This is something I love about France, and Paris, in particular.

The bakeries.

A trip to the boulangerie is a treat.

In Paris, good bakeries pretty much can be assumed.

Now and then you find one that seems to singe the baguettes day after day, or can’t seem to get the pan au chocolat right.

But if that is the case, you walk three blocks and try the next — which probably is just fine.

The warm baguette is something I have always loved. Fresh out of the oven, still a bit squishy, it is almost like a fragile, living thing — because in six hours it will be getting hard and in 12 hours it will be hard enough to use as a weapon.

That leads us to another advantage of French bakeries — in Paris, in particular.

They make bread twice a day.

When the baguette tradition is your stock in trade, you pretty much have to bake again in the afternoon. Can’t expect a Frenchman to buy a 15-hour old baguette.

And where else does that happen? Not in the U.S., certainly, where bread is expected to last for days, not for hours, and customers accept it.

Bakeries here have become multi-service businesses.

All along, they have been making other baked goods, the sweet and buttery croissant, the tiny tarts, the eggy brioche, the eclair.

But now (and this may have been the case all along), you expect your neighborhood bakery also to offer sandwiches for lunch, generally some combination of a baguette, jambon (ham) and fromage (cheese).

When I worked here, in the summer of 2001, I had one of those every day, though a downside must be conceded: The toasty ridges of baguettes eventually can gouge the roof of your mouth.

If I lived in a small town, in France, a town so small it had only one bakery, a competent boulanger would be very important. Probably a requirement.

Can’t do without that one-euro-10 magic bread stick.