Hygiene was all very well, but the locals of the Commune of St Denis had been making their cheeses and their pвtй de foie gras and their rillettes de porc for centuries before the EU was even heard of, and did not take kindly to foreign bureaucrats telling them what they could and could not sell. Along with other members of the Police Municipale in the region, Bruno had established a complex early warning scheme to alert the market vendors to their visits.

The inspectors, known as the Gestapo in a part of France that had taken very seriously its patriotic duties to resist the German occupation, had started their visits to the markets of Pйrigord in an official car with red Belgian licence plates. On their second visit, to Bruno’s alarm, all the tyres had been slashed. Next time they came in a car from Paris, with the telltale number ‘75’ on the licence plate. This car too had been given the Resistance treatment, and Bruno began to worry whether the local counter-measures were getting out of hand. He had a good idea who was behind the tyre-slashing, and had issued some private warnings that he hoped would calm things down. There was no point in violence if the intelligence system could ensure that the markets were clean before the inspectors arrived.

Then the inspectors had changed their tactics and come by train, staying at local station hotels. But that meant they were easily spotted by the hotel keepers who all had cousins or suppliers who made the crottins of goat cheese and the foie gras, the home-made jams, the oils flavoured with walnuts and truffles, and the confits that made this corner of France the very heart of the nation’s gastronomic culture. Bruno, with the support of his boss, the Mayor of St Denis, and all the elected councillors of the Commune, even Montsouris the Communist, made it his duty to protect his neighbours and friends from the idiots of Brussels. Their idea of food stopped at moules and pommes frites, and even then they adulterated perfectly good potatoes with an industrial mayonnaise that they did not have the patience to make themselves.