Hôtel de Gourgues

The Hôtel de Gourgues is a private mansion in the third arrondissement of Paris. It rose around 1639 and 1640 as the twin of the neighbouring Hôtel Mérault. Catherine Charpentier, the widow of magistrate Pierre Mérault, commissioned both houses. Master mason Michel Villedo and carpenter Claude Dublet oversaw the construction.

Pierre II Mérault, the eldest son, was its first resident. Further building work brought an extension in 1654. Later it took a tenant of note: Claude de Bourdeille, Comte de Montrésor. A noted figure of the Fronde, France's series of civil wars, he died in the hôtel in 1663. In 1707 the property passed to Armand Jacques de Gourgues, Marquis de Vayres, a maître des requêtes at the Parliament of Paris. A descendant, Armand Guillaume de Gourgues, held the house when the Revolution arrived. He was executed in 1794, a president at the Parliament of Paris. The city of Paris made the hôtel an elementary school in 1880. The building is listed on the supplementary inventory of historical monuments.

The street front tells one story and the courtyard another. Eighteenth-century remodelling under Louis XV gave the façade a central avant-corps with cartouches and rocaille consoles, topped by a triangular pediment. Inside the courtyard you meet the older house: Louis XIII façades of the seventeenth century, marked by high stone dormer windows. In the left wing, a grand staircase keeps its square wooden balusters. A gate separates this courtyard from that of the Hôtel Mérault, though the twin houses once shared a single one.