Etienne Truteau was a French soldier who built his two-storey stone house in the heart of what was then the colonial settlement of Ville-Marie. He lived there until his death in 1712, never imagining his home would outlast the empire that sent him across the Atlantic. The house changed hands several times before Richard Dulong transformed it into a fully operating inn on March 4, 1754, making it one of the earliest licensed establishments in North America. Under British rule, which had arrived with the conquest of New France in 1760, the inn received its historic liquor licence. Travellers on long journeys through the colony found a place to rest, eat, and drink behind those thick stone walls. For over a century, the inn thrived as Montreal grew from a colonial outpost into a major port city.

By the 19th century, competition from newer establishments had eroded the inn's trade. The building was converted back into a townhouse, its days of hosting travellers seemingly over. But in 1914, a man named Ludger Truteau -- bearing the same surname as the original builder, though the exact family connection is unclear -- restored the building to its original vocation and renamed it Auberge Saint-Gabriel. The inn survived both World Wars and the dramatic social upheavals of Quebec's Quiet Revolution. In 1987, the Bolay family purchased the establishment and continued operating it as an inn for travellers, maintaining the stone-walled character that had defined the building for three hundred years.

The modern Auberge Le Saint-Gabriel is co-owned by Marc Bolay, the Quebecois singer Garou, and Guy Laliberte, the founder of Cirque du Soleil. Under their stewardship, the inn has been renovated to straddle tradition and modernity -- a phrase food critics have used to describe the experience of dining beneath centuries-old stone arches while eating contemporary French-Canadian cuisine. The restaurant serves braised lamb shank with white coco beans and rosemary-infused braising juices, lobster galette in thick bisque flavored with Cognac and tarragon, and an array of dishes that reflect Quebec's culinary evolution from hearty colonial fare to refined gastronomy. The establishment also houses banquet rooms for private functions, a club in the basement, and valet parking -- amenities that Etienne Truteau could never have foreseen for his modest soldier's house.

Old buildings in Old Montreal accumulate stories the way their walls accumulate soot, and Auberge Le Saint-Gabriel has its share. The most persistent tale involves the ghost of a young girl who died in a fire sometime during the 19th century. Staff and visitors have reported hearing the sound of a piano playing when no one is near the instrument. The story has survived decades of retelling, outlasting many of the inn's owners and renovations. Whether the ghost is real or simply a good story for a building that has stood since the reign of Louis XIV is beside the point -- in a city where the past presses against the present as closely as the cobblestones of Old Montreal press against the asphalt of the modern city, a haunted inn from 1688 feels exactly right.

Walking into Auberge Le Saint-Gabriel today means passing through a door that has been opened and closed for over 330 years. The stone exterior looks much as it did when Truteau laid it, though the interior has been updated with the careful balance of old and new that defines Montreal's best heritage restorations. The thick walls keep the interior cool in summer and warm in winter; the wooden floors creak with the weight of centuries. Old Montreal itself -- the cobblestoned district along the St. Lawrence waterfront -- preserves the footprint of the original French colonial settlement, and the auberge is one of its oldest surviving structures. It stands as proof that the best way to preserve a building is to keep using it, to keep filling it with the sounds of conversation and clinking glasses and, perhaps, the faint notes of a phantom piano.