MORE THAN TWO DECADES AGO, I spent a year teaching English to high school students in Paris. The school was in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a wealthy neighborhood barnacled on the western border of central Paris, whose mayor at the time was a rising star of right-wing politics named Nicolas Sarkozy, set to win election a few years later as the sixth president of the Fifth Republic. Sarkozy’s children attended the school, which was filled with bored rich brats enduring the chore of formal education before they cruised into plum positions at firms owned by their parents, their friends’ parents, and their parents’ friends.
I arrived in Paris, at the age of seventeen, a virgin. I left Paris, at the age of eighteen, a virgin. I stayed on the school campus, in a whistling old room with hardwood floors and no toilet, and ate dinner in the basement canteen with various members of the maintenance staff who also lived on-site, almost all of whom were unfailingly friendly and eager to chat with this strange Francophone teenager from the Antipodes. My dining companions warned me about on…
