A European walk through Bordeaux1
Start : 1, Place Jean Jaurès
L'Hostaley deu capet roge
The Hôtel du Chapeau
Rouge – 1 Place Jean Jaurès
For over two
hundred years, this site marked the first point
of contact for foreign travellers
arriving in Bordeaux. They would arrive at a renowned inn that once stood
here called the Chapeau
Rouge [red hat], outside which hung
a sign showing a cardinal’s hat and which also served
as a relay point for post horses.
Although we do not know exactly when it
was opened, the Chapeau
Rouge, or Hostaley deu
capet roge, is mentioned in a text dating back to 9 October 1464, in
other words one year after the French conquest of Bordeaux. The hotel remained an essential port of call through
to 1676. It gave its name
to the street in the 16th century.
In
1511, its owner, Aymeric de
Fayolle, built a real-tennis court to make it more comfortable,
then a chapel. In 1530, board and lodging cost 24 crowns per day. According to Father Baurein, there was a trunk
at the inn for receiving alms not only for the poor, but also for foreigners stripped bare by thieves.
Europe’s monarchs passed through here to enter the city.
And it is here, at the Chapeau Rouge, that
the inhabitants of Bordeaux gathered
to greet Holy Roman Emperor Charles V on 1 December
1539. It is also here, in exactly the same place, twenty years later almost
to the day, that they welcomed the wife of his son Philip II –
Elisabeth of Valois, daughter of Henry II of France
and already Queen of Spain through her marriage
celebrated by proxy on 22 June
of the same year – as she marched towards
Spain. Etiquette prevented the King of Spain from going to her,
demanding that she be brought
to him. On 6 December 1559,
Elisabeth of Valois made her grand entry into Bordeaux through the “Porte
du Chapeau Rouge” [red hat gate], on which had been inscribed a sixain in celebration of the new sovereign
of the Netherlands and Spain: her
“unparalleled beauty, her glory and her happiness,”
whose “very great merit [...] could embellish two nations at once: the Spanish
and that of the French.”
After a few
days in Bordeaux, in the words
of Jean de Gaufreteau, she was “taken to the French border, where she was
delivered to the King of Spain’s
envoys.” The young queen, soon to be called Isabelle de la paix
[Isabelle of peace] by her subjects, would go on to meet her husband
for the first time a few weeks later,
in Guadalajara.
John of Austria
arrived at the Chapeau Rouge one hundred
years later, in 1659. And ten years later, on 29 September 1669, architect Claude
Perrault stayed at the inn during its last years in the company of his brother: “We
lodged,” he said, “at the Chapeau Rouge, the city’s
most famous inn. It has given its name to the street in which it is situated,
surely the most beautiful of all Bordeaux, since it is compared
to Rue Saint-Antoine. And, indeed, it is almost
as wide. It has two gutters and is lined with many
beautiful houses.”
However, seven years later,
in July 1676, the inn was demolished. It was one of a block
of houses whose demolition had been ordered to accommodate the
extension of Château Trompette. Over three hundred houses located north of Rue du Chapeau
Rouge were razed to the ground.
After this, several establishments attempted to adopt the name in various eras and several different places in the city, without
ever managing to make such a famous
name for itself as did the inn built
in the Middle Ages, which enjoyed
two centuries of continuous
success.
Head for the building at
the corner of 4 Place Jean Jaurès.
© Bertrand Favreau
and Tyché Editions 2014
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