Since 1680 the Comédie-Française had been performing in their first theatre, the Hôtel Guénégaud, but because of its proximity to the newly constructed Collège des Quatre-Nations, the company was asked by the school's leaders to move further away to minimise the bad influence of the actors on the students of the college. By an act of 8 March 1688 the actors purchased the Jeu de Paume de l'Étoile on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Prés. They also acquired two adjacent buildings at 17–19 rue des Mauvais-Garçons. Unlike for most French theatres of the period, the architect François d'Orbay did not convert the tennis court into a theatre, rather the existing building was demolished and a new building was erected on the site. The total cost of the new theatre was 198,433 livres, about one third of which was for the purchase of the land and the existing structures. by Étienne Le Hongre The theatre was inaugurated on 18 April 1689. Its design is known from documents found at the Archives Nationales and the archives of the Comédie-Française, and from architectural plans published by Jean Mariette after the originals and reproduced by Jacques-François Blondel in his Architecture françoise of 1752. The plans were also re-engraved and published in 1772 in Diderot's Encyclopédie. D'Orbay fit the theatre into a constricted site that was an irregular quadrilateral with oblique frontage on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain-des-Prés. He fit the stage service areas into the ancillary buildings on the irregular terrain to the south. The façade of cut stone is shown in an engraving from Blondel's book and in the original plans conserved in the archives of the Comédie-Française. It consisted of 7 bays of 3 storeys and an attic with a mansard roof. On the ground floor, in the outer two bays on each side were four doors opening to the interior. The central three bays, topped with a triangular pediment and flanked with rusticatedpilasters, formed a grand avant-corps. A high relief sculpture of the goddessMinerva by Étienne Le Hongre decorated the tympanum. Le Hongre's sculpture survives, mounted in a similar location on the façade of the current building and declared a monument historique on 29 March 1928. Below the pediment were the Arms of France sculpted in low relief, and below that, at the level of the main floor, a decorative medallion inscribed with the words "Hotel des Comédiens ordinaires du Roy entretenus par Sa Majesté M.D.C.LXXXVIII ". An iron balcony ran along the entire facade, and on the ground floor in the outer bays of the avant-corps were two ticket windows. By 1770 the theatre had become too cramped. The last performance was on 31 March 1770, and the company moved to provisional quarters at the Théâtre des Tuileries.
