Hôtel de La Vaupalière, Private mansion in 8th arrondissement, France

Hôtel de La Vaupalière is a neoclassical mansion at 85 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré and 25 Avenue Matignon, built in 1768 by Louis-Marie Colignon. Its pale cream stone facade has a rusticated ground floor with a central door and tall glazed doors under striped awnings, a stone balcony with balustrade above, three arched windows with matching awnings, and three rectangular windows with dark railings and carved stone panels above. A dark slate roof with dormers tops the building, and broad stone steps lead to the entrance.

Louis-Marie Colignon, architect of the King, bought the plot in 1765, demolished a brewery and houses, and built the mansion in 1768. It was leased for life to Pierre Maignart, Marquis de La Vaupalière, who moved in on 1 October 1769 for 11,000 livres a year. In the 19th century Louis Visconti added two glazed vestibules to the perron. AXA made it its head office in 1995.

The marquise Diane de Clermont d'Amboise, wife of the first tenant, received Voltaire and the Philosophes in her salon, where Beaumarchais's Le Mariage de Figaro was read in 1783. In 1788 a wedding supper featured a miniature landscape with a river of live fish, and Ruggieri set off fireworks in the honeysuckle- and jasmine-scented garden.

The exterior and some interiors can be viewed from the street, though the building now serves as office space and is not fully open to the public. It sits in central Paris near Franklin D. Roosevelt Square and the corresponding metro station.

The mansion was seized during the Revolution as property wrongly attributed to émigrés, and its furniture was auctioned in Year III. The lemonade-maker Cathenois then rented it and ran a guinguette there, while Colignon's heirs, the Frossart-Rozeville family, struggled to recover it before selling to Count Roederer in 1802.