Ancien hôtel Scipion ou ancienne boulangerie des Hôpitaux de Paris

English translation

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History

Maurice Bullioud settled in the Saint-Marcel district from 1532. Documents tell us that he had a first residence built between 1540 and 1565, called the "hôtel de Bulles": it was a large house composed of several building blocks and a large garden with at its centre "two houses". It was repurchased by Scipion Sardini, banker to Catherine de' Medici, in 1565 or 1580 according to sources. Tuscan like her, Scipion Sardini had come to France in the retinue of Catherine de' Medici, in whose entourage he made a considerable fortune, inspiring a bard to write the couplet "Recently a sardine, today a big whale: this is how France fattens little Italian fish". His political role and his too-rapid fortune earned him enmities. The sources do not allow us to know whether it was his principal residence or a country house. After the death of Scipion Sardini in 1609, the hôtel was converted into a hospice in 1612, the "hospital of the confined poor", it housed a bakery and a butcher's shop. It was then sold to the administration of the poor confined in the city of Paris by Marguerite Cousinet, widow of François d'Amboise, master of requests, who had acquired it from Pierre Plombier, president in the chamber of accounts of Grenoble. It was subsequently assigned to the Hôpital-Général in 1656 to create a maternity and nursing home under the name of Sainte-Marthe hospital. From 1673 to 1793, the hôtel was adjacent to the Clamart cemetery. After the French Revolution, it became the bakery of the Paris hospitals while being close to Sainte-Catherine cemetery. It retained this bakery function until 1974 when it was converted into a museum and then into an administration of Assistance publique - Hôpitaux de Paris (AP-HP) from 1983; a function it still occupies. Almost nothing remains of the former bakery activity housed in these walls for three centuries. Only a few ovens from the 19th or 20th centuries survive, beneath the boiler room of the adjoining hospital.

Description

The composition of the building is expressed by successive enlargements around a main courtyard, ranging from the first building dating from the 16th-17th century, from the 18th to the 19th century. It is composed of a Renaissance wing, the Scipion wing, built in the mid-17th century, when the building was assigned to hospital use; a Medici wing which houses the bakery ovens and the Vesalius wing built in the 19th century, remodelled in the 20th century.