HONEYMOON IN FRANCE: Back in 1984, my newly-wed spouse and I were planning our slightly belated honeymoon. (The scond one, that was: the one without my father, my brother-in-law, and the two kids from my first marriage also tagging along.) No, this was to be the real thing. And being as how we are both deeply convinced Francophiles, it was going to be France…
But we wanted to do something completely off the beaten track. We wanted to rent a car and drive around to some little-known towns, sample the riches of regional cuisines, climb to the source of the Loire, see some neat places… you get the drift.
So we asked our friend and colleague was then the Middle East-watcher in the French Embassy in DC for his ideas on good places to go, and he was really most helpful and forthcoming. His name was Dominique de Villepin…
So now, there he is, Master Hunk of the Rational Universe: witty, urbane, devastatingly logical and with a much defter diplomatic hand than his current boss, Jacques “those East Europeans ought to stay silent” Chirac.
In a March 3 column in the Washington Post, David Pugnatious writes of DDV that, “While working as Chirac’s chief of staff, he wrote a well-reviewed history of Napoleon’s 100-day dash from Elba to the disaster of Waterloo. And he has just finished a thousand-page book that he describes as an ‘elegy’ to the art of poetry, whose galleys he proudly displayed in his sumptuous office at the Foreign Ministry on Saturday. In short, de Villepin is one of those modern Supermen who can get by on four or five hours of sleep a night, write books several hours a day, maintain an impressive private collection of African and Asian art, and run marathons — in addition to directing French foreign policy. He describes his many passions in the words of a Portuguese poet, as le devoir d’inqui