Passion for Sweets Prompts Picky Parisians to Pursue the Perfect Pastry : Edible works of art range from apple tarts to chocolate mousse cake. Finding them is a national obsession.

PARIS —  Nouvelle cuisine may come and go--hearty bistro cooking is currently in the ascendant here--but French pastry remains a constant Parisian passion.

I first fell in love with Paris pastry as a young American student and paying guest of a chic Parisian aristocrat who cared more for her wardrobe than the culinary arts. I would supplement her meager menus with daily forays to neighborhood pastry shops. Each day brought a new discovery: apple tarts glistening with caramelized glaze, velvety chocolate mousse cake topped with whipped Chantilly cream and paper-thin cigarette tuiles . Thus also began a lifelong addiction to pain au chocolat, the crisp pastry roll stuffed with bittersweet chocolate that is the French schoolchild’s favorite snack.

More than 20 years later, now a picky Parisian myself, I am willing to walk six extra blocks to get the best baguette and cross-town to buy a celebrated chocolate concoction for a drop-dead finale to a difficult dinner party.

I am not alone in my pursuits. Parisian “pastryphiles” hotly pursue the perfect pastry, even to the suburbs. Advertising executive Isabelle de Beaufort, for example, patronizes six or seven different pastry shops, each for a particular specialty. Her advice: “Dalloyau for eclairs au cafe. At Lenotre, the pistachio macaroons are the best. The pain au chocolat, made with a thousand calories of butter in (the chic suburb of) Neuilly. I’m going all through Paris to buy one,” she says with a laugh.

One imagines French pastry shops filled with plump ladies of a certain age. The reality is that the Gallic passion for patisserie is a national obsession and arouses a craving no mere member of the opposite sex can satisfy. Latin lovers may be notoriously fickle, but they can be amazingly faithful to a luscious chocolate macaroon, for example, or a sausage-shaped eclair au cafe.

French pastries, like Frenchwomen, are put together with precision and panache. Chocolate charlottes sport chapeaus of sculpted black chocolate. Fruit tarts are constructed with the complexity and color of a stained-glass window. These sophistications are the creative celebrations of the best-money-can-buy ingredients.

Made fresh each day, destined to be eaten immediately, these pastries bespeak a light hand with flour and sugar that may account for the otherwise unaccountable slenderness of French pastry aficionados. Gourmandise, however, will definitely lead to greater girth. I put on five pounds during the 10 days of greed it took to research this piece.

The following pastry shops are the temples of Parisian haute patisserie and are the best of the best. Their sensuous wares make strong men--and women--go weak in the knees. Sweet surrender is the only option.

Gerard Mulot’s gleaming pastry shop in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Pres is an Ali Baba’s cave of plump macaroons, glistening almond croissants and melting millefeuilles bulging with custard and crushed raspberries.

The green-eyed patissier, a young-looking 42, conjures up, for example, something called Jour et Nuit, in which waves of bitter chocolate ripple around the rim of layered chocolate mousse and vanilla bavaroise, all wrapped in stripes of chocolate and vanilla cake and served with vanilla custard cream. The subtly caramelized, orange-scented mousse in the pastry of the tarte a l’orange is akin to the best creme brulee.

August senators rub shoulders with famished students and Faubourg Saint-Germain aristocrats in the crush around Mulot’s enticing glass counters. When he’s in town, Marcello Mastroianni stops in en route to see his daughter, Chiara, who lives nearby with her mother, Catherine Deneuve.

Mulot offers an equally epicurean selection of terrines and tabbouleh, exotic salads and quiches. The shop is takeout only, but there is a small counter to lean on if you can’t resist downing your favorite goodie right then and there.

Gerard Mulot, 76 Rue de Seine, phone in Paris 43-26-85-77 or 46-33-49-27. Closed Wednesday.

The clients of Millet, a small, unpretentious-looking pastry shop midway between the Invalides and the Eiffel Tower on the Rue St.-Dominique, provide a clue that the cakes on display are very special indeed. Couturiers , perfumers and a platoon of politicians and diplomats from the neighboring ministries are regulars, but even more revealing, so are three-star chefs Alain Senderens of Lucas-Carton and Jamin’s Joel Robuchon, whom many consider the most creative chef in France. (He adores Millet’s millefeuille.)

