One beatific day in May the welfare department of New York magazine gave me a small cash advance on my liver. And off I flew to foie gras country – insatiable Alice through the looking glass, growing taller and smaller on the magic mushroom.

        It is spring. Paris is gray and rain-logged. But there are fresh morilles – morels, the crinkly black wilds mushrooms of incredibly voluptuous texture, $25 a pound at Fauchon, Paris’s mythic bazaar of gastronomania. And in a few weeks, the first raspberries arrive, $4 a pint. But what ignominy! They come from California. At Maxim’s, the maitre d’hôtel himself personally arranged nine perfect berries around a soufflé glace. The first fat white asparagus is very precious. Tough and woody, it must be meticulously peeled. Then it is steamed to near pulp – a pitiful alternative to our tender, flavorful green stalks, lightly scraped and cooked to a faint crunch. But then, their asparagus must be eaten with the finger. Not because it’s more sensuous that way (a notion I’ve championed by eating berries, string beans and salad greens au sauvage everywhere), but because the bruising shock of steel or silver on asparagus is fatal to its subtle flavor. The French may be frivolous about serious matters, but they can be highly serious about frivolities.

        La Grande Cuisine is wounded. France is seeing gastronomic depression, resident epicureans say. Only America can afford the great wines of France today, a local wine merchant complains. Who wants to submit to the tyranny of the grueling kitchen apprenticeship? French youth in rolled-up jeans over custom-made boots has no patience with establishment eating rituals. Fast food. Quick snack. A Stand-up. Grilled meats. À la minute. Pizza. The owner of Fauchon eats string beans for lunch. His wife nibbles bean sprouts and a single perfect strawberry. When Everyman tries to zip himself into all those nifty costumes designed for skinny hairdressers…Voilà le régime. The drinking man’s diet. The great chef Paul Bocuse himself, lion of Lyon, sounds the doom. Bocuse has just shed 30 pounds. He is talking about the irresistible lure of mass-packaging his heroic loup en croûte… thaw, shake, and bake, Monsieur Paul’s frozen loup.

        Wine gets depressed at times, too. They say if you put away a sulking vintage for a while, it will come back. I can’t believe the Great Gods of Gastronomy are permanently on ice. Indeed, to the abused, sheltered, cliché-haunted food lover of New York, the French depression is scarcely noticeable. Prices are high. But we pay more for mediocrity in Manhattan than we pay for euphoria here. True, Parisian hosts have their own little tyrannies. And French chefs are seduced by their own clichés. Green peppercorns are obligatory. Fowl sauced in wine vinegar is everywhere. Puff-pastry bunting is a feverish craze, and two sauces on every dish is the ultimate in haute.

        Even the cult of simplicity here is not the pursuit of mass mediocrity. Simplicity in France is the freshest fish, respectfully braised, or the just-born string bean, exquisitely dressed. Never abandon hope for a nation that devotes so much passion to cheese and so much fantasy to an ugly little fungus like the truffle. Though the grillade faith flourishes and some Michelin-starred institutions crack, a generation of ambitious young chefs practices brilliant alchemy. You needn’t be born in a Velveeta cocoon to be seduced by their dazzle.

        The frenzied idolatry of the rare and pungent Tuber melanosporum – the mystical truffle – provokes fleeting cynicism. “The diamonds of cookery,” Brillat-Savarin called them. “Children of the gods,” said the ancient Romans. Now, really. But here I am confronting a salade de gastronomes. A ransom of truffles, more than I’ve ever before seen assembled on a single plate, with cubes of the most delicate melting fresh foie gras and crisp chunks of artichoke heart tossed with Twiggy-thin string beans in an impeccable vinaigrette. I could not feel richer if diamonds were edible and I’d just been served Elizabeth Taylor’s jewel box.

        The whimsical salad is just an entr’acte at Le Pot Au Feu. Here simplicity is a game – like upholstering a precious Louis XIV armchair in gingham – and a freak of fate: that the town’s most obligatory gastronomic mecca is that cramped few feet of space in what must have been a seedy little bar in a desolate blue-collar suburb, twenty minutes from the Rond Point of the Champs-Elysées ($2.50 by taxi). Enter through the backyard garden, knock, check your Ungaro trench coat across from the blue-and-white porcelain sink, and then wait: an hour and a half sipping champagne if you are Ted Kennedy and Pierre Salinger coming without a reservation. No wait at all if you’ve booked one of the 28 places. A month in advance will do. Then settle, gingerly, shoulder pressed against a rustic support beam, two inches away from a Belgian carpet mogul who booked six weeks ago for this Saturday lunch. The spirit is rustic – handsomely, almost preciously so: champagne iced in heavy crocks, cheese arranged on a butcher’s block to be tugged across the narrow aisle for your contemplation, real knives with heavy wooden handles, and Jacqueline, the host’s orange-smocked wife, a simple milkmaid by Varga or Vadim.

        Happily, though, the kitchen is brilliant and altogether serious. No one anywhere in my past four weeks of determined gastronomic research has done a feuilleté like chef Guérard’s. Guérard apprenticed in pastry. His is flaky, buttery, fragile, filled with sweetbreads and morels, or, as today, the tenderest green tips of asparagus in chervil-scented butter. There were crayfish from Poland in the market this morning, “with red feet, the best kind.” And the crayfish have been martyred for an intoxicating cream soup served in a tall covered tureen. Humble whiting has been elevated to finny divinity in the style of the late chef Fernand Point, with tiny batons or carrot and celery root in a silken sauce that is all butter perfumed with port, a dash of vermouth and a reduction of vegetable essence. Two notoriously insatiable appetites are spared instant gallbladder arrest by the prudence of sharing a single portion of each dish. Guérard himself chooses the wine, Chateau Magdelaine ’67 ($14), “best of the Saint-Emilions,” he says. Passion fruit ice makes a sharp tart finale. Then come foamy espresso and that blissfully stoned feeling. Strangers are shouting to each other across the room in three languages. The bill for this exercise in orgasmic discipline: $21.