In addition to the municipal police who mostly look the other way whenever the opportunity arises to give out parking tickets, thus encouraging people to park willy-nilly in the most inconvenient locations, the closest thing we have to a police station is the local branch of the “Gendarmerie Nationale”. The “gendarmes” (originally “gens d’armes”, or “armed people”) are a branch of the army that does the work of the “Police Nationale” in more rural areas, such as here. This assumes, of course, that whatever heinous crime they have to rush to is not discovered at an inconvenient time, for the “gendarmerie” keeps strict office hours: it closes over lunch and during the night. It says something for this area that this is not a problem.