Not tonight, Josephine!

I’ve been in Paris the last few days, taking the bottled waters and several aspirin.

As I propped up the cocktail bar at the Ritz hotel, the White House announced plans to send an American to Mars, the Red Planet.

“The Americans are from Mars, the French are from Venus,” drawled an aged American woman next to me with a white face and a silk turban. She introduced herself as ‘Josephine’, but she was a dead ringer for Gloria Swanson. The barman told me she’d been quite glamorous in the 1920s, hooking up with Scott, Zelda and Papa Hemingway in a celebrated ping-pong foursome.

I sipped my Martini and glanced at Le Monde. “President Bush plans to build a ranch on the moon so that he can escape to Mars for the winters”, read the headline.

“Your French is a little rusty, huh?” the woman hissed, nursing her Manhattan.

“So’s your bouffant,” I said.

One of her talons sliced across my cheek in a display of affection. “God, you’re cute!” She grinned, leaning towards me, her mink stole twitching as though alive.

I ordered another drink and lit three Gauloises.

She started to stroke her petit chien. “Let me tell you, pal, I’m an American in Paris, and I always knew Venus was prettier than Mars.”

“No contest,” I agreed. “Mars had that craggy beard, those bulging muscles, and that hot, flaming temper. Whereas Venus – now there’s a chick I ... ”

But when I turned round she was gone and I wondered if I’d imagined the whole thing, and if so whether it would show up on my bar tab, which was already threatening to dwarf the bill for my penthouse suite.

I woke up the next day thinking about what Josephine had said. As I took a leisurely breakfast in my box at the Folies Bergère, I decided to forget about the whole experience and spend the weekend quaffing as many escargot and cuisse de grenouille as I could fit into my cakehole.

But then my conscience reared its ugly head, and I found myself recalling the journalistic code: “Everything on expenses”.

I swung to the nearest papetiere, bought myself a pad and pen, and got to work.

My first visit was to an old friend at L’Ecole Militaire (from where no one ever graduates). I asked him if Franco-US relations were cooling off or whether we were headed for another cold war?

“The French are not afraid of the US,” he said, in French, taking five minutes to say it. “The Soviets were too weak to detonate a nuclear bomb. The French have no problem with this. Just ask the Polynesians.”

I gulped so hard I could’ve swallowed a football. The conversation turned to Iraq, occupation, the might of the Luxembourg military, then back to Iraq and occupation again.

“Was there ever really a French Resistance, or did it amount to nothing more than a handful of peasants with pitchforks?” I asked, though my interlocutor left for a lunch engagement before answering.

As I strolled down the rive gauche, stopping to gawp at Rodin’s ‘Thinker’, I thought some gauche thinkings of my own. I’ve been a little hard on France over the last year or so. My merciless assault on their sensibilities – supporting Saddam, posing as peaceniks, those striking stilt-walkers – has made me an unwelcome guest in one of my favourite cities. Only a year ago, I called Paris “the heart of the pro-Saddam, anti-American insurgency”. Would the phrase come back to haunt me?

Thankfully not. The French pride themselves on refusing to read anything not in French. In fact, French law states that 98% of all reading matter must be in French. All the movies are dubbed, not subtitled. Clint Eastwood sounds like Maurice Chevalier. My column is virtually unknown outside the Ritz bar and certain radical quarters of the Marais.

Comforted by the thought, I went to the international relations department of the Sorbonne, searching desperately for anyone whose politics were to the right of Poll Pott.

I found one guy in a windowless office just below the dungeons. He was keen to talk to me and kept kissing my cheeks.

I pushed him away. “Two’ll do, merci.”

“I love your columns,” he said after some sustained prompting on my part. “But I am amazed that a man who writes so much reactionary drivel can appear so cultured and sophisticated in real life. You seem so immersed in the intellectual and physical habits of ‘old’ Europe!”

“You really think so?” I blushed, adjusting my beret, but then we got into a debate about what “real life” meant and I got out of there as fast as I could.

My investigation was getting me nowhere. The French seemed typically reluctant to give a straight answer to my queer questions. I dropped into a brasserie and found some locals hovering around a TV set on which President Jacques Ch’Iraq was kissing girls and giving his “voeux” or “best wishes” for the New Year. The word “multipolar” was used seventy-seven times, I guess deliberately so.

Afterwards, I talked to some of the barflies. The general feeling was that America is an imperial power that must be stopped or rivalled, whichever won’t require their leaving the bar.

I decided to test one of my most treasured theses: that France is the America of Europe. The wide boulevards, the statue of liberty, the loyalty to the flag, the spirit of the republic, the love of jazz, Gershwin, Copland, the self-obsession, the fierce invention and preservation of national identity – these are all American attributes too.

Everyone looked baffled. “Rubbish!” said one man. “The Americans are uneducated philistines and bullies! We are cheese-eating surrender monkeys, and proud of it!”

Next stop, Neptune.