Apollonia Poilâne, at the bakery that her grandfather opened in 1932, at 8 Rue du Cherche-Midi. Photographs by Gueorgui Pinkhassov / Magnum

On November 2, 2002, Apollonia Poilâne sat down at her father’s desk and took over as the C.E.O. of the company that for eight decades has made Paris’s most celebrated bread. Two days earlier, her father, Lionel, and her mother, Ibu, had been killed in a helicopter crash. Lionel, a flying enthusiast, had attempted to land at Île des Rimains, off the coast of Brittany, where the family had a weekend house. Apollonia was eighteen. Her sister, Athena, was still in high school. Against the advice of her parents’ many friends, Apollonia decided to go ahead with her plan to matriculate at Harvard the following fall. For four years, she ran Poilâne from her dorm room, reviewing invoices between classes and fielding international calls on her cell phone.

When the Crimson published a story about her (“NO TIME TO LOAF AROUND”), she told the student reporter, “The one or two hours you spend procrastinating I spend working,” adding, “It’s nothing demanding at all.” She acknowledged only the hardship of finding decent bread in Boston, which she addressed by having her own delivered once a week by FedEx. She had made a bread bin out of a cardboard box. I asked her recently whether it had been an overwhelming time. She replied, “When I learned my parents had had an accident, I pretty much knew the scope of the thing, and that’s just the way it was.” In her view, the moment that they had prepared her for had come, just earlier than anyone expected. In her Harvard admissions essay, she had written, “The work of several generations is at stake.” Apollonia is a historian of her life, not a memoirist. “The whole idea of the grieving, and so and so forth?” she said. “That just annoys me.”

Poilâne was founded in 1932 by Apollonia’s paternal grandfather, Pierre. A native of Normandy, he opened a boulangerie at 8 Rue du Cherche-Midi, in the then bohemian Sixth Arrondissement, and quickly endeared himself to the neighborhood by occasionally accepting art as payment for his traditional country breads. In Pierre’s day, baking was a grinding profession. Its practitioners had for centuries constituted a subterranean caste, toiling in infernos while their customers slept. In 1973, after Pierre suffered a stroke, Lionel, aged twenty-eight, began to take over the company. “A very bitter boy stuck down in the basement,” as he once recalled, he had wanted to be an artist. According to Le Journal du Dimanche, “He dreamed of lights, discoveries, wide-open spaces; he dreamed of becoming a pilot.” His obituary in the Los Angeles Times noted that he was “the baker who in-line skated to work, some days wearing a winged silver cap on his head.”

Lionel channelled his creative impulses into the family business. He opened two more bakeries in Paris, another in London, and cultivated a worldwide network of retailers. He befriended celebrities and charmed reporters. Bread became his medium as much as his métier. For Salvador Dali, Lionel fabricated a bedroom made entirely of dough. (Dali said that he wanted to see if he had mice.) He assembled one of the world’s finest libraries of bread books, including almanacs on wheat flour and a nineteenth-century treatise on toasting. He petitioned the Pope to remove la gourmandise from the list of cardinal sins. He catalogued the disappearing regional breads of France: the basket-woven gâche du Cotentin; the Alsatian pretzel; the four-fingered main de Nice; the ring-shaped couronne, left hollow by northeastern Huguenots, who objected to the Catholic habit of tracing the sign of the cross on their crusts, and made in Bordeaux with undulating edges, giving it the appearance of a ruff.

If bread is a metaphor for Frenchness, Lionel was its most eloquent contemporary author. Floppy-haired and dapper, with a bow tie at his throat, he emerged as a dynamo of the first generation of French food personalities, young boulangers and fromagers and vignerons who began to talk about the things that they made not only as delivery systems for nourishment but as conduits of their nation’s patrimony. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, but when Apollonia was born her father put her to sleep in a crib fashioned from a breadbasket.

Today, Poilâne grosses eighteen million dollars a year and employs a hundred and sixty people, many of whom have worked for the company throughout their professional lives. The firm produces about three per cent of all the bread sold in Paris. Poilâne sells croissants, pain au chocolat, several pastries, and a few specialty breads. (The rye-and-raisin, which is soft as cake, but not sugary, is a favorite of mine.) But, even if they are delicious, they are distractions, like lobsters at a steak house. The company’s signature item is a four-pound miche, a wheel of sourdough—also known as country bread, pain Poilâne, and pain au levain—made from Pierre’s original starter, stone-ground gray flour, water, and sea salt from the marshes of Guérande. Loaves are sent to the Elysée Palace, as well as to more than twenty-five hundred of the city’s supermarkets and restaurants, in which pain Poilâne, smeared with tapenade or bolstering a croque-madame, has come to stand for “sandwich bread” as ubiquitously as “Kleenex” does for “tissue.”

Poilâne runs three restaurants called Cuisine de Bar in Paris and in London, serving casual meals such as soups, salads, and open-faced tartines. The company ships more than two hundred thousand loaves a year to clients in twenty countries, from Japan to Saudi Arabia. In New York, Poilâne bread is available at specialty grocers, such as Agata & Valentina and Tartinery, although some aficionados have developed their own means of importation. “Giant ziplock bag?” Claire from Brooklyn wrote recently on Yelp. “Check. Moved all non-essential personal items to checked baggage? . . . Ok. Time to hit up Poilâne to load up before hitting CDG.” Lionel once claimed that an American man paid him a hundred thousand dollars to insure that his offspring would receive a loaf of Poilâne bread every week for life.

Thin, pale, and refined, Apollonia—more of a baguette of a woman than a miche—is a formidable presence. She dispenses her opinions with the peremptory air of a mother-in-law giving child-care advice. She makes recommendations with the efficient gravity of a doctor writing a prescription. Still, she projects a mixture of innocence and experience. Her eyes are often hooded, from fatigue, but so are her sweatshirts. “I have a very instinctive and simple approach to bread,” she told me. “My philosophy is a small array of breads, each with its own use. I do not believe in making one bread with hazelnuts, one with almonds, and one with cumin, just for the hell of it.” Her other prejudices include breads that contain meats (“doughy and nasty”), breads that contain cheeses (“frivolous”), breads that contain novelty ingredients, such as algae (“not very relevant”), “organic” breads (“I don’t believe in paying money to some guy sitting behind a desk to certify something, when my father and grandfather before me were working very closely with their suppliers to make sure there were as few pesticides as possible”), panini (“pointless”), bakeries that sell soda (“drives me nuts”), and the French habit of eating foie gras with gingerbread (“fucking disgusting”).