Let’s return to that precise moment that Estrella de Diego evokes in her discourse; to the Salon Carré in the Louvre and Christopher Newman lying on the divan, exhausted, having seen everything, every painting marked with an asterisk in the Baedeker he is holding. The first Baedeker guide of Paris is dated 1867 and was published in English, indicating a significant presence of international tourism. It is not by chance that Newman is staying at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre, across the street from the museum, a massive hotel that occupied the whole block, from Place du Palais-Royal to Rue de Marengo and from Rue de Rivoli to Rue Saint-Honoré.

The vast Haussmannian building had opened in 1855 as the first luxury hotel in Paris, Le Grand Hôtel du Louvre, which Napoleon III commissioned to accommodate visitors to the Exposition Universelle that year. A newspaper report on the opening of the hotel had this to say about the unprecedented crowds arriving in Paris via the new train networks of France and Europe, and from all other continents: “a moving population floats incessantly on the surface of the sedentary one. It is no longer houses that are needed to house it, but cities within cities.” And it described the Grand Hôtel as a new “travel phalanstery.” In other words, it was a self-sufficient utopian enclave, a kind of paradise...[+]