presence of heavy Flemish tapestries from Brussels in most of the rooms of his mansion .They represented the seasons, the months of the year and  subjects borrowed from mythology. These weavers from Flanders  also supplied the window hangings and the trimming of the seats in crimson damask.

The Marquis,  had scarcely settled, in the mansion during 1723 when he was sent on another posting as ambassador to Switzerland . He rented the Hotel d'Avaray to Horace Walpole, the English ambassador to France from 1724 to 1727. , 

In 1727, the Marquis and the Marquise d'Avaray settled permanently in the hotel with three of their four children. The Marchioness died there the following year at the age of fifty-five. His eldest son, Theophilus, died in Italy in 1735 at the age of thirty-nine from wounds inflicted at the battle of Guastella, in which he had taken part as a brigadier of the infantry.

Towards the end of 1742, the wife of their  younger son, Charles Théophile, died in the camp in front of Cambrai where she had visited her husband. She was barely thirty. 

  In 1745, the old marquis himself died.at the  age of ninety years. 

  A portrait of the marquis, Claude Théophile Béziade  painted by Hyacinth Rigaud in 1716, hung in a  place of honor in the salon of the rue de Grenelle . 

 

The hotel which Claude Theophile had created remained undivided between Charles, now Marquis d'Avaray, and his elder sister, Madame d'Aubercourt.
Charles died on May 30 1746 of smallpox he contracted in Flanders. He left two sons of ten and six. Claude Antoine shared the interest of the mansion with his elder brother ,who was colonel of the Grenadier, .until he unfortunately died at the age of twenty one .When Madame d'Aubercourt -his aunt died without having a child- he inherited  the Hotel D'Avaray in 1776

As the fourth Marquis d'Avaray, Claude Antoine de Bésiade (1740-1829) had a interesting life . A swordsman like his ancestors, he was captain of cavalry during the Seven Years' War. Wounded at Minden,as Field Marshal , he was sent by the Orleans nobility to the Constituent Assembly in 1781. When the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was presented to the Assembly during the French Revolution , Avaray,  rose and presented to his colleagues the  declaration of the Duties of Man and of the Citizen.

 The hostilities  marked by  the new regime towards the nobility of France was shared by his family. The King and Queen and their family were  imprisoned. At the end of 1791, D'Avaray's three sons and two sons-in-law emigrated and left France to save their lives . Unlike many aristocrats who, made advances to the new regime but fell victim to the Terror, the  Marquis d'Avaray escaped the guillotine. He was arrested with his wife- Angelique de Mailly- daughter of  Louis Duke de Mailly-Rebumbré - towards the end of the Terror - but was saved by the 9th Thermidor. He then joined his family in exile and only returned  to France after the fall of Napoleon .The Hôtel d'Avaray, which became a national property, is listed in the foundation established by the Revolution, under  number 371. The Marquis  d'Avaray, was confided for more than six years to the  Chateau D'Avaray in the Loire Valley before his arrest .

 For more than twenty years the hotel in the Rue de Grenelle had remained almost constantly uninhabited. In the years following 1814 it was the subject of numerous restorations.
 

The marquis who had been welcomed by Louis XVIII, while still in England,  was granted the title of Duke in 1817. In fact, this  eldest son, Antoine Louis François (1759-1811) had  received this title before him . Being the Master of Monsieur's  wardrobe, the young d'Avaray succeeded in organizing  the escape of Monsieur -the doomed King's -brother from the Luxembourg Palace to Belgium. Having taken the title of king, Louis XVIII  appointed d'Avaray captain of his guards, and granted him the  favor of placing on his family coat of arms ,  the lilies of France, as well as the flattering motto: VICIT ITER DURUM PIETAS.(Loyalty finds a way over even the stoniest road)









Prince Condé.




 Louis Antoine , Duke of Angoulême.



Marie Therese of France .

