  We review recent results concerning the representation of conformal field
theory characters in terms of fermionic quasi-particle excitations, and
describe in detail their construction in the case of the integrable three-state
Potts chain. These fermionic representations are $q$-series which are
generalizations of the sums occurring in the Rogers-Ramanujan identities. (To
appear in the proceedings of ``Yang-Baxter Equations in Paris'', July 1992,
J.-M.~Maillard (ed.).)
