The Peter Moylan entity posted thusly:

>One disadvantage of a baguette, and indeed of French bread in general,
>is that it goes stale very quickly. It's therefore essential to buy the
>bread just before the meal, and to throw away what's left; there's no
>question of saving half a baguette for tomorrow. (This also is why
>French bread is unsuitable for sandwiches that you can take to work. By
>lunchtime, your sandwich is stale.) This means, of course, that a
>baguette is unsuitable for a person living alone, unless you have a
>prodigious appetite. When I lived briefly in France, my solution was to
>buy a "ficelle" on the way home from work and use it for the evening
>meal. The ficelle is similar to a baguette but is very much thinner, so
>it's just the right size for one person's worth of sandwich.
>Unfortunately, I've never been able to buy une ficelle anywhere in
>Australia.

When I lived in northern France, my apartment was directly above a
bakery. Aside from the incredible smell of baking bread, the other
advantage to the place was that I could get bread (yes, fresh-baked)
on Sunday. They used to put in a dozen or so loaves on Sunday morning,
to be given to close friends. Other folks had to make do with day-old
stuff.