Of course, you don’t have to travel on the Métro to realise that. Take bookshops. French books are still distinguished by their sober, unadorned covers. Similarly, bookshops eschew elaborate displays, dump-bins, advertising posters. Not for them the hype and pizazz of the contemporary Australian book trade. The stylish Compagnie in the rue des Écoles is content to display its wares on neatly filled shelves and on three or four large tables reserved for recent, notable books.

The books on display are, in comparison with local conditions once more, remarkably eclectic. Compagnie’s tables contained French versions of Robert Dessaix’s Night Letters, several of Peter Carey’s novels, Julia Leigh’s The Hunter and Frank Moorhouse’s Grand Days. Jingoists might be distressed by it, but I was pleased to see nothing to indicate that there was anything exotic about these and the other Australian works lying side by side with books from nearly every part of the world — or about the way Karin Mainwaring’s The Rain Dancers, the first Australian play to be performed by the illustrious Comédie Française, was promoted. This, it occurred to me not for the first time, is one of the distinguishing marks of a confident cosmopolitan culture. Where books and ideas, at least, are concerned, for the French the whole world is indeed their oyster.

Such cultural sophistication cannot be achieved, of course, without considerable self-confidence. In that, it goes without saying, the French are world-beaters. France may have lost its empire, its political influence may have waned, but la gloire persists. Simply put, every Frenchman and Frenchwoman is convinced that nothing equals the glories of their literature, art, or intellectual life. And that, while rendering them remarkably tolerant towards the artistic and cultural products of distant parts of the world, inevitably makes them prey to narcissism.

A recent instance of that – reflected in the reading habits of several passengers on the Métro – is a widely discussed and much admired book released in the middle of March, Jean-Paul Kauffmann’s La Lutte avec l’ange (The Struggle with the Angel). Kauffmann, a writer, journalist, and the current editor of a cigar-connoisseurs’ magazine, based this strange, enthralling, yet ultimately infuriating work on a depiction of the biblical story of Jacob’s fight with the angel, one of three frescoes Delacroix painted in the last years of his life in a chapel of Saint Sulpice – a vast, gloomy church in the classy Sixth Arrondissement.

A confession is unavoidable. Saint Sulpice seems to me just another baroque pile, like dozens throughout Europe. It may be slightly more restrained and tasteful than the most flamboyant excesses of the South German baroque, but only slightly. As for the Delacroix: it is, no doubt, a remarkable achievement, yet it strikes me as uncomfortably close to the pictorial style of Prince Valiant comics.

Reading Hoffmann’s book in the sardine-tin of a 747, as France, Europe, receded further and further into the night, roused suspicions of provincial prejudice, or (by contrast) of French navel-gazing. In Saint Sulpice, and in its chief glory, Delacroix’s frescoes, the greatness of French life, culture, history, and spirit came to be concentrated – at least if Hoffmann is to be believed. And more than that: a meditation on good and evil, life and death, civilisation and barbarism, all of which, and much else besides, are woven into a complex, dare I say pretentious, fabric in this three-hundred page, exquisitely written book. Admirable, enthralling, a perfectly formed image of the true life of the mind and the senses, but ...

Then we came back to earth, literally, and had to face the pedestrian business of declaring whether we were carrying animal products, had visited a farm or been in contact with livestock of any description.