Amélie finds the young man's name and number, and starts researching. The owner of the diary is desperate to find out why, and Amélie is desperate to find the owner.
Amélie picks it up and is immediately hooked: it reveals that one man is leaving his photographs in booths all over Paris. Then one day, as she is returning from a visit to her father in the suburbs, Amelie sees a young man collecting discarded passport-photos from a booth in the Gare du Nord. She fakes love-letters to the embittered concierge from the woman's late husband. She gets into Collignon's apartment and makes subtle changes, leading the horrible man to doubt his sanity. In an attempt to liberate her father's emotions, she steals his beloved garden gnome and gets Philomene to send him Polaroids from the gnome's round-the-world trip.
She steers Joseph into passion with Georgette the cigarette-girl and so frees Gina from his unwelcome jealousy. So moved is she by his joy that she starts looking for other lives to fix. Amélie returns the box anonymously to its middle-aged owner, Bretodeau, and watches from a distance as his life is transformed by its magical discovery. Finally, her path crosses with Dufayel, who puts her on the right track to find her quarry and, in the process, reveals himself to be a domestic philosopher and eccentric painter - he has been making a scrupulous copy of a Renoir once a year for twenty years. Her researches bring her into contact with the concierge of her building, who longs to receive a letter from her errant (and, unfortunately, dead) husband, and with the cruel grocer Collignon, who treats his innocent employee Lucien appallingly. Seized with excitement, she makes it her mission to find the owner. One day, Amélie discovers an old box of childhood treasures in her apartment.
Amélie's life is fairly happy, but it's narrow. She works in a café called Les Deux Moulins, where her boss Suzanne dreams of her past life in the circus, and co-worker Gina rebuffs the attentions of her jealous ex-boyfriend Joseph. She looks after her stewardess neighbour Philomene's cat when Philomene's away on a flight, and spies guiltily on her neighbour Dufayel, a man with brittle bones. Traumatised by her mother's sudden death and her father's consequent coldness, she has become fascinated by tiny things: baking a cake, plunging her hand into a barrel of rice, imagining how many orgasms are occurring throughout the city at any one moment. Amélie lives in Paris and in a world of her own.
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