But something's wrong. The statesmen -- there isn't a woman to be seen -- shake their jowls and summon le chef.

"The truffles are sublime, monsieur," snorts a senior senator. "Regrettably your poulet tastes of fish."

"Fish?" gasps the chef, doffing his toque.

"How can we bring Giniral De Gaulle to dine here tomorrow?"

The chef crumbles into a velvet-upholstered armchair. "It's true, messieurs, I can no longer find chicken that tastes of chicken. The caged poulets eat fishmeal with hormones and taste of the sea. I may have to fall on my sword before the Giniral like Vatel!"

The senators drop their cigars; Algeria fades from their minds. Frangois Vatel, chef to Prince Condi of Chantilly, chose suicide rather than serve Louis XIV substandard fare. "This is a national emergency," cries one parliamentarian, "a red emergency!"

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"Madame Fifi?" he splutters, taking cues from another woman nearby. "Perhaps you could help me and my dog adapt to Paris life -- we've just moved here."

Cut to a crowded Paris cafe. Another guy, a schlump in his mid-30s, has been eyeing the woman at the next table but hasn't dared talk to her. On cue from a half-hidden figure seated behind, the man stutters, "Pardonez-moi, I know this sounds strange, but there's something really interesting on the back page of your newspaper and ..."

At an upscale boutique on the Rue Saint Honori, a 40-ish character dressed like Marcello Mastroianni steps in bearing a single perfect white rose. "Your eyes are so beautiful I wanted to thank you," he sings, handing her his card. "Next time I'm in Paris, can I take you to lunch?"

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Paris' show, at the 100-year-old Grand Palais, itself the centerpiece of the 1900 Exposition Universelle, is titled "1900." Its curators clearly state that "this is neither an evocation of the splendor and misery of the Belle Epoque nor a commemoration of the exposition of a century ago with which Paris wished to astound the world, nor an homage to Art Nouveau and its master practitioners."

By contrast, London's offering, "1900: Art at the Crossroads" (co-produced by the Royal Academy and New York's Guggenheim Museum) seeks to assess "fin-de-sihcle artistic crosscurrents" by evoking Paris' 1900 Exposition Universelle through artworks shown at the fair or excluded from it.

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Better known as "smoking coffee shops," these Dutch dope dens dispense soft drugs, marijuana and hashish, to a mixed bag of customers. Tourists and locals saunter in then stagger out in a cloud of smoke. Inside the air is blue. People puff and joke, some of them laughing crazily, others digging into snacks while lounging in armchairs. Seventies rock alternates with cool jazz and house music. Soft-drug menus are passed from behind the bar, where an "ethical dealer" has just delivered half a kilo of "skunk nederwiet" -- the Netherlands' prized, domestically grown high-THC power weed.

A couple of bucks buys you a joint of it. Even if you don't light up your head begins to spin from a contact high. You glance around nervously, expecting the cops to show up. But they don't. And they won't. As long as the coffee shop plays by the rules.

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Michelin's Red Guide celebrates its 100th birthday this year, and perhaps more than ever it can make or break restaurants; millions of dollars ride on the star system.

So why the shock? The big news is that chef Guy Martin at Paris' historic Grand Vifour has earned a third Michelin star -- with no losses among 1999's 21-strong three-star lineup. Conspiracy theorists have long believed that for a chef to get a third Michelin star -- the guide's highest rating -- someone at the top has to die or be demoted, so that the total will stay at 21.

Now that the total of three-star properties in France stands at 22, everyone is talking about how this notion has just been "un grand nonsense" all along.

The 43-year-old Martin started his climb in 1983 at the Chateau d'Esclimont, taking over as chef des cuisines and directeur of Grand Vifour in 1991. His promotion comes as no surprise. "It's a consecration," Alain Sarraute, star-watcher at Le Figaro, told me. "We were expecting it last year."

