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By
LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
1914
It must have been Bourke who first said that even if you knew your wayabout Paris you had to lose it in order to find it to Troyon's. Butthen Bourke was proud to be Irish.
Troyon's occupied a corner in a jungle of side-streets, well withdrawnfrom the bustle of the adjacent boulevards of St. Germain and St.Michel, and in its day was a restaurant famous with a fame jealouslyguarded by a select circle of patrons. Its cooking was the best inParis, its cellar second to none, its rates ridiculously reasonable;yet Baedeker knew it not. And in the wisdom of the cognoscenti this waswell: it had been a pity to loose upon so excellent an establishmentthe swarms of tourists that profaned every temple of gastronomy on theRive Droit.
The building was of three storeys, painted a dingy drab and trimmedwith dull green shutters. The restaurant occupied almost all of thestreet front of the ground floor, a blank, non-committal double doorwayat one extreme of its plate-glass windows was seldom open and even moreseldom noticed.
This doorway was squat and broad and closed the mouth of a wide,stone-walled passageway. In one of its two substantial wings of oak asmaller door had been cut for the convenience of Troyon's guests, whoby this route gained the courtyard, a semi-roofed and shadowy place,cool on the hottest day. From the court a staircase, with an air ofleading nowhere in particular, climbed lazily to the second storey andthereby justified its modest pretensions; for the two upper floors ofTroyon's might have been plotted by a nightmare-ridden architect afterwitnessing one of the first of the Palais Royal farces.
Above stairs, a mediaeval maze of corridors long and short, complicatedby many unexpected steps and staircases and turns and enigmatic doors,ran every-which-way and as a rule landed one in the wrong room, linkingtogether, in all, some two-score bed-chambers. There were no salons orreception-rooms, there was never a bath-room, there wasn't even runningwater aside from two hallway taps, one to each storey. The honouredguest and the exacting went to bed by lamplight: