If the walls of the Hôtel de Paris could talk, they would probably require a very expensive lawyer.

Opened in 1864 by François and Marie Blanc, the hotel was part of an audacious plan to transform a rather sleepy little principality into the playground of Europe’s rich and powerful. The Casino had opened the year before, and the Hôtel de Paris provided somewhere suitably grand for its gamblers to sleep, dine and, presumably, recover from the night before. The formula worked. By 1869, more than 170,000 visitors were descending on Monte-Carlo.

Royalty arrived almost immediately. The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, was an early guest, along with Prince Napoléon. Over the decades the royal roll call grew considerably more impressive: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, Prince Peter of Yugoslavia, the Aga Khan and members of the Montenegrin royal family all passed through. Winston Churchill was another regular and returned after the Second World War. Apparently he sometimes travelled with his budgerigar, Toby…proof that even statesmen need an entourage.

Then came Aristotle Onassis. The Greek shipping tycoon arrived in Monaco in 1952 and eventually acquired a controlling stake in the Société des Bains de Mer, owner of the Hôtel de Paris and Casino. His vision for Monaco increasingly clashed with that of Prince Rainier III. Rainier ultimately won the rather glamorous corporate battle by engineering the issue of new shares, diluting Onassis’s control. Forget Succession…Monaco was doing it decades earlier, with better tailoring and considerably larger yachts.

The hotel’s guest book reads like someone emptied the contents of a particularly fabulous 20th-century dinner party into the lobby. Sarah Bernhardt, Charlie Chaplin, Maria Callas, Salvador Dalí and Alexandre Dumas all stayed here. Errol Flynn married actress Patrice Wymore in the Salle Empire in 1950, with Rita Hayworth and other Hollywood stars among the guests. And when Prince Rainier married Grace Kelly in 1956, the Hôtel de Paris became closely associated with Monaco’s new princess, who would remain a familiar presence here.

four-year, €280-million-plus transformation completed in 2019 brought the grande dame thoroughly up to date, while carefully preserving its historic façade, legendary lobby, wine cellars and Belle Époque soul. So while the history is wonderfully old, thankfully the plumbing is not.

Even James Bond couldn’t resist. The hotel appears in Never Say Never Again, while the cast of GoldenEye stayed here during filming. After more than 160 years, Hôtel de Paris remains gloriously theatrical…a Belle Époque palace where royalty, gamblers, movie stars and the occasional fictional spy have all come to play.