On my first visit to L’Hotel in 1974, I wasn’t allowed into the famously bohemian Rive Gauche hotel. I wasn’t the problem, precisely. I was traveling with a busload of raffish rock music journalists who’d come to see a Moroccan band called Les Variations play the famous Olympia concert hall. And L’Hotel was probably right to spurn us. I ended up rooming with the gonzo Detroit legend Lester Bangs at the George V, and after a night at Club Sept, returned to find he’d drunk the entire mini-bar, smashed all the bottles against the far wall of the room, and was dead to the world, splayed across his bed like a beached white whale.

A decade later, my future wife, who’d actually stayed at L’Hotel in the ’70s, took me back and we’ve been visiting ever since. Though we sometimes stray to another hotel or an AirBnB, we inevitably return to the place made infamous when an impoverished Oscar Wilde died there in 1900 (“above my means,” as he put it), following his release from Reading Gaol, where he’d been imprisoned for gross indecency. Decades later, Jean Cocteau, Marcello Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, Robert De Niro, Barbara Streisand, Jim Morrison, Mick Jagger, Princess Grace of Monaco, Liza Minnelli, Roman Polanski, Joséphine Baker, Aga Khan, Salvador Dalí, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, Natalie Wood, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and Serge Gainsbourg would follow, though they would survive their stays.

By the late 1980s, when I covered the Paris fashion shows twice a year, and regularly shared the chic hostelry with the likes of art dealer Holly Solomon, designers Romeo Gigli and Helmut Lang, Italian Vogue’s Franca Sozzani, and teams from Max Mara, Neiman Marcus, and Barneys New York, I was enough of a regular that the concierge held my mail. And once, when Gene Pressman of Barneys decamped early, my wife and I were moved to one of the penthouse suites, where Jacqueline Bissett turned up for cocktails on the arm of a friend.

But anyone will feel like a star at L’Hotel, after passing beneath the silver ram’s head that hangs over the doorway at 13 rue des Beaux Arts, into the sumptuous Jacques-Garcia-designed parlors. A domed central atrium ringed with a spiral stair leads to the twenty bedrooms, including the one where Wilde died, and another featuring the mirrored bed once owned by the singer and actress Mistinguett. Past the atrium, the Wilde bar offers sophisticated cocktails, and breakfast is served in an indoor/outdoor dining room. Below, in ancient vaults, guests can book private time in a small swimming pool and hammam—a perfect cure for jetlag.

“I have the simplest tastes,” Wilde once quipped, “I am always satisfied with the best.” That’s L’Hotel.