Love's labour's lost in the translation

'Wind up a Frenchman, toss him an abstract thought, and he will talk for hours without saying anything'

Yesterday I asked you if you knew which novelist had started a new book by saying: "All characters in this novel are based on real people - any resemblance to fictional characters is totally coincidental."

Yesterday I asked you if you knew which novelist had started a new book by saying: "All characters in this novel are based on real people - any resemblance to fictional characters is totally coincidental."

It's a good joke. It's a joke that, by its nature, can be done only once. It's also a French joke, because it was written by Raymond Queneau, the French novelist, at the start of one of his novels, called La Dimanche de la Vie.

(Queneau, I am sorry to say, is still not very well-known in Britain, even though he wrote some of the funniest and cleverest novels of the last century. Iris Murdoch discovered him early on and dedicated her first novel, Under the Net, to him, as a result of which Queneau is sometimes mentioned in critical works as the man to whom the great Murdoch tipped her hat, as if that were his only importance, whereas I would personally rather keep one of Queneau's novels than the whole inflated corpus of Dame Iris's works...)

What is really nice about the Queneau quotation is that it is funny and French and short. The French have acquired a reputation, quite fairly, for being long-winded and flowery and going off into the kind of waffle for which the word "euphuistic" must have been specifically evolved. Wind up a Frenchman, toss him a semi-abstract thought to gnaw at, and he will write or talk for hours without saying anything. From time to time, we British fall under the spell of this incantation and let ourselves be colonised by these ramblings, whether they are about existentialism or structuralism, whereas it is actually wiser to let the French floodwaters of thought rise and fall unnoticed.

But there is another side to the French mind, which is quite the opposite: terse and witty, neat and shrewd. It was a Frenchman who said: "What's the point of getting your hair cut? It only grows again." It was a Frenchman who, when asked what he had achieved during the French Revolution, said: "I survived."

Perhaps the best expression of French terseness still resides in the maxims of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, a sparkling series of sceptical if not cynical sayings that are nearly 400 years old now and still hardly known in Britain. It was the duke, not Oscar Wilde, who first said that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. It was La Rochefoucauld who said: "In the adversity of our best friends, there is often something that does not displease us... "

And I remember with especial fondness his simultaneous put-down of true love and superstition: "Tales of true love are like accounts of the supernatural. Everyone tells ghost stories, but nobody has ever seen a ghost..."

The French can be witty even in gestures. I am not sure about this but I think that it was a Frenchman who came up with the idea of paying tribute to the thousands of forgotten war dead by inventing the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

I came across a rather touching version of this on the only occasion when I have visited a wartime concentration camp. It was Belsen, which is still a British Army camp; the old slave campsite next door is grassed over and kept as a memorial park. All the nations whose citizens died at Belsen have their own marble memorial there - Russians, Poles etc - and all the memorials are chock-a-block with long engraved lists of names and dates.

All except one - the French one. The French one is virtually empty. It has nothing but one eye-catching single sentence that, to the best of my recollection, reads: "In Memory of Those Who Died for the Crime of Having a Different Opinion." As a summary of the Holocaust, it seems oddly oblique, but as a sample of French thought and wit, I think it's great.

And I saw something else like that only two weeks ago in France, on a notice in a supermarket car park belonging to the Leclerc chain. The sign was hanging over the parking area nearest the store, reserved for disabled people. Able-bodied parkers had obviously been using the area illicitly, because the notice, aimed at them, read: "OK - I'll let you have my parking space if you take my handicap."

It read even better in French. Dammit.