Leather-bound rare books in a glass case lend gravitas to a solid-looking writing table wedged into a window-side niche. But there is also plenty of crime fiction, children’s books in their own nook, fat best sellers and coffee table whoppers like “Louis Vuitton: 100 Malles de Légende” (“Louis Vuitton: 100 Legendary Suitcases”).

Image Albertine has French books in English and English-language books in French, about 14,000 titles in all. Credit... Philip Greenberg for The New York Times

For advice on the selection of titles, Mr. Baudry turned to the poet Yves Bonnefoy, at 91 one of the grand names in French literature, although it seems unlikely that Mr. Bonnefoy cast his vote for Stephen King, or best-selling French suspense writers like Guillaume Musso, or the lovingly displayed volumes of the comic serials known as bandes dessinées.

To understand the store, it helps to know a little about Mr. Baudry, 39, and his zigzag intellectual path. A Parisian by birth, he studied mathematics until, at 20, he started taking literature seriously.

“The poison entered my veins,” he said. “Before that, it was comic books, sci-fi and math.” He went on to write a dissertation on Proust — hence the name of the bookstore — and, after a chance meeting with Dominique de Villepin, France’s foreign minister at the time, began working at the Quai d’Orsay, as the Foreign Ministry is known, as an adviser on culture and international economics.

The machinations at the ministry gave him the material for “Quai d’Orsay,” a bande dessinée that he wrote under the pen name Abel Lanzac, with illustrations by Christophe Blain. The second volume of “Quai d’Orsay” won a top prize at the annual comic-book festival in Angoulême, forcing Mr. Baudry to reveal his identity, a coming-out that was widely covered in the French press. The book was brought to the screen (as “Quai d’Orsay” in French, “The French Minister” in English) by Bertrand Tavernier, who gave the role of an adviser on African affairs to Julie Gayet, who would go on to capture headlines when the French press reported on her extremely close friendship with President François Hollande. The book was recently brought out in English by the British publisher Self Made Hero under the title “Weapons of Mass Diplomacy.”

In other words, Mr. Baudry, who moved to New York in 2010, and whose wife, Bérénice Baudry, is a lecturer in the French department at Columbia University, brings a certain off-kilter sensibility to the job. It is reflected in the festival, which he has organized with Greil Marcus, the former Rolling Stone writer and the author of the cultural studies “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century” and “The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice.”