Hotel Bienvenue

Paris, that grand old dame with a dark humour, loves to play tricks on tourists. Little do they realise she’s too classy to hang out on the Champs-Elysées or at the Eiffel Tower. You might, though, catch a glimpse of her in Pigalle. Situated across the Boulevard de Clichy from Sacre Coeur and Montmartre, this former red light district – home to the Grand Guignol theatre and the Moulin Rouge and once the haunt of Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh – is now a purlieu for French and other (often British) hipsters. Especially to the south, which has taken on an anglicised moniker: ‘South Pigalle’ or ‘SoPi’.

It’s among this confection of quaint cafés, boutiques, bars and boulangeries that Mrs Smith and I found Hotel Bienvenue late one evening on a relatively quiet side street opposite a church. Through its cast-iron art deco entrance we stepped into a marble hallway flanked by crimson banquettes with floral cushions. A handsome reception desk was manned by a baudelairian type who had to shake himself from a poetic reverie to retrieve our key. The restaurant was closed, he absently declared, until the new year.

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more Parisian, we decamped to our fifth-floor privilege room by taking turns in the one-person antique elevator that skewers this supermodel-thin townhouse. Those averse to tight spaces might opt for the spiral staircase which snakes helter-skelter-like around the ornate lift shaft.

The room was similarly compact and clever: the deco-inspired bedhead and lamps; the window opening onto a jigsaw of rooftops; the elegantly tiled bathroom with twin sinks and a tub were all a little neater than we’d anticipated for this relatively budget option. But what sets this room apart from those on the lower floors is the shower cubicle that doubles as a hammam. Much like with the elevator, a turn-of-the-century contraption kept up-to-date with 21st-century controls, we had to applaud the engineering that went into installing a hi-tech miniature steam room on the fifth floor of a hundred-years-old building.

Giggling like extras in a Carry On film, Mrs Smith and I shed our clothes and piled in, eager to ratchet up the heat controlled digitally from the LCD screen on the wall inside. The next hour evaporated in a steamy blur until we emerged, pink as lobsters, to ready ourselves for a night out in Pigalle.

The midweek action seemed to centre around the streets branching star-like off place Gabriel Kaspereit, especially rue Henry Monnier and rue Frochot. We dined first on dreamy coq au vin and carotte râpée in atmospheric Buvette before swinging north around the Grand Pigalle Hotel (which looked an excellent shout for cocktails by the way) past a neon-red ‘sex shop’ sign to Dirty Dick, an upcycled tiki bar that couples a voodoo-inspired menu of cocktails served in coconuts or skulls with kitsch tropical decor. ‘Calm Before the Storm’ was the appropriately titled cocktail for how our night progressed.

We awoke nursing rum-stricken heads; but it was nothing a blast in the hammam and a continental breakfast couldn’t shift. Fresh cheese, cold meats and buttery croissants were très délicieux (everything at this point had become très). The morning also shed light on areas of the hotel we hadn’t seen – namely the leafy, kaleidoscopic courtyard, which we imagined comes into its own in the summer.

We wondered, too, how South Pigalle would look in the daytime. From the hotel you’re a block east from the apex of rue Notre Dame de Florette and rue des Martyrs, two endearingly Parisian streets with such a high concentration of cool cafes, shops and bars that they occupied us for the entire day. Sacre Coeur is on a hill, after all.

There was Emmanuelle Zysman, the punk jewellery shop; Le Comptoir Belge, specialising in Belgian waffles like you’ve never tasted; Chez Michou, the half-century-old transvestite cabaret; Mademoiselle Madeleines, selling exquisite madeleine cakes and nothing else; Sébastien Gaudard, the expert pastry maker; a Scandinavian toy shop; a haberdashery; a Japanese kimono shop; an anarchic bookstore; and, on place St. Georges, a streetside brasserie opposite a small theatre in what is probably the cutest cobbled square in all of Paris.

Feeling a little guilty after testing our third café (but feeling fairly caffeinated), we thought we’d clear our conscience with something cultural. The Louvre was only a stroll away, but two blocks east of rue Notre Dame de Florette is the Musée National Gustave Moreau. The modest first floor – the painter’s living quarters – doesn’t quite prepare you for the upper levels: two high-ceilinged halls hung with reams of almost embarrassingly ambitious art. Only a tortured Parisian, we agreed, would have the testicules to tackle Alexander the Great’s conquest of India, the head-severing Salome, Oedipus and the Sphinx, Ulysses’ return from the Odyssey, a portrait of King David (why not?), and the life (and death) of Jesus H Christ. These aren’t your regular baroque pieces, either: each masterwork is caked in absurd symbolism (we loved the unicorns with dead black eyes). It was well worth a coffee-fueled hour or two.

Culture out of the way, it was back to the booze. We caught the Metro into town for a stroll around Notre Dame, then stumbled into a cosy Corsican bar for a glass of Grand Marnier. The only seats were at the bar, manned by your typically enormous Corsican barkeep and a bedraggled, one-eyed drunk who payed us no mind whatsoever as they sang Corsican ballads with heartfelt earnest.

It was bitterly cold on our return leg, which made the low-lit foyer at Hotel Bienvenue all the more inviting. The receptionist, who’d earlier abandoned his notebook to attend to our probably quite irritating whims (‘Where’s the nearest flea market?’ ‘Can we borrow some scissors?’), bid us goodnight. He was as accommodating as the rest of the staff; all of them unwaveringly professional in the face of our boozed, English-speaking ignorance.

The following morning, over breakfast, we assessed our stay. At no point had we looked in at the Louvre, sailed the Seine, or even spotted the Eiffel Tower. But how many tourists seek that Paris, returning home with only a string of sightseeing fails, aching feet and an empty wallet to show for it? We’d spent two nights in Paris a la Pigalle, and she turned out to be a riot. Merci beaucoup Hotel Bienvenue. Or, as Mrs Smith put it: ‘Merci beaucoup very much’.