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Walt Whitman
It is unclear whether Walt Whitman ever set foot in the Hotel Albert, but the following claim has been made:
An American publisher remembered in old age “a large-boned old man in a sombrero” shuffling into the Hotel Albert (the anecdote is Ford Madox Ford’s, and is therefore suspect). “I am Walt Whitman,” said the old man, “if you’ll lend me a dollar you’ll be helping immortality to stumble on.” (The dollar would have been equally useful upstairs in the hotel, where Ryder hovered over his visions: American culture has the eerie habit of passing itself, in narrow corridors, ghostlike.)