The man whom the king called "his dear d'Avaray," helped his master to leave Verona, and join the army of Prince Condé, encamped on the right bank of the Rhine. Having restored  the union of the royalists, d'Avaray negotiated the liberation of  Marie Therese of  France -the daughter of Louis XVI and  Marie Antoinette , and  arranged her marriage to  the Duke of Angouleme.

On the day of this marriage , Louis XVIII bestowed the dukedom to D'Avaray on him..In 1799, Antoine was the first Duke of the famous line of the Béziade family . He died at Madeira on June 4, 1811, his health having suffered severely from the London climate. Faithful to his remembrance, Louis XVIII, , brought back his ashes to France, and, made his father a duke as well. Armand Louis Théophile, who had fought with the Army of  Princes, was shot in 1795 during the Quiberon affair.
 The Hotel d'Avaray became the property of the third brother Joseph Théophile Parfait (1770-1859), lieutenant- General under the Restoration, who lived there until his death.

  During this time the  heirs share different apartments of the mansion . As early as 1825, the first floor at the back of the hotel had been successively rented to many tenants, among whom were the Dukes of Caraman and Vallombroza.

 

 Count Durazzo.

Duke of Caraman.

Among the other tenants of the  apartments of the hotel,  were Marquise de Courtomer and Marquis Durazzo,

 

Countess Louise -Marie-Antonie Béziade D'Avaray- Wife of  Auderic Comte de Moustier 

 

Among the other tenants of the  apartments of the hotel were Countess Auderic Moustier the daughter of Edouard the Duke of D'Avaray .She died in the Charity Bazaar fire in Paris on May 4 1897.
The Bazar de la Charité " was an annual charity event organized by the French Catholic  aristocracy in Paris from 1885 onward. It is best known for the fire at the 1897 bazaar that claimed 126 lives, many of them aristocratic women.The most famous of who was Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Alencon nee Sophie Charlotte of Bavaria die sister of the famous Austrian Empress Sissie

On the death of the Countess Auderic Moustier, the ground floor of the hotel was rented  to the Comtesse de Choiseul d'Aillecourt and later to M. Foucher-Lepelletier, deputy of the Seine.




Francoise-  Adelaide-Caroline Eugenie-Marie of  Mercy D'Argenteau .
Daughter of Earl  D' Mercy D'Argenteau and Louise de Riquet of Caraman- Chimey .
Married the Duke D"Avaray in 1883 and divorced in him 1892.

The  Princess of Montglyon, and the last Duchess of D'Avaray notes in a book of memoirs that the house terrified her, and  that she fled as often as possible from that place which took away her joy and youth. She divorced the Duke and at the end died in the USA in 1925.

Chateau de Mareil le Guyon .

On October 31, 1894, the  owner of the Hotel D'Avaray in the Rue de Grenelle, Jules Victor Camille de Bésiade, Duke of Avaray, died at the Chateau de Mareil .The chateau belonged to his wife.
 The hotel was sold by his son to the Government of the Netherlands by a deed dated April 1, 1920.

http://newyorkdaybyday.blogspot.com/2018/04/beziade-family-davaray.html

http://newyorkdaybyday.blogspot.com/2017/06/visit-to-chateau-davaray-2017.html

For more on the Duke D'Avaray's family- click on the top links.



