A key moment during any stay in a French city?

The weekly “market” day.

This is when temporary stalls are set up in some wide spot in the ville and for four or five hours (presumably) fresh and higher-quality foodstuffs are sold at rates higher than the neighborhood supermarche.

What sort of producers show up, the breadth of their products and their quality is telling.

Which led us to market day, today, in the little Cote d’Azur town of Les Issambres.

It is difficult to expect too much from a town of this size, which has perhaps 1,000 full-time residents, though a few thousand more could drive here, from Sainte-Maxime, to the south, and Frejus, to the north.

Our noses told us the Les Issambres Monday market passed one key test:

We could smell roast chicken cooking.

Yes, they had the big hitter of any French market day, the truck with a dozen chickens turning slowly on a rotisserie. Roast chicken may be the single most popular meal in French homes.

There was more: The fish man; the cheese guy; two fruits-and-vegetables merchants; a honey monger; and a “gourmet” truck selling foie gras from the Auvergne.

A few more trucks sold the non-edible things you normally see on market day, in France: T-shirts, caps, rugs. And the not-so-normal — mattresses. The question being, who goes to the market expecting to return with a mattress? Can’t carry if off in your plastic sack.

So, on the whole, not a bad performance, for a local market.

We bought a chicken, of course, for 10 euros … and that was dinner, later in the day.

By 12:30, all the vendors were gone, and workers from the municipality were washing down, and we were likely to make the walk down to the market again next Monday, if only for the roast chicken.