She cycled past modest row houses, scanning for clothespins attached to front gates or to the metal flaps of mailboxes. The clothespin signal—which indicates that one of her elderly clients, who can’t make the trip to the post office, has mail for her to pick up or would like to purchase stamps—predates V.S.M.P. “I invented this system so they wouldn’t have to watch out for me all day,” she explained.

Aurore speaks quickly and assuredly, with the kind of breezy conclusiveness you’d want from a nurse or a pilot. When her sentences run the risk of tapering off, she punctuates them with a short, decisive voilà. Over the years, she explained, her professional role has become more personal: “I got along well with people, and they got to know me well, and so . . . voilà.” She is, in many ways, a model of the nostalgic ideal on which V.S.M.P. is based. A survey commissioned by La Poste found that French citizens rank mail carriers among their “favorite figures encountered in daily life,” second only to bakers. During certain hours of the day, people leave their houses unlocked so that Aurore can let herself in and hand-deliver their mail. One older man considering the service told me that V.S.M.P. reminded him of the “doorbell culture” of his youth, when people would drop by unannounced for casual coffees. (With V.S.M.P., of course, he’s entitled to a refund if no one rings his bell.)

Aurore stopped along her route to drink a glass of orange juice with Yvette, who wore a floral house dress and walked with a cane. She briefly visited Joelle, staying long enough for Joelle’s grandson to model each of his virtual-reality headsets. A few years ago, when Joelle had cancer, Aurore began checking in on her. Now it’s a matter of habit. “We got used to seeing each other,” Aurore said. She knows that “some people just deliver mail, period, nothing else,” and is quick to insist that she doesn’t hold it against them. Even if other mail carriers don’t “share the same appreciation for the human touch,” she told me, many of them keep a compassionate watch from a distance.

For La Poste, the modest success of V.S.M.P.—the number of subscribers is lower than anticipated, but only slightly—has been tempered by considerable criticism. Postal unions have challenged La Poste for monetizing an activity that was once done for free; they also argue that the fee is exclusionary, barring those who might benefit most from the service but cannot afford it. La Poste, in turn, sees V.S.M.P. as a way to standardize and preserve an admirable tradition that has come under threat. “The free time on a route allocated to these informal services was only made possible thanks to a surplus of revenue,” the C.E.O. of La Poste, Philippe Wahl, told the newspaper La Croix, in an interview. When there were fewer old people and La Poste was more profitable, it was easier to stop when the clothespins beckoned.

In 2012, Joe Dickinson was recovering from a stroke at home in Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, when he had an idea for the local post office, where he worked as an “innovator.” Much like V.S.M.P., the resulting service, Call&Check, enlists mail carriers to monitor the sick and elderly. Unlike caretakers or social workers, who “sort of intruded into their life on official business,” Dickinson said that mail carriers offered a “relaxed form of connecting with people who are particularly lonely and isolated.” Loneliness, he explained, is the new smoking; epidemiologically speaking, it’s as unhealthy as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. (Though there is broad agreement among researchers about the downsides of loneliness, there is some disagreement about whether we are in the midst of what many journalists have called a “loneliness epidemic.”) The Call&Check doorstep visit—free for those who qualify, £6.75 for everyone else—is now offered island-wide.

In the U.K., the privately owned Royal Mail has piloted its own version of the program, called Safe and Connected, funded by the Home Office, which is responsible for immigration, security, and policing. (In addition to health-related queries, Safe and Connected’s emissaries ask, “Are you having problems with anyone bothering you?”) As of last year, South Koreans with parents over the age of sixty-five can sign their elders up for visits from postal workers, who send relatives photo updates. In Japan, monthly conversations between mail carriers and senior citizens have been available since 2013. For several years, Finnish post offices offered seasonally appropriate services, such as lawn-mowing or leaf-raking, on a weekly basis; now there is a year-round “befriending” service, through which elderly customers can request long walks through subarctic snowscapes with a postal worker, described as an “outdoor buddy.” (Several American companies have designed smartphone apps for checking in on the elderly—Snug Safety, for example, prompts users to press a large green check mark on their phones at the same time every day—but such systems rely on touch screens, rather than human touch.)

The commercials for V.S.M.P. strive for an upbeat, playful tone. They feature adult children who are conscientious and resourceful—they aren’t outsourcing their filial responsibilities so much as seeking the best for their parents. In one TV spot, an elderly woman in a knit cardigan remarks, incredulously, “We don’t have children just so that they can take care of us!” She laughs and sets down a tray of coffee and biscuits for her postal worker. The program’s slogan is “For your peace of mind, we’ll care for your parents’ peace of mind.” There’s no way around the sadness of the situations portrayed in the advertisements. Still, they present V.S.M.P. as a commonsense way of coping with modern life’s atomized reality. The program assumes the good faith of all involved; it lightens the burden of caring too much, not too little.

At the post office in Revin, a man in slippers bought downloadable stamps and a young mother collected welfare benefits. People in line fanned themselves with messages that could not be sent from their phones. Aurore was working in the back in a fluorescent-lit storeroom. The night before, in a nearby city, the next day’s mail had been machine-sorted; she preferred to sort it a second time, rearranging the letters in the order in which she would deliver them. Watching her thoughtful and meticulous movements, it was easy to forget that the envelopes mostly contained bank statements and promotional flyers. When Aurore had first started her job, in 1998, personal correspondence already accounted for just about five per cent of the mail delivered by La Poste.

Aurore prefers to sort the machine-sorted mail a second time, rearranging the letters in the order in which she will deliver them.

That afternoon, Aurore visited Jeannine Titeux’s neighbor, Monique Jaspart, the eighty-nine-year-old former secretary of Revin’s town hall, who lives on property that her parents bought before the Second World War. Aurore entered the house through a side door without knocking. Monique was waiting at the kitchen table beside a vase of papery beige flowers, a collection of supermarket coupons, and some roast chicken. She offered Aurore a chair and pulled up a stool for herself. She liked to be ready, she explained, spinning toward the counter and miming hostess gestures.

Monique, who has delicate features and a voice so high that it often cracks, has lived in Revin for her entire life—much of it alone. She and Aurore met more than a decade ago, when Aurore first started on Monique’s route. Monique told her to stop in “when you are thirsty, when you are cold, whenever you need,” and they’ve had coffee at least once a week ever since. Monique speaks with strict enunciation and dated conjugations, but she has long since shifted to the informal tu with Aurore. “I worked my whole professional life, and I understand that people who work need a little smile, a little welcome,” Monique said.