Hôtel Pont Royal

At the Pont Royal, the most interesting room used to be the one without a view. It was in the basement, a short walk from the offices of Gallimard, and the writers who went there rarely seemed in a hurry to leave. Editors brought their authors. Authors brought grievances, new books, old feuds. Over a drink, the fate of French literature could be discussed without the inconvenience of putting anything in writing.

In 1947, young Saint-Germain had its own underground kingdom. Across the neighbourhood, Le Tabou opened in a cellar on rue Dauphine, where jazz, dancing and Juliette Gréco helped make going downstairs the fashionable thing to do. The Pont Royal's basement was a different sort of club. Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and writers published by Gallimard came for the relative privacy. They could argue here without becoming part of the spectacle outside. For a hotel opened in 1923, it was a remarkable second life: less a place to stay than a place to finish a conversation.

You won't find the same scene if you take the stairs today. The famous basement bar belongs to the hotel's past. F-Sharp is the present-day address for cocktails; the adjoining Library Lounge hosts live jazz. It is a deliberate nod to the district's old nightlife, not a surviving 1947 club. The distinction matters. Paris is very good at dressing up nostalgia, and the Pont Royal has enough real history not to need a counterfeit.

The hotel itself is reassuringly old-fashioned. Its entrance on rue de Montalembert is only a few steps from rue du Bac, yet the mood is removed from the shoppers and gallery-goers outside. There are armchairs in which to sit properly, books worth opening and service that makes no attempt to become a performance. It is easy to imagine ordering one drink and discovering that it is later than you thought.

Then there is dinner. L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon opened beside the hotel in 2003, with a radical little proposition: take serious French cooking off its pedestal and place the guests on stools around the kitchen. The red-and-black room is theatrical in its own way, but the show is the work at the counter, not the person eating. You can book it without sleeping here, just as you can stay here and eat somewhere else. That independence is part of the appeal. In the morning, breakfast takes place separately, overlooking a small Japanese-style garden.

Upstairs, the rooms are less dramatic than the hotel's reputation. A Superior measures eighteen to twenty-two square metres, and the decor can feel rather traditional for the bill. Even the Deluxe Eiffel, with its balcony and extraordinary view from the sixth or seventh floor, is just twenty-three square metres. If you want room to linger, the suites are a more sensible proposition; on the eighth floor, the panoramic suites have terraces above the rooftops. The view is Paris at its most generous. The room beneath it is not necessarily enormous.

You are paying for an address as much as a bedroom. The Musée d'Orsay is close, the Seine is down the street and the Pont Royal takes you towards the Tuileries. There is no destination spa to hide in, and some recent guests have found the bedrooms tired for five-star prices. If a gleaming bathroom or generous floor space matters more than neighbourhood and atmosphere, think carefully about the rate.

But go down for a drink, even if the old bar is gone. The best thing about the Pont Royal was never the basement itself. It was the notion that an evening could become interesting enough to forget where the stairs were.