The vegetarian travellers guide to France

The vegetarian travelling in France is well advised to return across the border by whichever means they entered France as soon as possible, or be prepared to face long distances of many hundreds of kilometres between cold plates of tofu and beansprouts, broken only by the holy trinity of French rural vegetarian fare, this being the pizza, the crepe and the salad chevre chaud (which Penjamin ordered several times, as when done well she argued, can be the best meal in the world).
Vegetarian fare in France can sometimes be found in the larger cities and is still resolutely stuck in the 1970s where one can enjoy raw grated sandals served on hand crotched plates dyed with the owners own urine. A country that has more cheeses than ladies razors seems completly unable to do anything with them beyond the aforementioned trinity of dishes.
Outside of the cities in the provinical areas, the French have managed to discover a form of ham that would appear to be vegetarian by the way it is included in salads as speck. The bountiful range of produce available in the country is only to be used as a supporting dish for the local delicacy of meat based products.
Much is made of the regional specialities of the regions, the produit de terroir. This is why if one place serves a local delicacy, they all do. And they don't serve anything else. In Sarlat for instance, they specialise in stuffing geese until their livers explode into the ready waiting canning factories, a technique for creating food that could only have come about in some unfathomable way. And so every shop and every restaurant serves foie gras. Cold, hot, fired, battered and topped with a whelk, it's all you can find there. And hardly any of the restaurants looked that busy. If someone had a good idea to try something different, I'd guess they'd all be doing it inside twelve months, following each other like lemmings - though don't mention that to them, they'll put them on the menu.