ad a French mistress; Japan has its version of the Eiffel Tower; and a reproduction of the Alsatian town of Colmar is being built above the tropical forests of Malaysia. The most expensive hotel suite in Korea is modelled after the Palace of Versailles. An Indochinese sect counts Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo among its saints, and Cambodians smoke cigarettes named after the actor Alain Delon. Schools on the resort island of Phuket in Thailand learn to play ptanque, and Madame Mao (somehow Mrs Mao doesn't sound right) plotted the Cultural Revolution from a villa modeled on a Louis XIII manor house in Shanghai. As for the classic Coca-Cola bottle and the Lucky Strike packet, a Frenchman redesigned them both. Bitter opposition to France's nuclear tests in 1995 did not cause the Australian Prime Minister to abandon his hobby of collecting French clocks, or stop a Japanese firm tripling its orders of Beaujolais Nouveau. The head of one of the world's largest media and entertainment companies keeps a copy of the Albert Camus novel L'tranger in his office in New York. In the 1960s, an aged African dictator tried to get his country turned into a department of France. Another African President called Charles de Gaulle `papa', and the leaders of the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte announced that they wanted to become part of France `like the department of the Lozre'. Duke Ellington defined himself as a drinker of Beaujolais; James Dean found solace in Saint-Exupry's The Little Prince; and Ella Fitzgerald was once spotted reading a book by Jean-Paul Sartre in her dressing-room. This country invented the pressure cooker, the sewing machine and the non-stick flying pan which gave Ronald Reagan his Teflon nickname. French surgeons conducted the world's first graft of a hand in the autumn of 1998 just as Paris put into service the first major underground railway line without drivers or conductors. Voltaire dreamed up Candide and Panglosse, and ...
