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A homage to the novelist Marcel Proust, the hotel features sumptuous spaces that conjure the Belle Époque and in them you’ll discover objects linked to the hotel’s namesake, including an autographed copy of “Swann’s Way.”

A dandy who reads Proust and listens to Édith Piaf, Alexandre is obsessed with the past, mainly the aborted revolution of 1968.

Mine will be the Summer of Proust, as I work my way through “In Search of Lost Time.”

As a teenager, he said, he read Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in a day and Marcel Proust’s monumental “Remembrance of Things Past” in a week.

Indeed, Man Ray’s deathbed photograph of Marcel Proust makes a fitting bookend to Nadar’s of Victor Hugo.