I felt a qualm. Adela knew of Fauchon’s existence only because she had eaten up all the chocolate-covered almonds I had bought here. I hadn’t really thought the almonds were worth a dollar apiece, but I had wanted the little pink tin they came in, emblazoned as it was with “Fauchon” and a black-and-white photo of Fauchon in the 1920s. Fauchon was the most famous and most expensive place to buy food in Paris. Now that Adela had convinced me to show her where the store was so she could have her own tin, I wasn’t sure how well she and it would mix. This was not a place for arrogant and aggressive impoverished students. It was a place for meek students who didn’t mind being treated like bugs that had crawled out from under a rock. “I’m wearing jeans,” I hissed at her. We were talking in Spanish, all the better not to be understood by supercilious guards, clerks, and the multimillionaires shopping around us. “I don’t have the self-confidence to shop at Fauchon’s in jeans.”

I’d developed a uniform for Paris shopping: black boots, black pants, a long black coat, black leather gloves, and a red scarf, all carried with a self-assured stride. The ideal accessory for this look was a shopping bag emblazoned with Fauchon or Ladurée or something similar, but this could get expensive. If the bag’s edges grew battered from repeat use, sales girls got that disdainful pinch to the corners of their mouths again; then I had to buy something else at a luxury store and start over. Jeans and tennis shoes, even black ones, were fatal for shopping around the place de la Madeleine or on the rue Faubourg St. Honoré, needless to say.

Adela rolled her eyes and batted a hand at me, rather as she might at an annoying fly, and kept going. Pink tins with black-and-white photos, exactly like the tin Adela had emptied on her last visit to my dorm room, climbed up a wall to our left. We wove through customers in furs, passing display cases of chocolates, marrons glacés or candied chestnuts, paté de fruits, cakes, and small tartes. Some pink tins had upturned lids, with a handful of different types of candies in each, demonstrating what was inside the tins in that row. “Look!” Adela exclaimed, delighted. “They have samples!” She helped herself to a blue wrapped candy, which proved to contain a stick of brown sugar.

“Adela. Those aren’t samples.” I glanced around. The exquisite and enormous security guard was watching us.

“Of course, they are,” she made the fly-swatting motion again. “But we’re getting off the subject. How many more times are you going to make me go back to that restaurant before you ask this guy out?”