Paris When It's Sweet, Part 2
A spoonful of chocolate makes the medicine go down...for Marie Antoinette
As you will remember, we were walking west on the boulevard St. Germain, with the younger members of your party looking for a street sign containing the French word for “father”.
Our sign successfully spotted—the rue des Saints Pères—there is a bit of triumphant jumping around before we turn right and walk to the middle of the block to see the exquisite facade of Debauve & Gallais Chocolaterie.
As everyone oohs and ahs over the prettily decorated landmarked building, I walk you up to the window and point out this portrait and begin telling you the story.
In 1779, the pharmacist of King Louis XVI, Sulpice Debauve, was tasked with creating a headache remedy for the queen, who suffered chronic pain. M. Debauve knew that Marie Antoinette loved chocolate and despised the bitterness of the medicines she was given. He came up with the idea of mixing his headache remedy with cocoa butter and almond milk to make the first dark chocolate with medicinal properties. He formed them into small crisp disks that Marie Antoinette claimed resembled the Spanish coin called the “pistole,” so that’s what Debauve named them.
Note - up until now, chocolate had only been consumed in liquid form. So Debauve is celebrated as the person who made chewable chocolate.
When no longer tasked with curing the queen’s headaches (insert guillotine joke here), Debauve went on to become Napoleon Bonaparte’s chocolatier. With his nephew, Gallais, Debauve founded the company that moved to this location in 1819. The company’s motto, borrowed from Horace, is “Utile Dulci!” or “useful sweets,” because since the beginning their focus has been on “healthy chocolate.”
Luxuriously decorated in the neoclassical style by the First Empire architects who designed the pink mini-arc de triomph in front of the Louvre as well as the arcaded buildings along rue de Rivoli, the facade and the elegant hemi-circular counter (reminiscent of a pharmacy) are now listed as historical monuments.
So, full disclosure: during our tour, I haven’t actually been able to tell you all of this. I shortened it for those with less patience to a 30-second story about Marie Antoinette and her headaches and her love of chocolate and naming them pistoles. And now we walk through the front doors and breathe in the inimitable smell of freshly made chocolate, and head to the right-hand counter to admire the pistoles.
Their medicinal properties are still touted, a fact that no one seems to care about when choosing the 1 pistole each that we will buy and sample. The choices of dark chocolate are: The King’s Pistole (vanilla), the Refined (coffee), the Connoisseurs (dark chocolate 74% from Madagascar), the Young Ladies (with honey flakes), the Ladies (orange blossom), for Evening (verbena), the Purists (dark chocolate 100%).
In the milk chocolate section, they were out of the plain milk chocolate, which is advertised as “La Pistole des Enfants”, shaming any self-respecting adult chocolate lover into selecting one of the dark chocolate choices. So for the kids we buy two milk chocolate pistoles with almond milk, called “La Pistole de la Reine.” For the adults, we buy honey flakes, verbena, coffee and orange blossom.
The children immediately crunch into their pistoles and shrug, as if to say, “Why all the hype? It’s just chocolate.”
This is because they didn’t read the instructions on the bag, which translate thus:
“Above all, take your time and make every moment of tasting a moment of eternity, in the peace and quiet of your home, surrounded by loved ones. With your mind at ease, absorb yourself in the enjoyment of a chocolate. The palate appreciates all the aromas as soon as the sensation of hunger is not pressing or the saturation of the taste buds following a copious meal wears off. Placed in the middle of the tongue, delicately broken with the teeth after a few seconds of controlled waiting, during which the coating warms up, the candy remains in the mouth until the intimate blend of subtle aromas it contains subjugates the palate with all its rich flavours.”
Basically, friends, this is a shameless attempt to hypnotize us with chocolate.
One of us bites into their verbena pistole, just to see what happens. Nothing. It’s a fine chocolate, that’s clear. But the flavoring is so subtle that, standing in the middle of the shop with young ones jumping around saying, “Let’s go to the next place!” it is basically impossible to detect any additional ingredient.
The rest of the party takes their cue from the guinea pig taster, and tucks their pistoles into their bags to taste later, “in the quiet of their home, surrounded by loved ones” and all the rest.
We leave the boutique and return to the street where I give the next clue. We are heading left out the door and the young ones must search for a boy’s name, at which point we will turn right.
(Fast forward to the evening. You take your orange blossom pistole out of your bag. Your loved ones are somewhere near, but not imposing. You sit in a comfortable armchair, put your tired feet up, and slip the pistole onto your tongue. You close your eyes and concentrate on the confection in your mouth. You taste chocolate. And then as it begins to melt…there it is. The slightest hint of orange blossom.)
See you in the next post to sample one of Paris’s current favorite delicacies!
Absolute magic! Thank you for this adventure. <3