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She was right: The renowned chef's specialties hadn't changed an iota in the 12 years since we had first eaten at this, our cult retro restaurant. My mouth watered at the thought of chicken liver terrine with foie gras, pike dumplings, pan-fried frog's legs, veal sweetbreads in a creamy sauce Grand-Mhre Ducloux ...

"Only one thing has changed," I remarked, taking a sharp breath. "The prices."

Each delicacy now required the sacrifice of many hundreds of French francs. I estimated the upcoming damage to be on the order of $200. The classic, the unchanging, the steadfastly rich dishes at this archetype of French country establishments, a veritable temple of gastronomy, had substantially outstripped inflation.

Some critics might even claim that the prices were inflated to start with, way back in 1947.
The same chef-owner, Jean Ducloux, has been cooking the same food here since then. Actually, most of Ducloux's dishes are much older than that -- from the 19th century or maybe even the Roman Empire.

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Women wearing tailleurs and men in tuxedoes mingled under a frescoed
ceiling. Huge portraits painted by a forgotten 19th century dauber stared
down at the merrymakers, the maid with her silver tray, and out to where we
loitered on the quayside.

A bateau-mouche cruised downstream, its blinding lights further
illuminating the tableau being played out above us. Another boat slid along
behind it. This time my eyes followed the shifting, intricate pattern of
leaves projected onto the building's fagade as the boats followed the
river's flow.

One by one the tuxedos and tailleurs on the mansion's second floor
replaced their emptied champagne flutes on the maid's silver tray and
slipped out. Two chauffeur-driven limousines whisked them away. The maid
looked down, spotted us and yanked the shutters back till all we could see
were slits of light.

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The lamb-bearer and the lady with the giant egg did a jig on the sidewalk and soon were tripping over a half-dozen school kids rushing by clutching Kinder eggs, milk-chocolate eggs with a toy hidden inside -- the bane of most Italian parents. Italian kids throw fits any time of year if they don't get their Kinder eggs, but especially around Easter.

The old lady, the fat man and the kids somehow managed to share the sidewalk without disaster. I watched the youngsters gobble their eggs and merrily toss the litter aside as in some ancient ritual dance. "I'll bet that's what you used to do at Easter," my wife said as I shook my head at the diminutive litter bugs.

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Across the street at the cafe on the Rue Saint-Antoine I heard a similar refrain. "Twenty-one?"

"Still 21!"

As I strolled through the open market on the Boulevard de Minilmontant near my office a butcher reluctantly left his morning copy of Le Parisien and served a man who looked like a walking sausage.

"See, there are still 21," said the man. "The ratings are fixed."

A few hours later I deciphered their coded language: It meant Michelin.

The news was on the radio, on TV, in all the papers and on the collective tongue of the capital. The Michelin red guide to hotels and restaurants in France had arrived. Michelin: the bible of gastronomes, assembled by an unknown number of secretive inspectors who prowl the country in search not only of humbug and bedbugs to denounce, but of the Delicious, the Luxurious and the Sublime. After a long and fraught winter, nothing reignites the fires of French foodies -- and even normal citizens -- quite like it.

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My wife and I have lived above Renie's for 12 years or about 7,500 chair-and-table draggings. We don't feel particularly privileged. There are roughly 10,000 cafes in the City of Caffeine. Up and down the scarred asphalt sidewalks and across the quaint cobbled squares, the patrons do the same dawn and midnight chair dance.

Enough, you might say, to make us hate Renie, Josi and Paris cafes in general? Not a bit of it. Well, maybe once in a while we'd love to pour boiling oil out the window.

But what would Paris be sans cafes? They're the stomach, lungs, liver, bad conscience and -- oh yes -- soul of the city. You buy tobacco in some, gamble in others, philosophize, write or surf in yet others, and drink and eat in all -- sometimes well. Romance buds, hatred flares, revelation dawns, violence erupts, fortune smiles upon lucky winners, smoke gets in everyone's eyes.