The following was taken for the blog  by Gerard 2016

http://www.noblesseetroyautes.com/lhotel-davray-a-paris/

1. It was on August 23, 1718 that the architect Jean-Baptiste Le Roux acquired 660 toises and four feet of earth from the inheritance of the master gardener Michel Lemire for 31 200 pounds to build a residence for Claude Théophile de Bésiade , son of the Lord Knight and first Marquis d'Avaray, grand bailiff of the hereditary sword of Orleans, a family of Bearn nobility of sword, and his wife Catherine Angélique Foucault.  The hotel was built by Master Mason Bossery for £ 75,000 and the total cost of the work can be estimated at £ 137,500 over two years.
   The second marquis was lieutenant general, knight of the king's orders, and played a decisive role in 1707 on the left wing of the army of Marshal Berwick at the battle of Almansa, which assured the throne of Philip V. He was governor from Flanders and Hainaut and brought back for his Parisian hotel tapestries from Brussels representing the seasons, the months of the year and mythological subjects. He rented the hotel to Horace Walpole, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of England, future first Baron Walpole, and brother of the Prime Minister. It was in 1727 that the marquis, the Marquise and three of their four children really settled in the hotel where the Marquise died the following year at 55 years. His eldest son Jean Théophile died at age 39 from wounds received at the Battle of Guastalla when he was a brigadier of infantry in 1735. Towards the end of 1742 the wife of the youngest son, Charles Théophile, died at the camp in front of Cambrai where she went to visit her husband and she was 30 years old. The marquis died at age 90 in 1745. The hotel remained undivided between Charles became Marquis d'Avaray and his older sister Olympe, Madame d'Aubercourt. Charles died on May 30, 1746 in the army of Flanders, he was marshal of the camps and armies of the king and he succumbed to smallpox. The division continued between the aunt and the youngest son of his two sons, Claude Antoine, whose eldest brother, Charles Theophile, colonel of the grenadiers, had died at the age of twenty-one. The aunt dying without children, the marquis was the sole owner in 1776. This fourth Marquis d'Avaray, Claude Antoine (1740-1829), was a soldier like his ancestors, marshal of camp, deputy of the Orleans nobility to the Constituent, he presented to the Assembly after the Declaration of Human Rights a Declaration of the Duties of Man and Citizen. The whole family was very opposed to the new ideas and at the end of 1791 his three sons and two sons-in-law emigrated, the marquis was arrested with his wife born Mailly-Nesle only shortly before the end of the Terror and was saved by the 9 Thermidor. His hotel had become national property because he was a father of emigrants. Under the Empire he remained in his castle Avaray (Loir-et-Cher) and the hotel in the rue de Grenelle was almost uninhabited. In the years following 1814 it underwent restorations which considerably transformed it and deprived it of the Brussels tapestries. The marquis became duke in 1817. The eldest of his sons, Antoine Louis (1759-1811) had been master of the wardrobe of Sir, future Louis XVIII, and allowed him to leave without a hitch his palace of Petite Luxembourg. King in exile, Louis XVIII appointed him captain of his guards and granted him by decree of 16 December 1815 the authorization to place in heart family coats of arms the full arms of France with the motto Vicit iter durum Pietas.
   The phrase which was probably chosen by the scholarly King Louis XVIII was taken from Virgil's Aeneid VI. It means that piety has overcome the difficult path.
   After the descent to Hell Aeneas found his father old Anchises. "As soon as he saw Aeneas all merry advancing before him, through the turf, tears flooded his cheeks and he held out his hands, and a cry came out of his mouth:" Venisti tandem, tuque exspectata parenti vic iter durum pietas! ... "," You came at last, and the piety that your father expected from you, triumphed over the difficulties of the journey! ... ".
   
