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Must be 100 of em lined up outside the city walls.

Have you tried the budget version though? - look, after a tent - luxury, but rooms are clean cells, no plates - eat breakfast off a tissue, had to wait for cups and spoons and other stuff etc - I would upgrade to Ibis in future.

Here, in a chapter from something as yet unpublished, is my hotel policy from the time when I was a magazine editor...

Where Russian poets go to die
When I was a magazine editor, travelling to cover motor shows with a small team (a photographer and another journalist), I picked hotels carefully. There were two main criteria: the establishment had to be convenient for getting to the show and it had to be as cheap as possible, on the intelligent principle that we would save our money for essentials such as good food and wine.

In those days one could still find some very cheap and shoddy hotels in big cities if one knew where to look, and I became skilled at seeking them out. It took a while for those who worked with me to understand the logic of this policy, but they soon appreciated the two benefits: we ate very well and IPC’s managers never questioned our expenses.

The dump in the 13th arrondissement of Paris that I favoured in the 1980s, when attending the biennial Salon de l’Automobile, was a case in point. It was memorably described by my colleague Andrew English 1 as “the sort of place where Russian poets would go to die.” Several years later, I discovered that it had been the hotel of choice of the wandering (non-Russian) minor poet Jean Genet. I may even have passed him on the stairs of the Hotel Rubens at some time. My pocket was not picked, but Genet’s thieving days were probably long past by then. He had become internationally famous and was not short of cash, but never bought a house or even an apartment, preferring to stay in cheap hotels.

If the Hotel Rubens, in the street where they used to make splendid Delahayes 2, had not been fully booked on the evening of 15 April 1986, Genet, then aged 75, would almost certainly have died there, rather than a few hundred yards away on the other side of the Boulevard de l’Hôpital, in another of my regular haunts. The old dear was in a bad way by then, with throat cancer, but he died after tripping and cracking his head on the way to the lav.

Oddly, Jack’s Hotel in the rue Stéphen-Pichon has no plaque on its outside wall to commemorate this event. An English rendition of this might read “Jean Genet, minor poet, absurdist playwright, vagabond, petty thief, homosexual prostitute, ex-con, motor racing sponsor 3, total fruitcake, etc, checked out here (without checking out).” I was not even able to discover in which room he had snuffed it; “Ah, Monsieur, vous voulez la Suite Genet? C’est un petit peu plus chère...” The French are sometimes surprisingly poor at marketing. It is, of course, a nation of fonctionnaires.

Whenever I was not picking up the tab, on the other hand, I generally stayed in four-star establishments that would have resulted in difficult conversations with IPC’s managers if I had put the bills on expenses.

1 Later the Motoring Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph.
2 Not many people born after World War II are aware that France once had a proud reputation for creating high-quality cars – Amilcar 4, Bugatti, Delage, Delahaye, Talbot-Lago, among others.
3 As backer of the driver Jacques Maglia. Known outside motor racing circles as “Jacky”, Maglia was the stepson of Lucien Senemand, one of Genet’s numerous homosexual partners. Jacky was primarily heterosexual but apparently his early exploits as a car thief were at least partly an attempt to attract the eccentric poet’s attention.
In 1959, tiring of his then protégé, a young Arab who had had to abandon his career as a tightrope artist after a fall, Genet transferred his attentions to Maglia and became possibly the most improbable motor racing sponsor in history. Genet followed Maglia wherever his racing took him, even living with him for a while in Norwich, where he bought a Lotus for the young racer. While they were there, Maglia married the daughter of a local policeman. Genet signed as a witness to the Church ceremony, giving his profession as “voleur” (thief).
Maglia had demonstrated considerable promise in his racing career, but it came to an end with a serious accident in a Formula 2 race at the spooky Solitude circuit to the west of Stuttgart in 1965. It was also the last ever race at Solitude. Abdullah the ex-tightrope walker having committed suicide, Maglia was the sole beneficiary in Genet’s will.
4 It was in one of these superb little light cars (rather than a Bugatti as is often incorrectly stated) that the loopy dancer Isadora Duncan had her third from last ride (after that it was the ambulance and then the hearse). The last thing she said to her proposed jockey for the evening, or indeed to anyone, was “SCAAAAAAAAAARF!”

Most interesting read Peter ...enjoyed that ..thanks for posting !

So did I, thanks

Good writing Peter, enjoyed it, paints a picture in the mind.