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The Bastille area's hipsters pass Le Pied Rare without a glance. The cafe's no-nonsense decor has elements of French provincial kitsch: a display case full of plastic or ceramic pigs, pig postcards, piggy banks, pig dolls.

The specialty here is pied de porc ` la Sainte Menehould (pronounced men-eu), named after the untouristed village in the unsung Argonne region due east of Paris. The trotter is bound and boiled for 12 hours in stock with white wine, herbs and spices, according to a centuries-old recipe.

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France's long-running recession appears to be ending, with higher-than-expected growth and employment rates recently announced by the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin. No one is more surprised than the Parisians themselves.

The national mood has begun to swing from existentialist bleak to uncharacteristic bright, helped along by France's (mostly) stunning performance in the World Cup held in the country this summer. Waiters and cab drivers are smiling again, the dollar is up to about six francs (the exchange rate used in this article) and the strident tone of French-bashing American and British newspaper editorialists has softened.

The City of Light may be glowing more radiantly than it has since the end of the Gulf War -- the start of "la crise." But the flip side of these glad tidings is an increase in prices, visitors, traffic and headaches in general as the Paris tourism-and-convention machinery roars into high gear. Long live the new crisis!

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Ten miles inland from Portofino as the seagull flies, the clack of a centuries-old loom echoed down hilltop Lorsica's cool stone alleys -- alleys scented by jugged hare, wild boar stew and homemade fettuccine writhing under pungent sauce, all served at the village's sole trattoria, Circolo ACLI Bar.

Italy is a country of great contrasts, and none is more startling than that between the sun-washed Riviera and mountainous Lorsica. This Appenine village has about 600 inhabitants, many of them elderly. A single, chase-your-tail road coils up 1,000 feet from the Fontanabuona Valley, through terraced olive and chestnut groves, then dead-ends here. The back of beyond.

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Naples and smoke are inseparable. An old saying about con artists goes, "The guy's selling the smoke of Vesuvius."

But Vesuvius and its neighboring rust-belt steel mill aren't the only source of smoke in the Siren City: Naples has dozens, maybe hundreds, of wood-burning pizza ovens scattered around the atmospheric old city. Neapolis, the "new city" 2,000-odd years ago, is a layer-cake of ancient Greek, Roman, Barbarian and Mediterranean civilizations -- all of them, apparently, pizza-eating.

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Swiss chocolates, cuckoo clocks, swans; gold, secret accounts and frenzied diplomacy to save distant peoples: It was a perfect Geneva day. Morpheus and Mammon cheek-by-jowl.

Geneva is an odd, wistful place. It seems to be inhabited exclusively by migratory Italians, Turks, French, Germans, British, Dutch, Saudis, Nigerians, Panamanians, Chinese, Americans. There are guest workers, bankers, exiles, refugees, diplomats. My late Italian uncle married a Russian here just after the war, then divorced and remarried a Dutch woman. In 20-odd years' worth of visits, I can't recall having met a native Genevois of Swiss stock.

Another funny thing about Geneva: I am always hungry here. I have no secret, numbered account and can't resolve the world's diplomatic crises. So what else is there to do but stroll and feed the swans and myself?

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But do not be fooled into thinking that Amsterdammers are mere hedonists: The Netherlands' true passion is business -- the art of the deal. It is no coincidence that the expression "going Dutch" was invented here. If there is a single word to sum up the national character it must be: savvy.

Dutch business-mindedness is underpinned by centuries of religious tolerance and ethical pragmatism. That is why Amsterdam's Red Light District (read prostitution and party hotels) has been run and regulated by city authorities so efficiently since the city's foundation in the Middle Ages. That is also why the city's 300-plus "smoking coffee shops," where soft-drug use is tolerated, are (almost always) clean, safe, law-abiding -- and profit-making.

Statistics show, however, that Amsterdam's drug and sex tourism industry is actually on the decline. The reason is simple: Family and business travel are even more profitable.

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