   The coat of arms is thus "Azure a fess Or charged with two stars Gules and accompanied in base of a shell of gold, with the crest of France brochant on the fess". The "dear d'Avaray" played a considerable role during the immigration to connect with the princes the army of Condé, to negotiate the release of Madame Royale and to obtain her marriage with her cousin. The Dutch embassy recalls under the pen of Sadi de Gorter that Louis XVIII erected in favor of the youth of Avaray the county of Lisle-Jourdain duchy in 1798 by letters patent which were not registered, and he was therefore the first Duke even before his father. He died in Madeira on June 4, 1811, where he had gone to seek treatment after having been a victim of the London climate. Louis XVIII transmitted by reversion to the father the duchy of the son by renewing the letters patent on August 16, 1814. He erected the duchy in duchy-hereditary peerage on August 31 and December 6, 1817 for Claude Antoine (1740-1829). The letters were confirmed on December 7th, 1822. The younger brother Armand Louis Théophile who was in the army of the princes had been shot in 1795 after the Quiberon affair and the hotel remained the property of the third brother Joseph Théophile Parfait (1770- 1859), lieutenant general under the Restoration, 3rd duke, who lived there until his death and was father of Ange Edouard Théophile (1802-1887), fourth duke.
   From this time the d'Avaray shared the apartments of the hotel which was thus retouched. From 1825 the first floor at the back of the hotel was rented to many tenants including the dukes of Caraman and Vallombrosa. Among the tenants of other apartments we note in the nineteenth century the Marquise de Courtomer, the Marquis Durazzo, the Count Auderic de Moustiers husband of Antonie d'Avaray daughter of Edward Duke d'Avaray (1802-1859),  The ground floor of the hotel was rented to the Comtesse de Choiseul d'Aillecourt and then to Edmond Foucher-Lepelletier, deputy of the Seine. On October 31,the Duke  1894 died in his castle of Mareil-le-Guyon, north of Rambouillet, Jules Victor Camille de Bésiade d'Avaray, 5th Duke, whose two sons sold the building to the Dutch government on April 1, 1920. The work the hotel had lost its inner grace and it was necessary to try to reconstruct it as it was in the eighteenth century around a monumental staircase, and it was the task of the Jonkheer John Loudon, Ambassador of the Netherlands in France from 1919 to 1940, between the two world wars. The old tapestries come from the family of this one. Naturally the garden is planted with tulips, the triangular pediment of the hotel bears the BA figure of the family of Avaray Besiade while the porch overlooking the street is the royal arms of the Netherlands.
   The last Duke of Avaray, the seventh, was Marie Bernard Edouard de Besiade who did not marry. Edouard was born in Paris 7th October 26, 1884 and died in Paris 8th February 27, 1941, he was son of Elie Marie Victor de Besiade, Earl of Avaray, and Countess Marie Gabrielle Constance Antoinette Melanie Hinnisdael and the Holy Empire. He became duke on January 23, 1930, on the death of his uncle, the 6th Duke of Joseph Joseph Marie de Besiade (1856-1930), son of the fifth Duke Jules Victor Camille (1827-1894), who was the son of the fourth.
2. It will be recalled that Louis XVIII was count of Lisle-Jourdain in Armagnac. And this as a result of an exchange with the county and the forest of Senonches which figured in his appanage since 1771, more than 4000 ha in the Perche, exchange concluded with Jean, count du Barry, August 29, 1775. C ' As a reward for his complacency, and as a result of complicated negotiations made by fictitious exchanges, the latter had received the county of Lisle-Jourdain, and it is precisely this county later that Louis XVIII gave to his Avaray's young friend by making him a duchy under the name Avaray, and after the death of Avaray it was passed on to his father who was to become the king's first chamberlain in 1820. The title had been given secretly to the occasion of the marriage of the daughter of Louis XVI with the Duke of Angouleme, at Mitau, June 9, 1799. In 1774, Sir, while he wished to become governor of Languedoc, had acquired this county of L'Isle- Jordan which assured him by the forest of Bouconne, access and influence to Toulouse, and it is this the forest that had so anguished Charles VI.
   Count de Besiade d'Avaray, the son, was 18 when he was introduced to the Count of Provence and he was a young provincial without fortune but handsome and intelligent. It was, as the Duke de Castries reminds us , for Louis XVIII for more than 30 years the fidus Achates, the faithful Achate, the friend of Aeneas.
   He was also the first of three friends who were for him brothers or sons, Avaray, Decazes and Blacas.
