y system as Britain and Italy put together. Only the United States house more nuclear power stations. The French go to the cinema more than other mainland Europeans, and their film industry produces the most full-length features on the continent. They eat high levels of butter and eggs while maintaining a low rate of heart disease and until recently at least an obesity level one-fifth of that of Americans. A Europe-wide investigation reported that their children were the most healthy on the continent. This country grows the most expensive potatoes on the planet, nurtured on seaweed and once sold for 3,000 francs a kilo. It is the. world's biggest exporter of apples, and bred the first hybrid tea rose. France houses what may be the world's earliest work of art in the form of a 32,000-year-old cave painting, and the most ancient walnut, an 8-million-year-old fossil discovered in Burgundy in 1995. It produced the greatest court diarist in Saint-Simon, and witnessed the first parachute descent, two centuries ago from a balloon above the Parc Monceau in Paris the intrepid jumper had prudently tried it on his dog beforehand. A Frenchman sailor was the first man to make a solo crossing of the Atlantic. A seventeenth-century prelate, Pierre de Fermat, set out the theorem which took three centuries to prove and Albert Binet invented the intelligence test. On a less elevated tone, France has given the world the first men's underpants with a horizontal fly; a toilet which keeps users locked inside until they have washed their hands; and lavatory paper printed with short articles on culture, geography and the European Union. For other sources of information, the French may suffer from having a weak national press, but Canal Plus runs Europe's biggest cable television operation and Elle magazine claims to be the highest-selling international women's publication. It was French agents who finally captured the terrorist Carlos the Jackal in ...
