French bread

I couldn't figure out where to post this, but I thought some of you foodies would enjoy a couple of paragraphs copied from the week three letter I received from a friend who has rente an apartment in Paris for a month:

Bread has always been the stuff (and staff) of life and legend in France; one recalls the famous “Let them eat cake (actually, ‘brioche’),” when (supposedly) Queen Marie Antoinette was told that there wasn’t bread for the peasants. We have a Parisian friend who believes it is bad luck to throw away even a tiny crust of bread. Paris boasts 921 bread bakeries, according to David Lebovitz, and we’ve bought baguettes and loaves at several score of them in our attempts over the years to find the perfect, crisp, chewy dream of a loaf. This year we’ve tried bakeries in the Bastille, the Marais, rue Cler, and three boulangeries in our area in the 15th as well as loaves from Monoprix (Polane), Simply, Lafayette (Eric Kayser), and Casino. Despite the gourmand myths of Paris bread, we have often been disenchanted with many of the baguettes we have eaten. They can be dry, feeble-crusted, airy, flavorless, and unsatisfying. And this is not just personal bias based on the fact that French bread is one of my cooking fortes at home (also our key to party invitations). Wonderful loaves abound, but one has to search more diligently than one might expect for them.
Curiously, a little boulangerie just three blocks away from our apartment has some of the most flavorful bread we have eaten over the years, and it is almost as good as the delicious and much more famous handiwork of Eric Kayser (and I’m rather biased against the ultra-famous Polane, since in 2004 or 2005 I broke a front tooth on a loaf of his bread on our first day in Paris). So what is the perfect loaf? It needs firm, crispy, golden-brown crust, an interior texture that is moist and slightly chewy, a mixture of hole sizes with significantly more bread than holes, and, most importantly, it must have a rich, yeasty, wheaty flavor. Walking into a big boulangerie is a daunting adventure, as one often has the choice of at least a couple of dozen different kinds of loaves based on flour, seeds, baking techniques, shapes, recipes, and sizes, to mention just a few of one’s options. The French buy bread once or twice a day, so it is common to see them packing their loaves down the street. Some are given bags with the baguette end polking out which is inevitably bitten off and munched on. On rue Cler, one fellow had the loaf tucked in his armpit--not too appetizing. Others are given a napkin and grasp the long loaf in the middle, carrying it like a spear. Some hike it on the shoulder like a rifle. Some carry it like a club. We often see loaves sticking out of plastic grocery sacks, briefcases, pockets, cloth bags, and backpacks. This is a bread-centered nation.