Note: This blog post is based on the first draft of part 3 of my forthcoming paper with Alain Alcouffe, “Adam Smith and the salons of pre-revolutionary Paris” (footnotes are below the fold):

Adam Smith’s primary residence during his sojourn in Paris in 1766 was the Hôtel Parc Royal on the rue du Colombier. Alas, the precise location of the Hôtel du Parc Royal is a mystery. For starters, a street-numbering ordinance was not enacted in Paris until 1768, two years after Smith’s stay in the French capital.[1] Also, according to the Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris (Hillairet 1964, Vol. 1, p. 665), “rue du Colombier” was renamed “rue Jacob” in 1836. It is possible that the Parc Royal was located on today’s 37 rue Jacob or the present 41 rue Jacob; the entries for those particular street numbers in the Dictionnaire Historique des Rues de Paris read “Ex-hôtel” (ibid., p. 666).[2]

Nevertheless, although we do not know much about the Parc-Royal, we know that it was described as one of “the best hotels or lodging houses” in the “Quartier S. Germain des Pres” in the 1768 edition of The Gentleman’s Guide in his Tour through France,[3] and even more importantly, we also know that two of Smith contemporaries, his close friend David Hume and Horace Walpole, the son of a former prime minister, both lodged at the Parc-Royal during their stays in Paris. According to Mossner (1980, p. 504), for example, Hume had relocated to the Parc-Royal in November of 1765 and stayed there until his departure from Paris on January 4, 1766. For his part, Horace Walpole stayed at the Hôtel du Parc Royal from October 1765 until his departure from Paris in April 1766.[4] That such luminaries as David Hume and Horace Walpole would stay at the Parc-Royal is some indication of this hotel’s quality.[5] It is even possible that David Hume recommended the Parc-Royal to Adam Smith and that Smith occupied Hume’s rooms after the latter’s departure on January 4, 1766.

Today, the rue de Colombier is the rue Jacob, a quiet street in the 6th arrondissement of modern-day Paris.[6] At the time of Smith’s stay, however, the rue du Colombier and the rue Jacob formed one long street. Writing in May of 1766, for example, the Reverend William Cole describes the scene thus: “This Rue du Colombier, & the Rue Jacob make one long Street from the Rue du Seine quite down to the River; & the Rue des Petits Augustins, where I lodged came into this long Street, near the Joining together of the Rue du Colombier & the Rue Jacob” (Cole 1931, pp. 52-53, punctuation and spelling in the original).

Back in 1766, the Hôtel du Parc Royal and the rue de Colombier were not only located in one of the most fashionable quarters of Paris at the time, the Faubourg Saint-Germain;[7] they were also in very close proximity to three of the most famed salons of pre-revolutionary Paris, the salons of the Duchesse d’Enville in the hôtel de la Rochefoucauld and that of Madame du Deffand in the Convent of Saint-Joseph as well as the informal salon of her protégée and eventual rival, Mademoiselle Julie Lespinasse, located just down the street. Before proceeding, however, below is a close-up of the “Rue du Colombier,” as it appears on the 1739 Turgot map of Paris, for the reader’s reference. (Notice how close it is to the hôtel de la Rochefoucauld, the location of the salon of the duchess of d’Enville.)

[1] See Conlin 2013, pp. 80-81. Even then, the implementation of the ordinance was uneven, since the aristocracy would refuse to bemean their town houses with numbers. Ibid.

[2] According to another source (Lefeuve 1875, Vol. 3, p. 23), the Parc-Royal subsequently became the “hôtellerie du Roi-Georges,” but as of this writing (spring of 2025), neither Alain nor I have been able to find any information about the Roi-Georges.

[3] See Gentleman’s Guide 1768, p. 234. In all, a total of eight hotels are listed under “Rue du Colombier” in the Gentleman’s Guide (ibid., pp. 233-234), including the Parc-Royal. Additionally, two of “the best ordinaries and eating houses” were also located on this same street, one being “De la Salle, Traiteur, from 20 sols to 3 livres”; the other, the “Hotel d’Espagne, at all prices” (ibid., p. 228). It is unclear, however, whether Smith himself was aware of this particular travel guide. According to James Bonar’s catalogue of Smith’s library and Hiroshi Mizuta’s 1967 checklist of the same, Smith’s bookshelf contained many travel books and journals, including John Bell’s Travels from St Petersburg, François Bernier’s Voyages, Peter Kalm’s Travels into North America, Henry Maundrell’s Journey from Aleppo, Thomas Nugent’s Grand tour, the 1769 and 1772 editions of Thomas Pennant’s Tour in Scotland, William Thomson’s Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, and Joshua Tucker’s Instructions for travelers, as well as several travel guides by Arthur Young, but neither Bonar nor Mizuta contain any reference to any edition of The Gentleman’s Guide in His Tour through Paris.

[4] See Lewis 1939, p. 266 n.72. Indeed, Horace Walpole returned to the Parc-Royal during each of his four subsequent visits to the City of Lights. W. S. Lewis, the editor of Walpole’s correspondence and his 1765/66 Paris journal, states that the Hôtel du Parc Royal “remained [Walpole’s] hotel during all his visits to Paris.” Ibid.

[5] Cf. Lefeuve 1875, Vol. 3, p. 23: “N’est-ce pas à l’hôtellerie du Roi-Georges, dite alors du Parc-Royal, que ne craignit pas de descendre le protecteur des lettres Horace Walpole, qui devait être difficile sur le choix de son pied-à-terre? Il avait à Strawberry-Hill une résidence princière, dans laquelle s’imprimaient ses propres ouvrages.” (Our translation: “Wasn’t it at the hôtellerie du Roi-Georges, then called the Parc-Royal, that Horace Walpole, protector of letters, was not afraid to stay, who must have been difficult about the choice of his pied-à-terre? He had a princely residence at Strawberry-Hill, in which his own works were printed.”)

[6] Rue du Colombier was renamed “Rue Jacob” on July 14, 1836. See Hillairet 1964 (Vol. 1), p. 665. See also Lefeuve 1875, Vol. 5, p. 389: “Dès 1838 une rue du Colombier s’est engloutie dans la bouche de la rue Jacob ….” (Our translation: “As early as 1838 a rue du Colombier was swallowed up in the mouth of rue Jacob ….”). The original “Rue du Colombier” is thus not to be confused with the existing “Rue du Vieux Colombier.” (Julian Baggini, for example, makes this mistake in his intellectual biography of David Hume. See Baggini 2021, p. 192.).

[7] During the 18th century, after the initial construction and later expansion of Les Invalides, many of the most prestigious families of the French nobility began to build their residences or hôtel particuliers in this area of Paris. This quarter became so fashionable within the French aristocracy that the phrase le Faubourg has been used to describe French nobility ever since. Honoré de Balzac, for example, explains the very specific Faubourg’s aristocratic way of life in his novel La Duchesse de Langeais.