You will have recognized the Jeanne-de-Laval hotel-restaurant, at 34, boulevard du Roi-René, an Angevin “institution” which has seen the Tout-Angers pass through… The private mansion built around the years 1850-1860, owned by the Champrel-Villoutreys, then by the Brulon family, became a guesthouse in 1937.
In 1940, the Germans requisitioned it to make it their officers’ mess. The guesthouse was taken over in 1944 by Mrs. Boutin-Dupont who transformed it into a hotel-restaurant. “A born organizer, a hard worker” (“Le Courrier de l’Ouest”, July 11, 1960), she added a mobile kitchen to the establishment that could be used throughout the department, and far beyond, for several hundred meals.
It was she who served General de Gaulle in 1948 when he was received at La Romanerie by the deputy mayor Victor Chatenay, who provided the 700 place settings at the banquet for the centenary of the Cointreau house in 1949, the garden parties of the Angers Drama Festival in the gardens of the Prefecture, the international congresses at the Saint-Jean attics… How many parties, awards ceremonies, and association meetings have taken place in the salons of Jeanne-de-Laval! But everything must come to an end and the hotel-restaurant closed in 2008.
