Haunt · 1903
Hôtel Regina
Address · 2, place des Pyramides, 75001 Paris
Metro · Tuileries (1)
Today · Still open. Hotel, still in operation.
The story
The Hôtel Regina was born of the initiative of Léonard Tauber and Constant Baverez, who decided in 1898 to turn a building on place des Pyramides into a luxury hotel. The works, entrusted to the architect Armand Sibien, lasted about two years, and the establishment opened for the 1900 Exposition Universelle. Its name, a tribute to Queen Victoria, was meant to salute the Franco-British rapprochement. Facing its windows stands Emmanuel Frémiet's gilded equestrian Joan of Arc, unveiled in 1874. In 1919, representatives of the Allied Red Cross societies met there, a meeting that led to the future international federation.
On 24 March 1903, Crowley, then living in Montparnasse, lunched there with Major General Sir Hector Macdonald, who had recognised him in the restaurant's dining room, according to the Aleister Crowley Timeline. The son of Highland crofters, who had enlisted as a private in the Gordon Highlanders, Macdonald had covered himself in glory at Omdurman in 1898 and had commanded the British troops in Ceylon since 1902.
Rumours about his relations with young boys had driven him to return to Europe. In London, Lord Roberts had advised him to go back and face a court martial. The day after the lunch, 25 March 1903, he discovered in a morning newspaper, at the Regina, that the accusations had been made public, went back up to his room and took his own life. A commission concluded in June that no evidence supported the accusations. Some thirty thousand people attended his funeral in Edinburgh. The novelist Jake Arnott drew on this encounter for his novel The Devil's Paintbrush.
Crowley returned to the Regina the following year: the timeline places him there on 16 and 18 October 1904, a few days after his Masonic initiation, when he visited the Salon d'Automne at the Grand Palais.
The hotel still exists, run by the descendants of Constant Baverez, and was renovated between 2013 and 2015. From place des Pyramides one can see the Art Nouveau stone façade and a plaque recalling the former royal riding school that occupied the site.