From Corpse Diplomatique, by Delano Ames:

***

He was wearing a beret I'd forgotten he had. A copy of a French Communist newspaper was folded beside his saucer and he had bought a packet of Gauloises cigarettes. He gesticulated in a very Latin way as he asked the waiter to bring me a Dubbonet. He looked essentially, unmistakably English. I'd never noticed it before.

***

Mrs Andrioli... bustled in with a kind of well-that's-that air about her.

***

[I love the wealth of meaning and intensity of feeling that the phrase "I mean to say" can have in the mouth of a Brit (and how--Incomplexpletives Dept.--it's not even necessary to specify what one means to say).]

"Not that one's superstitious or any rot of that sort, but... I mean to say!"

***

As the question was not only cryptic but also rhetorical I smiled back vaguely and said nothing.

***

Midday cocktail parties usually take me like this at about five-thirty in the afternoon, especially when I have missed tea. I glanced through a footnote in Hugo's Simplified Grammar and learned that the imperfect of the subjunctive is almost never used in contemporary French conversation; but even this did not cheer me greatly.

***

Dagobert ordered a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, though he does not normally like champagne, and attacked the Anglo-Saxon heresy that champagne ought to be very dry. Like all silly things it should be slightly sweet and, as it is not supposed to chill, it should not be too cold. It ought to go off with a resounding pop, the cork preferably bouncing from the ceiling on to someone else's head. It ought to have a reckless label designed by, say, Raoul Dufy, and the neck of the bottle should be festooned with plenty of gold and silver tinfoil.

***

"It is pointless celebrating when there's something to celebrate. You need to celebrate when there's nothing in particular to get excited about."