Debauve & Gallais

The story begins not with a chocolatier but with a chemist. Sulpice Debauve was a trained pharmacist who served as apothecary to Louis XVI. The legend, repeated so often it has become part of the house's identity, is that Marie-Antoinette complained to him about the foul taste of her medicines. Debauve's solution was elegant: he folded the bitter remedy into cocoa, cane sugar, and sweet almond milk, and pressed the mixture into thin coin-shaped discs.

The queen approved. She called them pistoles — after the old gold coin — and the Pistoles de Marie-Antoinette are still made and sold in the shop today, each one stamped as it was then. It is one of the few cases in Paris where the founding object of a house has survived, unbroken, for more than two centuries.

A Shop by Napoleon's Architects

By 1819 the business had grown enough to warrant a proper shop, and here the decorative-arts story turns serious. The premises at 30 Rue des Saints-Pères were designed by Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, the two architects who effectively invented the Empire style and shaped the interiors of the Louvre, Malmaison, and the Tuileries for Napoleon.

What they built for a chocolate merchant is now a monument historique: pale wood panelling, a sweeping semicircular counter that curves around the room like the apse of a small chapel, and the quiet symmetry the Empire style did better than anyone.

You are buying the room and the lineage as much as the chocolate — and that is rather the point.

Purveyor to Kings

By 1816 Debauve had been named sole chocolate supplier to the French royal family, and the warrant followed the throne through every turn of a turbulent century. When his nephew Antoine Gallais joined in 1823 the house took the name it still carries. What makes it unusual among the great former royal suppliers is that it has stayed independent and family-run to this day.

Things Worth Knowing Before You Go