How [not] to eat a pain au chocolat

Unless you're only two.

First, you dip your finger in the end and keep doing this until you've got out as much gooey chocolate  as possible, then you open up the pastry  to reach the rest of the chocolate, then you lick well to make sure no chocolate remains. You discard the rest of the pastry.

As it happens, my father would sometimes give me pain au chocolat for breakfast when I was not much older, but the pain was ordinary bread and the chocolat was a few squares off a slab. It was what French children ate, he said. I was not sure that I liked the combination of the soft bread and the hard chocolate. I never knew it could be like this.