The Saint Marc, for example, is an ambrosial assemblage of chocolate mousse, whipped vanilla Chantilly cream and a thin biscuit covered with a caramelized sabayon. The Meli-Melo has a base of almond meringue dipped in chocolate; a bavaroise flavored with tropical rum is filled with diced pineapple, mango and kiwi, then topped by a slim slice of sponge cake decorated with fresh oranges, mangoes, grapes and pineapple.

Is it a sign of the times? Madeleines, the lemony tea cakes beloved by Proust, can still be found, but the tea cake of the moment is the almond financier.

There are a few tables and the fixings for a light lunch--salads and sandwiches--in the shop, but on a pleasant day it’s better to walk the few blocks to the gardens of the Champ de Mars and consume these gossamer delights in sight of the Eiffel Tower.

Millet, 103 Rue St.-Dominique, 45-51-49-80. Closed Sunday afternoon and Monday, and in August.

Gaston Lenotre’s father was head chef at Paris’ Grand Hotel; his mother cooked for Baron Pereire. Gaston took up pastry making at the age of 13 and has founded an empire. Today, there are 14 Lenotre boutiques in the Paris region, 26 abroad, two Parisian restaurants (the Pre Catalan in the Bois de Boulogne and the Elysee Lenotre in the gardens of the Champs-Elysees) and a cooking school. But even his rivals admit that expansion has not eroded the superb Lenotre quality.

Lenotre’s spacious boutiques, richly decorated in marble, blond wood and smoked mirrors, are scattered through the quarters of the Right and Left Banks, with a new shop conveniently located in the Lafayette Gourmet store of the Galeries Lafayette.

The confirmed classics are not to be missed: the Feuille d’Automne, which harbors a meringue and bitter-chocolate mousse under its hat; the charlotte aux fruits, terrific and tasty vanilla bavaroise filled with fresh grapes, red currants, peaches, pears and kiwis, and the divine deep-chocolate Charlotte Cecille, layers of vanilla bavaroise and chocolate mousse.

Like a couturier, Lenotre introduces new creations each season, selected after tastings by loyal customers who include Roger Moore and Claudia Cardinale. Among the new stars: the Concerto, a rich chocolate-coffee medley, and the Noix au Velours, a delicate design of two mousses, praline and vanilla, crushed nuts and almond biscuit.

Lenotre, which also offers elaborate salads, quiches and terrines, as well as cheese, chocolates and wines, is takeout only, though in certain stores you can snack at stand-up tables. Before holidays, especially Christmas, the Avenue Victor-Hugo store has the happiest lines in Paris: White-gloved waiters serve Champagne or hot chocolate on silver trays to waiting clients.

Lenotre, at several locations including: 49 Avenue Victor-Hugo, 45-01-71-71; 44 Rue d’Auteuil, 45-24-52-52; 44 Rue du Bac, 42-22-39-39; Lafayette Gourmet, 40 Boulevard Haussmann, 48-74-37-13.

You get the message as soon as La Maison du Chocolat comes into sight: Chocolate-colored exteriors, chocolate-colored awnings and windows crowded with chocolate treats announce La Maison du Chocolat as the answer to a choclate lover’s dream.

Choosing between chocolate cakes is impossible. One nibble of the super moist and chocolaty Pleyel, named for the concert hall across the street, and you’re hooked. Move on to the Moccambo, memorably merged with crushed fresh raspberries, then to the Gounod, a marvel of chocolate truffle mousse with orange zest. Leave room for the Negresco, whose lustrous chocolate frosting conceals bitter-chocolate truffle mouse on an almond biscuit, and the Rigoletto, a blend of fresh caramel, chocolate and almond. Don’t overlook the small sables, divine sugar cookies with a tang of lemon, the kind your grandmother would have made if she’d been a French pastry chef.

