It was mid-morning. We were in the Cafi Jade on the Rue de Buci in the Saint-Germain-des-Pris neighborhood. I always meet my English friend -- a Paris denizen for the last 35 years -- in cafes. That's where she does her entertaining, holds meetings, reviews scripts, edits manuscripts. She took a hummingbird sip at the black tar in her espresso cup and nodded at the goings-on: waiters whirling among the mushroom-shaped tables, a mixed clientele of aging regulars from the 'hood, loners, mavericks, tourists, Sorbonne students, a businessman seated outside on the shaded terrasse, shouting into his cellular telephone.

The open market was in full swing around the corner so the street swam with colors, movement, voices. Our table was an eddy: In safety we snapped up snatches of foreign and French conversation, feasted on the sight of passersby, drank in the kitchen smells of simmering food.
' "That's why one comes, isn't it?" asked my friend. "For this -- the life, the human contact."

Once the haunt of Paris inevitables like Jean-Paul Sartre, Picasso, Hemingway, et al, Saint-Germain-des-Pris may have lost most of its intellos (intellectuals), artists and retenues of sycophants. But its dozens of cafes live on very much as before -- with the exception of the famous Deux Magots and the Cafi de Flore, which have become exquisite tourist traps.

My friend and I hadn't actually meant to meet at the Cafi Jade, now a pleasant enough wannabe-trendy retro spot. Until a few months ago, it had been known as the Cafi Dauphin. We were unaware of the changeover. Gone are the Dauphin's booths with their slippery, pumpkin-colored moleskin seats. Now there are faux-antique wooden tables and hard-bottomed chairs. A salmon- colored neon tube curls across the ceiling. The awning is a matching salmon pink.

It's odd to feel nostalgic about the cruddy old Dauphin and its hideous 1970s decor, lousy food and worse coffee. But as my friend pointed out, the decor, food and coffee are marginal considerations. It's the feel of the place that counts, the atmosphere, the relationship between waiter and client, waiter and patron, patron and client, client and client.

This web is spun over months, years, decades. More than anyone perhaps, photographer Robert Doisneau captured this microcosm of Frenchness in his grainy black-and-white shots: images that have become icons and clichis, like berets, baguettes, pitanque bowlers, ripe camemberts.

Camembert or not, even today most Paris cafes are still family-owned or -managed and many, like Madame Renie's, are handed down through the generations, webs and all.

While they have long been taken for granted, recently these supremely democratic social institutions have become the focus of renewed attention and appreciation.

Restaurant critics have started reviewing them alongside their siblings, the bistros and brasseries. And for the last five years or so, a festival celebrating them has been held in late September: The Bistrots-en-Fjte, as it is known, has quickly evolved into a popular modern Bacchanal featuring dancing, feasting and drinking, often to excess.

The top end of the fashion/lifestyle industry has begun to pay attention too, wedding the cafe revival to Food-in-Shop, that nifty invention pioneered in London and New York. Now it's trhs chic to buy CDs and hang out at the Virgin Megastore cafe; drop megabucks at Emporio Armani and be surrounded by monied X-rays as you lap up a foamy cappuccino; and toy with the accessories at Lanvin before lunching in the modish Caffi Bleu.

An aberration of another kind is Ah! ga ira!, a self-service, patriotic, red-white-and-blue (yes, those are the colors of the French flag, too) cafe that opened this June. It's cold, charmless, has no waiters, no regulars and caters primarily to cheapo tourists, though many locals, fed up with high cafe prices, are being converted. The coffee is cheap, the beer is cheap and the decor is strictly high turnover, but you can get a decent brownie and a cuppa something hot for less than $3 (the place is not officially a cafe, so it pays only 5.6 percent Value Added Tax (VAT), not 21.6 percent like other cafes, and there's no 15 percent service charge, either).

The name refers to the cafe's location at Place de la Bastille, stormed by patriots in 1789. One of their Revolutionary chants included that catchy refrain, Ah! ga ira! -- yeah, we can do it, it'll all work out! Could it be the chant of a new Tax Revolt? Hmmmm ....

The nearby Cafi des Phares, the first and still most popular philosophy cafe in town, provides a counterbalance, with a volunteer army of bespectacled intellos ready if necessary to storm across the square and tongue-lash the faux-Revolutionary "ga ira" types with quotes from tomes by Pascal, Descartes, Camus, Sartre, Deleuze, Foucault.

That's about as political as cafes get in these post-Berlin Wall days.

In synch with Paris' cafe renaissance, a friend of mine, Daniel Young, food critic at the New York Daily News, has written an intelligent and amusing book called "The Paris Cafi Cookbook," featuring his favorite 50 Paris hot spots. Many happen to be my own personal favorites, too, and though soon I will no longer be able to get a table in them because of this opus, I must applaud it nonetheless.

It was in this book that I finally confirmed rumors of why French roast is better stateside and so uniformly awful here (ga n'ira plus!). It turns out that for a hundred years or more most Paris cafes have been controlled by an Auvergnat "mafia" that supplies everything from furniture to loans, lettuce to coffee beans.

The Auvergnat came to the capital from the impoverished Auvergne region centered around the Massif Central. They transformed cafes from their earliest Italianate incarnation into havens of the working class, serving food and drink while carrying on their main business activity -- selling coal or wood for heating.

This "mafia" is more like a mutual aid society and has nothing to do with organized crime. The rub is that the blends the Auvergnat supply their brethren are generally undrinkable, but everyone has always taken them and those who discontinue risk becoming PNGs.

As my long-suffering English friend and I walked from the Cafi Jade toward lunch at the Saint-Andri-des-Arts, we agreed that cafes, though burdened by high VAT and employment taxes, are nonetheless a good feeding-time alternative to even pricier restaurants.

