'I insist upon my rooms being beautiful. I can't abide ugliness in factories,' announces diva-like confectionary magnate Willy Wonka to the golden-ticket winners in Roald Dahl's children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Via his mad-cap and childlike imagination, a chocolate processing plant is transformed into a fantastical wonderland. It's a scintillating world filled with churning waterfalls of cocoa and miraculously grown trees of sweets, and was responsible for firing up the wandering imaginations and waistlines of an entire generation.
While those Wonka-heads will forever live with the disappointment of reality, a close second does exist in the the factory belonging to La Maison du Chocolat, understood to be one of world's best chocolatiers.
There's always been a rivalry between French, Belgian and Swiss chocolatiers. But France can lay serious claim to having perhaps the celebrated chocolate tradition - they invented the truffle, after all. Headed by Gilles Marchal, a former pastry chef at the Plaza Athenee and Le Bristol hotel, today he is showing us around the company's Nanterre headquarters, situated in a non descript suburb in the hinterlands of Paris' industrial estates.
Before you enter the factory floor, the air is dizzyingly heavy with the nutty aroma of cocoa - it's so cloying, you want to faint from the languid smell. And it's all understandably clinical: a careful and ritualised ablution must be performed, where scrubs are worn to prevent any unwanted human detritus from mingling with the delicate production process.
Of course, that's all extraneous once you actually step foot on the floor. The heavy aroma gives away to light tropical notes - a reminder of the chocolate's exotic origins in Madagascar, Ghana or the Caribbean. Marchal sources his chocolate from Valrhona, a French chocolate-maker considered to be one of the best in the world who supplies its 'couverture chocolate' - a high quality form which uses the best chocolate beans.