Although there are more than 150 shops in Paris listed as historic monuments, these are often really just fronts or signs. Only some bakeries, cafés and chemist’s have kept their interior décor and furniture. Fewer still have retained their original function; the wonderful engraver Stern, for example, has become a restaurant.
One of the most elegant survivors of an increasingly bygone era, as formal and sophisticated as a museum, is the chocolate shop Debauve & Gallais at 30 Rue des Saints-Pères. What a delicious discovery! The interior as well as the gold-lettered Neoclassical façade were designed by Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine – the well-known architectural partnership responsible for Joséphine de Beauharnais’s Seine-side Château de Malmaison, among other highly ornate Empire-style projects during the reign of Napoleon I.
At Debauve & Gallais, its interior punctuated by columns and a half-moon display case, the chocolatier still sells its famous compositions in stemmed-glass compotiers and other sophisticated receptacles. Some of the chocolates, or rather their recipes, are themselves historic… Take, for example, Monsieur Sulpice Debauve’s early blend: a ‘therapeutic chocolate’ invented in his first shop in Saint Germain des Prés, founded in 1800, and made by mixing cocoa butter and cane sugar in a potion to combat headaches. It was a hit and Monsieur Debauve landed on the concept of producing high-quality products and marketing them for their health benefits.
Having become Louis XVI’s supplier, Debauve concocted for Marie Antoinette a mixture of coconut and almond milk that disguised the bitter taste of her medicine. These chocolates, which took the form of pistoles, or coins, engraved with the queen’s bust in silhouette, are still offered today at Debauve & Gallais, as are the ‘Croquamandes’ he invented with his cousin and co-partner, responding to a commission from Napoleon Bonaparte, for whom they had become the supplier.
The firm subsequently won renown; the food critic Brillat-Savarin even praised the sweetmeats in his famous The Physiology of Taste (1825). The chocolatier still belongs to the same family, which retains the motto of its inventors, utile dulci (the useful with the pleasurable), borrowed from Horace – a fitting name for a store that marries function with delight.
For more information, visit debauve-et-gallais.com
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