Like 9,950 others, the Saint-Andri-des-Arts didn't make it into "The Paris Cafi Cookbook." For good reason: The food is nothing special. Yet we were happy to be greeted with the usual banter by our perennially pale-faced but cheerful waiter.

"You think there's less smoke out here than inside?" he quipped as we settled onto the terrace facing the Place Saint-Michel metro. "Now that we've put in a nonsmoking room, no one wants to come inside. There's more smoke from the buses and trucks out here."

But he couldn't convince us. We had our croque monsieurs (which sounds better than toasted milk-soaked bread with ham inside and melted cheese on top) in the sun. An impromptu gathering engulfed us as crowds of students rushed around buying and selling their textbooks on the square, a September back-to-school ritual.

Leaving my friend to her afternoon cafe meetings, I decided to stop at the remodeled Cluny on the Boulevard Saint-Michel on my way to the bus stop. Like the Jade, the Cluny has also received a retrofit: wooden tables and chairs, mock-old prints, bookcases. By shedding its moleskin and linoleum it's trying to reclaim its position as a literary cafe. The upstairs, especially, has become the haunt of scribblers of all kinds, most of them French, well-dressed and able to afford the stiff prices.

As I sipped my passable coffee upstairs and listened to the pens scratching away, I reflected on the fact that most of the working writers I know in Paris -- French, Italian, British and American -- are cafe habituis, with their own personal lists of favorites. But none would be caught dead scribbling in one.

Most of those beautiful pens and handsome writing pads at the Cluny -- and a hundred other self-styled literary haunts -- are doubtless used for composing letters back home to Peoria, shopping lists, Sorbonne course outlines and tragically unpublishable masterpieces.

As I rode the 96 bus toward my office in the 20th arrondissement, I tried to count the cafes we passed: about a thousand, I reckoned, before a pierced belly button and a Le Monde closed off my view.

Gluttony takes many forms, including the occasional desire for self-destruction, and I decided to indulge it, get off the bus and have yet another coffee -- this one admittedly a dica (decaffeinated) -- at one of the hottest of the Paris pseud hangouts, the 11th arrondissement's Cafi Charbon, on the Rue Oberkampf.

To fully appreciate the Cafi Charbon it's essential to know several Paris buzzwords. Branchi means hip, cool, hot, trendy, but is often used as a pejorative, because it suggests a lack of authenticity and an excess of frime, as in frimeur, the other pertinent buzzword. A frimeur is a poseur of a peculiarly pernicious sort, the kind employed to star in the very worst of current French cinema.

According to "The Paris Cafi Cookbook," the Charbon has been several things over the last 112 years, including a pocket theater and an industrial workshop. But it has never been an authentic Auvergnat, a coal- and wood-dispensing cafe, as its name would suggest. Everything in it is strangely marvelous, bona fide 100 percent frime. War of the World-style lamps. Zinc (tin) counter. Broken-tile floors. In short, a retro decorator's dream.

Yet it is so well done that most denizens actually think it was once powdered with coal dust and filled with Potato Eaters in funny hats.

Happily the hard-core frimeurs don't show up until after work, so a midmorning or midafternoon visit is a treat. I sat in the dark recesses of the place and watched the sneaker-shod, un-uniformed waiters groove with the hipsters perched in booths or poised in front of huge mirrors while billowing smoke like Russian coal-burning plants. Jazz was on the radio. No one pestered me. I had a table all to myself, with plenty of room. And the coffee was good. Italian coffee, naturally, nothing to do with Auvergnats, their mutual aid society and daily grinds.

Perhaps I was experiencing the future of French cafes, but I hoped not. If it's going to be this or Ah, ga ira! then I'm moving to Alaska.

Having ingested enough stimulants to keep me awake until the year 2000, I couldn't stay still at my office. And besides, by the time I got there it was aperitif hour. Dispensing l'apiro, as my French pals call it, is another important function of the cafe.

My wife agreed to meet me across town on the glassed-in terrace of Brasserie Balzar, an old Latin Quarter favorite of ours and about a million other locals and visitors, including Daniel Young, who may have stretched the definition of "cafe" to put it in his cookbook. Naturally we couldn't get a table for dinner.

"It must be the atmosphere," said my wife, indicating the Art Deco interior, the mirrors and cozy tables pushed up to moleskin banquets. "The food certainly has never been great, but who cares?"

We quaffed several ruinous rounds of draft beer, eavesdropped on an adulterous couple and decided it would be all right to continue on for dinner at another favorite, Les Fontaines, near the Panthion.

This is the antithesis of Balzar: tacky decor, great food. The view of other portly, savvy, ecstatic regular diners obscures the black tuck-'n'-roll vinyl banquettes and jaundice-hued lighting. Les Fontaines is the cafe to end all cafes: chummy, comfy, hideous, noisy, 100 percent provincial French and brimming over with devastatingly caloric delicacies and wines. Clever Mr. Young has included it in his book, so we're indulging ourselves there as often as possible before the word gets out and the tables get even scarcer.

My liver needed a crutch after the chicken heart salad, the pbti, the rabbit kidneys with mustard sauce, the tender sweetbreads and creamy wild mushrooms, the strawberry pie and all that chilled Brouilly. There just wasn't room left for a coffee. So we figured, what the heck, let's finish the evening at Madame Renie's.

But by then it was midnight and Renie was locking the door. "Shucks," I exclaimed, "you won't be waking us up tonight after all." My wife and I yawned, said goodnight to Renie and Josi and woke up as always to their table-and-chair dance at 6 the next morning.