One of the questions that always crosses my mind when I visit Paris is, What do unintelligent or uneducated people read there? Certainly, the daily newspapers cannot meet their requirements: Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro (to say nothing of L’Humanité) strenuously eschew the wilful vulgarity that the British are inclined to mistake for vigor and a critical spirit, but which is, in reality, just plain old vulgar vulgarity. I confess that it is a relief to read for once newspapers that do not worship at the shrine of meretricious celebrity, and assume that their readers might actually be interested in the affairs of faraway countries of which they currently know nothing. But their circulations are small, at least by British standards: and the rest is silence.

I confess also to a mild frisson of irritation—so tonic in the mornings as one sits in a café—at their incessant use of the word “anglo-saxon” as a term if not of outright abuse, at least of thin-lipped and not well-veiled disapprobation. What does “anglo-saxon” mean in this context, exactly? In the mental economy of the French intelligentsia, it means crass, shallow, and vulgarly materialistic, though also regrettably powerful and attractive to lesser breeds without culture. It plays the same role as the term “judaeo-masonic” once did in the minds of some of the less intellectually distinguished, though perhaps more historically influential, political philosophers of the twentieth century.

Of course, I know as I experience my brief frisson