Although a more grizzled clientele of gallery-owning types lunch on the plat du jour here, La Palette is predominantly a bar, and an essential one, at that.

Jazz plays indoors, where proper aproned waiters come and go from the traditional zinc bar; the brown walls, old-school murals, caked painter’s palettes and mirrors are all truly charming. But what you’ve really come for is the terrace, set just off the narrow rue de Seine, which always fills up by night with students from the nearby Ecole des Beaux-Arts, young American dilettantes and bobo types from all over Paris, smoking, talking and drinking Ricard and good wine.

To leave any given subterranean den and come here for your last drink of the night is something like heaven.