   D'Avaray was of profound honesty and absolute fidelity. Unfortunately his relationship with the king in exile ended in painful circumstances amid intrigue. Louis XVIII and his faithful friend believed in the words of Fouché's agents. This was the time of the Perlet affair. Louis Fauche-Borel (1772-1829), a quibble bookseller, Calvinist Freemason born in Neuchâtel, compromised in the conspiracy of Cadoudal, interned in the Temple, escaped in incredible circumstances and made contact with the Count of Antraygues another double agent who served the legitimacy. To abuse the police of the Empire they sent false reports and the police of Fouche used them to neutralize for a long time Louis XVIII through an unscrupulous suborder of the name of Charles Frederic Perlet (1759- 1828), a Parisian bookseller born in Geneva, who circumcised Fauche-Borel, persuading him that France wanted the restoration of the king and that in the entourage of the emperor existed a clandestine royalist committee with Cambaceres, several marshals and members of the imperial family. Fouche hoped to set up a new Cadoudal affair, in which the Duke de Berry would play the part of the Duke d'Enghien, and Louis XVIII and Avaray gave it to the panel after the king's arrival in England. Louis tried to get in touch with these famous Royalists close to the Emperor. Fauche-Borel sent his nephew Vitel to France to make contact, and he was arrested by the French police, he was promised life if he spoke, he spoke and was shot. Perlet had been incarcerated at the same time as Vitel, which persuaded the king of the sincerity of the man. The British agents also believed in this sincerity. Perlet, who had been liberated, arrived in London on June 10, 1808, and was immediately received by Lord Hawkesbury, Minister of the Interior, and announced that the Royalist Committee was considering joint action with the British Government. But for the details he only wanted to reveal them to the king. On the 22nd of June, the Count de La Chatre brought him to Gosfield, the castle which the king lived until the Duke of Orleans unearthed Hartwell. The conversation took place face to face, but Avaray, who had not been seduced by the character, refused a second audience. However, Perlet had deliberately left Gosfield with a notebook containing the so-called secrets of the royalist committee. He then claimed it but Louis XVIII had had a copy taken. The information was naturally fanciful, but they convince the prince of the reality of this royalist committee, and from then on he waited patiently for three years for this committee to complete his mission.
   D'Avaray was already ill and he ended his political career in a fight against the defeated Quiberon Count Puisaye, he was a conspirator refugee in London who began the publication of his memoirs where in the sixth volume he made accusations extravagant against d'Avaray, apparently encouraged by the Comte d'Antraigues, and he asserted that d'Avaray had attempted to have him assassinated. D'Avaray was informed before the publication of the Memoirs, but Puisaye proposed deleting the disputed passages if d'Avaray confessed by letter. He refused, the volume appeared in January 1808 and caused a great scandal. To show then his undaunted confidence in Avaray Louis XVIII authorized him to make public his appointment as duke and peer. The English government protested that the Comte de L'Isle (it was his title of incognito in England, which was soon transformed by counters in Count of Lille), did not have the power to confer an England titles of nobility.
   Then Puisaye had a word that made the gallery laugh, saying that if D'Avaray tried to assassinate him again, he would certainly be elevated to the dignity of prince of the blood. Louis XVIII dissatisfied ordered the meeting of a commission of 12 members to judge the case. D'Avaray asked Puisaye for compensation by arms. He refused. The commission declared the documents of Puisaye wrong, which was removed from the list of general lieutenants, but Avaray, already sick with tuberculosis, left England for Madeira. At his death the king's grief was immense, he sent to Madeira an epitaph he had composed and engraved on the marble. The young duke wished to rest in France and as soon as the king was restored to his throne he sent a ship, the Nantaise, to seek his remains where after an office celebrated by the bishop in the presence of the governor, she was taken to be buried in the castle Avaray.
   The king wrote in a letter of September 14, 1804 about the day when d'Avaray allowed him to leave France safe and sound: "If my name survives me, June 21, 1791 will be the most memorable day of his career. [...] It was probably a lot to have saved a life by giving me back my freedom; perhaps it is still more to think only of my glory and to speak to me unceasingly of the austere language of truth. "
   
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The following photographs of the Hotel D'Avaray's interiors are by CHATSAM
Click on the photos to enlarge them.

By Chatsam - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82393963