We took advantage of sunny, cloudless weather for a morning stroll in the Jardin des Plantes. We saw many flowering fruit trees in full bloom, and a passing troop of school children shaking the branches to bring down showers of petals.

Appetites awakened, we took the Métro to Odéon, and thence walked along the inconspicuous rue Monsieur-le-Prince to the even more inconspicuous:

12 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Paris 06. Métro Odéon.

Just two out of a total of a dozen tables were occupied in the small but bright and comfortable ell-shaped dining room. Set out here and there were bowls of walnuts, a specialty of the Franche-Comté, signaling the kitchen’s focus on that region.

Pissenlits au lard. This warm salad of dandelion greens, tossed tableside by an affable waiter, amply fulfilled the promise of its aromas of French bacon and vinaigrette.

Salade mélangée au comté, jambon fumé et noix: A salad of greens with nutty-tasting cubes of cheese of the region, lightly-smoked ham, and walnuts. The quality of the nuts caught our attention—barely ripe, they had a lively, almost fruity flavor and a slightly sappy consistency.

Poulette à la crème gratinée. We shared half a young chicken, small but of solid consistency, coated with cream, cheese and breadcrumbs lightly toasted and served on a mushroom-cream sauce. A smiling waiter left it up to us to decide who took the breast and who the leg. In fact Jean kindly gave me the entire toasted and cheese-coated skin of the breast (scrumptious, but in a coarse way unbecoming of a fastidious gourmet) and in return I gave her my sincere thanks. But we both went on to wallow in the excesses of the underlying mushroom-cream sauce

The restaurant’s wine selection included in our F190 menus was Bourgueil Viemont et Maître (non-vintage), a light and acidic wine well suited to rich chicken dishes.

Gâteau au noix consisted of several layers of macaroons, crushed and reformed, with a filling of thick crème patisserie tasting of walnuts. The beige glaze had us thinking of maple sugar—does Franche-Comté boast a similar product?

Fondant au chocolat, crème à la liqueur de sapin: A light-colored and light-textured chocolate cake—far too hard and dry to be properly called a fondant, we thought—served on a green sauce redolent of pine and mint with a suggestion of chartreuse.

In both the coffee at Chez Maître Paul and the chocolate truffles served with it, we noticed intriguing touches of bitterness. The total was F450.