Baudon de Mauny

Though I can see a blazing sun doing its best to bore its way through window-masking muslin, our vast bedchamber is cool, calm and airy. All around us is white. The intricately corniced walls and lofty ceiling are milk coloured and decorated with elaborate frescoes of frolicking fauna; and everything, from the huge bed in which I'm lying, to the curtains rippling gently in the breeze of a Montpellier morning, is Arctic-pale. It feels as though we’re in the video for ‘Imagine’. All we’re missing is a white baby grand. And John Lennon.

My Yoko is starting to stir. Mrs Smith extricates herself from the soft cotton sheets and begins her journey across several feet of cool flagstones towards the ornate bathroom. Halfway there, she stops. ‘Did last night really happen?’ she asks, furrowing her brow. It seems unbelievable now that we’re ensconced in such tranquil surroundings, but, yes, unfortunately last night did happen. Somewhere between checking ourselves into this beautiful 18th-century townhouse in the ancient Ecusson quarter and returning to our chambre d’hôte around midnight, we’d ended up in a slanging match with a furious chef out in the place du Marché-aux-Fleurs.

There’s no dining room at this boutique bed and breakfast so, after dropping off our bags and stealing a peek into a couple of elaborately wallpapered rooms, we’d headed out into the winding, caramel-coloured streets of Montpellier’s old town to eat at the fêted Tamarillos. On paper, our choice of restaurant was perfect – alfresco dining, a supposedly new take on French cuisine, a quasi-celebrity chef – what could possibly go wrong? Well, pretty much everything. Starters – cold ones at that – took more than an hour to arrive; the main course, a further 90 minutes. By the time we’d devoured our last mouthful of fish in the manner of grizzly bears falling upon their first post-hibernation kill, we were grumpy, deflated and – after drinking two bottles of wine on empty stomachs – very, very drunk.

We weren’t the only ones. Table after table, inebriated on expensive wine and livid about their ruined evening, diners demanded to see the chef. We lost count of the times Monsieur le patron stormed out of the kitchen, head down and fists clenched, looking like an angry Rottweiler who’d managed to chew his way through a fence. Being presented with a bill for more than €200 was the final straw. To the amusement of the predominantly French clientele, we asked to see the owner. ‘Look, even the English are complaining,’ a man on the next table whispered to his wife. Out came the chef, a red-faced ball of fury, who glowered darkly as we laid out our grievances. It escalated from there. At the peak of the row, the chef whirled and bellowed hoarsely, arms flailing like a newborn baby at feed-time, as he came under attack from five or six irate tables. People spilled out of nearby bars to watch.

Thank goodness then for Baudon de Mauny, a short walk away from the restaurant on Rue de la Carbonnerie. Just to walk through its heavy centuries-old wooden front door into the silent cobbled courtyard that leads to its grand stone staircase is – if you’ll indulge the Lennon analogy a little longer – an instant-calmer. And by the time we’d reclined on the antique scarlet sofa in the first-floor salon for a while, glasses of velvety Faugères red in hand, our anger had completely disappeared.

The next morning, after a late breakfast of pastries, fresh bread and fruit, we leave the hotel behind and head once more into the beautiful streets of the old town. Bathed in sunlight, its elegantly crumbling mediaeval buildings glow like buttercup-filled meadows, while its corkscrew alleyways provide all the shade a freckle-cheeked, closet ginger such as me requires. Though Mrs Smith, with enough Italian genes in her lineage to withstand the Mediterranean glare, is all for joining the locals and stretching out in the Jardin du Champ de Mars, I manage to lure her into the excellent – and air-conditioned – Musée Fabre to see an exhibition of surprisingly gynecological 19th-century paintings.

By dusk, we’re drinking champagne cocktails outside a parkside bar off Rue Foch, and watch leather-faced old men smoke on benches while their wives drag four-legged pompoms around the paths. Then we wander into the cobblestoned heart of the old town and secure an outside table at Le Grillardin – where, on first inspection at least, no one seems to be demanding their money back or threatening to inflict GBH on the chef. Our meal – which includes a wonderfully sticky and salty salad of pigs’ trotters, and garlicky, herb-infused cuttlefish – is superb. And, despite the presence of a roaming band of reggae-murdering trustafarians in the Place de la Chapelle Neuve, the experience is 100 times finer than the disaster of 24 hours ago.

Back in our soothing, blanched boudoir at Baudon de Mauny, I lounge on the bed and flick through a hilariously translated local-history book: ‘Saint Roch of Montpellier went alone in a wood and could have died if a dog had not brought him bread every day with a friend hand’. Meanwhile Mrs Smith takes full advantage of the luxe toiletries in the ensuite where antique charm meets contemporary cool. Such here-and-now touches somehow don’t diffuse the then-and-there feel, but it’s like being able to step back in time but without surrendering any modern-day sybaritic demands. It’s amazing how laid-back and utterly at home we feel. There are guests in Baudon de Mauny’s other four rooms too – it’s just that, thanks to the hotel’s laid-back ambience, you never see them. Everyone’s getting up when they want, lounging in the hip-and-historical salon when the mood takes them, and generally being as relaxed about everything as we are. Like John and Yoko, thankfully, we only have to imagine all the people.