“Sure, you have problems with the language. This leads to even greater deceptions and misconceptions. Despite eight years of school French, eight years of studying this beautiful language that institutions of humanistic learning count among the living languages and that is no more alive than the grillwork on a Gothic church window—despite eight years of French, you, a highly educated man, can manage in this language to claim proudly that you are the state, and not much more. And there’s little one can do with that nowadays, the state being the most controversial institution of the present age. Here, you are restricted to the purely optical; that is, so to speak, to the zoological.

“Here in Paris, you see mainly Frenchmen. Well, for all his national characteristics, a Frenchman looks as universally human as any other exemplar of the White Race. All in all, the French are an important, probably the most important, people in Europe. If one is struck dumb before the French, it is not just for reasons of linguistic ignorance—if you will forgive that expression—but out of admiration. Unfortunately, this obtains most of all for the French themselves. I swear to you: you could be as eloquent as Cyrano de Bergerac, but your chatter would never succeed in snapping the French out of their mania—the mania of their self-absorption. They live in a kind of trance—not merely a different state of consciousness but a different state of biological existence.

“Encounters such as you may have envisaged (Goethe runs into Lavater: ‘ ’Tis thou?’—‘ ’Tis I!’) no longer occur here, not even as a hostile collision. And it is no advantage to you that, forgive me for saying so, a Frenchman can identify you as a boche a kilometer away. It does not even bring you hatred, which, after all, would be a relationship of some kind, even if in the negative, so to speak. Not even the aggression normally and subconsciously released by the collective mind against old archenemies (I mean the aggression that once acted as Keeper of the Seal for such tensions in old Europe), not even this ancient human feature emerges here. This cannot be good in the long run, my friend. I worry about our dear old continent. You feel like a stranger here, all right. As if you had been cast ashore on a different star. Do you think you’re the only person who feels like this? No, no, I tell you: the sense of being fundamentally alien here, of finding oneself on a different planet, among Martians, is not restricted to us non-Frenchmen, us foreigners, us transients in Paris. Some fifteen million native Parisians and purebred Frenchmen share that feeling with us. Just about everyone here lives on a different star. Simply through the abstraction of this French world, which immunizes the individual against the immediately human. Believe me, friend, it won’t help you to truck through the streets in your still-earthly constitution, with good German fat on your belly and beer-thickened blood in your veins. One doesn’t inveigle one’s way into life here by being conspicuous. Take me, for instance: I am certainly anything but a run-of-the-mill type in these surroundings—true, I’m not exactly striking, but at least I can’t be easily classified, readily placed in an ethnic category. I’m rather shapeless, amorphous. An ethnic jellyfish, as it were. A non-Frenchman with no pronounced racial characteristics or identifiable accent (since I don’t give my diction the broadness of padded American shoulders, as certain other people can). Fitting in with no ethnological cliché and yet easily made to fit any at all. Whenever I find it too difficult to explain why I am not the child of any fatherland, too difficult to cite my confused background and the requisite facts about the ethnic, geographic, and historical conditions of Central Europe, then I can get away with calling myself a Russian, Dutchman, Swiss, North Italian, or Irishman. But not a Frenchman, for God’s sake. So one cannot deny there is something blatantly different about me.