Saturday afternoons in the Faubourg St.-Honore shop is like a friendly party of beaming chocolate lovers. Valerie Vrinat, who runs the wine shop of her father Robert’s three-star Taillevent restaurant, might be in with her husband. Or orchestra conductors Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta may bolt across the street between Pleyel concerts, when they’re in town.

The Rue Francois-1er boutique, in the heart of the golden designer shopping triangle of the avenues Montaigne and George-V, boasts a warm, paneled salon du chocolat. Here, you may happily cross the line into “chocoholism,” sipping one of several sumptuous blends of hot chocolate, made with melted chocolate bars, along with your truffled cakes. And Carole Bouquet, Philippe Noiret and Jean-Paul Belmondo may be doing the same.

La Maison du Chocolat, 225 Rue du Faubourg St.-Honore, 42-27-39-44; 52 Rue Francois-1er, 47-23-38-25.

A culinary version of the little black dress, the Gateau Opera, lavishly layered in coffee and chocolate, is the most celebrated cake in the French repertoire. At Dalloyau it reaches its apogee, a stunning syncopation of thin almond biscuit and succulent coffee-chocolate truffle interiors, frosted in satiny dark chocolate and decorated with gold leaf. Dalloyau’s edge on the competition may come from the fact that Madame Andree Gavillon, mother of the current owners, revived and updated the cake in 1955 from a 19th-Century recipe. She dedicated it to her friends in the Paris Opera.

Not for the fainthearted, the fudgy Luxembourg is as solid as the paving stones that students hurled in this neighborhood in 1968. The Regal has a lighter bitter-chocolate mousse on a vanilla-flavored chocolate biscuit with a chocolate Chantilly cream.

Founded in 1802, the firm earned its reputation for quality pastry under the pomp of Napoleon’s First Empire. Long caterer to the chic and famous, Dalloyau has done baptisms, confirmations and marriages for three generations of top families, and it is always present for the president’s Bastille Day reception in the Elysee Palace gardens.

There are six boutiques that also provide a complete takeout service of cold buffet and prepared dishes. The two most inviting are the Faubourg St.-Honore shop, whose beige and apricot upstairs tea salon is a haven for chic Faubourg shoppers and draws the fashion mavens from nearby Christian Lacroix and Thierry Mugler and a squadron of svelte models. At lunch, one can snack on smoked salmon or have a full meal. The etuvee de poissons with sole, monkfish, salmon and scallops in a saffron sauce is irreproachable. In good weather, the Luxembourg boutique, just opposite the Jardin du Luxembourg, has a sidewalk terrace where you can take your tea and perfect pastries in the sun.

Dalloyau, 99-101 Rue du Faubourg St.-Honore, 43-59-18-10; 2 Place Edmond-Rostand, 43-29-31-10.

On the Rue Royale near the Madeleine, Lauduree is one of the prettiest pastry shop tearooms in Paris. The turn-of-the century decor of marble-topped tables, olivewood trim and painted murals is equaled by Laduree’s legendary chocolate macaroons, recently confirmed in their glory by the gourmet Club des Croqueurs du Chocolat (a chocolate-lovers club) as No. 1.

When Marie-Antoinette counseled her starving subjects to “eat cake,” what she actually said was “brioche.” Laduree’s special raisin-filled Cramique brioche is just what she had in mind--or perhaps the mousse de fois gras brioche sandwich.

Like Maxim’s, Laduree is an institution. The table arrangement simulates the de rigueur squash of a successful Parisian soiree. The unwonted intimacy with total strangers is part of the experience. As you’re practically on your neighbor’s lap, you’re never alone at Laduree.

It’s worth waiting for a table downstairs. Teatime here (or, indeed, breakfast or lunch) is like a little bit of theater with a constantly changing cast. A young black-haired woman is deep in a book; a debonair gentleman and two beminked ladies are treating an adorable tot to tea; a dapper businessman, on his own, is chatting with two young women at the next table.

“The croissant d’amandes is to die for,” confides an American friend. She’s right. Savor every sinful bit of one of the most delicious croissants ever made. On the celestial painted ceiling, chubby cherubs are baking brioche in the clouds.

Laduree, 16 Rue Royale, 42-60-21-79. Closed Sunday and August.