Du Chat Noir, Paris

...foot of our hotel ‘L’Hôtel du Chat Noir’ (in English ‘The Black Cat hotel'). We looked up at the shabby looking building and shrugged, at £100 for a double room for 3 nights we weren’t expecting the Ritz. Entering the lobby I was reminded of the description given when I booked the rooms through octopus travel: ‘The lobby is very small, consisting of a narrow corridor leading to a small reception desk. There is one lift leading to all floors.’
...to capture the innate shabbiness of it all. The bloke at the desk was not unfriendly, however and he handed over our keys to room 79 (yes, on the seventh floor) with politeness considering the late hour. I looked at the stairs with dread but thankfully the man pointed me towards the small lift.

The elevator, like the rest of the hotel, was shabby and rather small, just about big enough for Mortimus, our bag and I. It also felt quite ... more

This is one of a series of ops about the Parisian holiday of Mortimus and I; our first together, and his first foreign holiday. This is only my second op so please go easy on me :-)

So there we were, just stepped off the Metro at Pigalle, the station we had guessed was closest to our hotel. We were bright eyed and bushy tailed after our remarkably short journey, thanks to easyjet, and ready to experience all things Parisian despite it being almost midnight. We emerged from the dimly lit Metro station into the lights of the city. There were actually rather a lot of lights, in many different colours. Oh, they’re signs on the shops, gosh these shops are open late. Lets see if I can practise some French already…S E X S H O P

I didn’t need my dictionary for that one. Nor for PORNOFILMS or PEEPSHOWS. Our hotel was in the middle of the red light district. I had been very excited when I found that it was situated on the same road as the famous Moulin Rouge, the film about which I love and have seen more times than I care to recall. I had in my mind the centre of bohemia shown in the film, with people making music and plays and drinking absinthe all night, I was…surprised.

We asked our way to the hotel using the Moulin Rouge as a landmark, knowing that our dwelling place would be between this Metro station and the infamous nightclub. Walking past the numerous sex shops and admiring the various drapes used in place of doors, we were totally bemused and slightly wary, but when we saw the respectable looking middle aged people sipping wine outside a bar on the street our fears were set aside to be replaced by a general sense of happiness and excitement at the days ahead.

Said bar was actually at the foot of our hotel ‘L’Hôtel du Chat Noir’ (in English ‘The Black Cat hotel'). We looked up at the shabby looking building and shrugged, at £100 for a double room for 3 nights we weren’t expecting the Ritz. Entering the lobby I was reminded of the description given when I booked the rooms through octopus travel: ‘The lobby is very small, consisting of a narrow corridor leading to a small reception desk. There is one lift leading to all floors.’
This is not an inaccurate description, although it fails to capture the innate shabbiness of it all. The bloke at the desk was not unfriendly, however and he handed over our keys to room 79 (yes, on the seventh floor) with politeness considering the late hour. I looked at the stairs with dread but thankfully the man pointed me towards the small lift.

The elevator, like the rest of the hotel, was shabby and rather small, just about big enough for Mortimus, our bag and I. It also felt quite unstable, and upon shifting your weight from one foot to the other it would shake disconcertingly. We gulped in unison.

We left the lift behind and made our way down the narrow corridor towards our room. I fit the key in the lock and turned, pushing the door and apprehensive about what sight would meet my eyes inside. Once again the description did not lie: ‘The rooms are small and in a poor condition. They are simply decorated and poorly equipped. Rooms facing the main street can be a little noisy.’
There was a bed, a wardrobe, a TV, a window (which due to the heat we gratefully found to be open) a desk and chair and a couple of lights on the little bedside tables. What’s more, there was also an ensuite bathroom, which I had not been expecting. For a young couple’s first holiday together in Paris we couldn’t have asked for more. Ok so there was no choccy on the pillow, no room service and no kettle with tea and biscuits, but a bed and a sink was all we really needed (and a window!). The room wasn’t particularly small, it didn’t smell bad and it wasn’t falling to bits. The decoration was…simple, and a little tatty but that didn’t bother me, and as for poorly equipped? Well I couldn’t find the trouser press or the iron but that again didn’t concern me greatly.

So we settled ourselves in, changed out of our travelling clothes and prepared ourselves to ‘hit’ the town, well, more like ‘tap it lightly’ as we were both quite tired. We braved the rickety lift again and deposited our keys with the man at the desk who wished us well and we went out into the bright lights of Pigalle. We decided to first try the bar we’d seen at the foot of the hotel and I ordered two beers in my best French. The man at the bar immediately asked me in English if I would like small or medium beers, to which I replied in French that I should like medium beers. He charged us €15 for the drinks and we sat down outside to watch the world go by and come to the realisation that we’d just paid £9 for two beers. After draining our glasses we vowed never to go near that bar again and made our way along the road to find greener pastures, eventually ending up in Corcoran’s Irish bar, where all the staff and most of the clientele were in fact Irish. What a waste of a plane journey to France.

We discovered that the best way to avoid being coaxed by the men standing outside their porno-show boutiques, or to be cat-called if you’re female, is to walk along the middle pavement, situated between the two carriageways of traffic, where there are no shops, only people loitering about or making their way from A to B. Pigalle is also the only place Mortimus or I have ever seen that has sex shops and greengrocers side by side and open at the same time, but it all adds to the charm.

When we returned from our little wander and consumption of no small amount of alcohol we found that right next door to the hotel was the Musée de L’Erotisme, and we decided that we should visit it before the end of our holiday, it was in fact still open at this time, approximately 2am, but we were ready for our beds. The man who was previously at the desk (the owner of the hotel at a guess) was standing outside the hotel awaiting our arrival. However I got the impression he didn’t usually shut up much earlier than this and the rooms were probably rented by the hour. Our room wasn’t facing the main road, but with the window open by necessity it was still noisy. The bed was fairly comfortable though, and we sank into sleep, excited by the possibilities of the two full days ahead of us in Paris.

Breakfast was served between 7.30am and 10am and was extremely basic. A croissant, small bread roll, butter and jam portions, a cup of orange juice and tea or coffee (which Mortimus reliably informed me was revolting, although the tea wasn’t bad) with plastic knives and plastic plates. Not the most inspiring meal to wake up to, Parisians clearly don’t go in much for breakfast, but the delicious and sizeable lunches and dinners we had in various restaurants made up for that.

Cost: £99 for a double room for three nights (in mid-July), inc. breakfast
Situation: 68 Boulevard de Clichy, 75018 Paris
Telephone: 33-1-42641526
E-mail: hotel.duchatnoir@worldonline.fr
Closest Metro stations: Pigalle, Blanche
For more information see www.octopustravel.com
 

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