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Origin and history

The hotel Mégret de Sérilly, located at 106 rue Vieille-du-Temple in the Marais, is built between 1618 and 1621 for Nicolas Malebranche, financier and treasurer general of the Fermes de France. The latter, close to Richelieu, embodies the ascent of the rich bourgeois who adopt the model of the private hotel, reserved until then for the nobility. The architect Jean Thiriot, already author of the nearby Hozier Hotel, directs the works. The building, typical of the first decades of the 17th century, combines brick and stone, with a facade on a garden wider than that on a courtyard, adapting to the irregularity of the plot.

In 1686, the hotel was acquired by Charles du Tillet, Marquis de La Bussière, master of requests, whose family partially changed the structure. He changed hands again in 1776, when Antoine Jean-François Mégret de Sérilly, treasurer general of the extraordinary war, became its owner. The latter had Pierre-Noël Rousset redecorate the interior, including the boudoir of 1778, adorned with the walls of Jules-Antoine Rousseau and a ceiling of Jean-Jacques Lagrenée, is now preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Revolution marked a turning point: Sérilly, guillotined in 1794, saw his hotel divided into workshops and shops in the 19th century.

The hotel, registered with the Historic Monuments in 1961, maintains its original plan between courtyard and garden, despite subsequent changes. The facade on street, redone in the 18th century, contrasts with the brick and stone elevations of the 17th century. Two pieces decorated by Rousset were dismantled: the boudoir in London and the living room in the United States in the Vanderbilt mansion. Restored as a private residence in the 20th century, it bears witness to the social and architectural changes of the Marais, an aristocratic district that became bourgeois and then artisanal.

Architecturally, the hotel is distinguished by its even number of spans, rare for the scholarly hotels of the time, which favoured odd bays. This particularity, as well as the presence of a lower courtyard in the east, reflect a transition between the bourgeois house and the nobiliary hotel. The brick-stone polychromy, typical of the seventeenth century, and the asymmetry of facades underline the adaptation to urban constraints. The interior decorations of the 18th century, though scattered, illustrate the fascination of the financial elites before the Revolution.

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