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Are you free mornings at eight?

Is la caisse a cultural icon?

I am in a department store and see a soap dish that I like. I have the one hundred francs right here, the package will fit into my knapsack, and on to dinner—not. The salesclerk takes the dish from my hand and gives me a piece of paper. With it I go to the opposite end of the floor and wait as the empty-handed shoppers ahead of me converse earnestly and at length with La Caisse. The French are not a superficial people. Several modes of payment are possible and the meanings attendant to each must be explored. Payment concluded, claim ticket in hand, I cross the floor once again to the bath accessories department and these possibilities: the clerk who holds the dish is nowhere to be found, the clerk who holds the dish has never seen me before in her life and can’t imagine what dish I’m talking about, the clerk who holds the dish remembers everything but where she put it. Pas de problème, here is another just like it. Well, almost—it is a bit larger and twenty francs more. A notation on the chit, another trip to La Caisse, a return to her and…voilà, the soap dish is mine.

Is this why the French dine late?

Are the motionless people in cafés recuperating from shopping expeditions?

How do you say “efficiency expert” in French?

Were the coquilles Saint-Jacques that Alice and Brad Hinkel of Des Moines enjoyed at Chez Claude (and asked Gourmet to get the recipe for) in fact … frozen?

Don’t deny that it is possible. The evidence is, as with Poe’s purloined letter, hidden in plain sight—260 Picard stores full of frozen food lining the streets of France. Oh, they are wily. They have named the stores Les Surgelés—one glance through the window at the white-clad salespeople and low, long cases that you can’t see into enhances the uneasy feeling that medical implements that you’d rather not think about are on sale there. Chef Claude may well have studied with Paul Bocuse—but don’t tell me that when he has one of those nonstop days, he doesn’t sneak into Picard for everything from soupe to noix. When the guests, ravenous from museum walking, rush in asking, “What’s for dinner?” he puts on his signature touch, a tomato rose, and produces the plate with a flourish. When they heap praises upon him, he stifles a knowing smile and thinks, “Just the way I’d do it myself, if I had the time.”

Can a dish consisting of potato noodles, cheese, and ham (gnocchi-jambon-fromage) really be Weight Watchers?

What’s the real story behind Croque Monsieur and Croque Madame?

Have you ever eaten a bad meal?

Can I come and live with you?

Your age, gender, and appearance are, as they say in the personals, not important. Oh, French person, I want to live your life. I want to walk kilometer upon kilometer every day—single file down narrow, curving streets and six abreast on large boulevards. I want to pay three dollars for a tablespoon of coffee with a chocolate wafer on the side. I want to order a tartine avec confiture (bread and jam) at a different café every morning and notice how the bread is always a different length and consistency, the butter thick or thin, salted or sweet, the jam apricot or strawberry, already spread on or in a dish to the side, the price never twice the same. I want to pay confidently with money I no longer have to put on my glasses to check the denomination of. I want to shop where the bottle with the red cap is whole milk and the bottle with the blue cap is double crème. I want to go to a dry cleaner who calls a suit a costume and returns the pants done up in gift-wrapping paper. I want to eat yogurt that sometimes tastes like sour cream and sometimes like sweet cream and is filled with fruits like rhubarb and figs. I want to stand in line for an ice cream cone where each scoop comes nestled in its own compartment.

I want to live where sitting is an activity that people get dressed up and go outside to do. I want to live where people who smoke don’t cough and people who eat fat aren’t fat and everyone