I have a daughter who's married to a Frenchman.

Invented by Frenchman Édouard Léon Scott de Martinville, it was patented on March 25, 1857.

As a Frenchman, I cannot wait for the next World Cup match between France and Germany.

On the one hand, Sarkozy s fascination with rich people has helped isolate him from the average Frenchman.

A Frenchman named Jean Nicot (from whose name the word nicotine is derived) introduced tobacco to France in 1560.

In 1713, another Catholic Frenchman, Charles Irénée Castel, abbé de Saint Pierre, published his Project for Perpetual Peace in Europe.

Nevertheless, I would like to leave just this one honest testimony I am dying, just as I lived, as a good Frenchman.

Such comments may be understandable coming from a Frenchman concerned about his country s welfare, but they should be unacceptable to everyone else.

Today, his successor, Dominique Strauss Kahn (DSK), handcuffed and grave in ubiquitous front page photos, is the most humiliated Frenchman in the world.

Why should a Frenchman or Italian in his early sixties work today, when in the 1990's he could have retired in his mid fifties with 80 or more of his last working age salary?

The head of the IMF, Frenchman Dominique Strauss Kahn, could easily select a superb panel from any range of former crisis countries, including Mexico, Brazil, Korea, Turkey, Japan, and Sweden, not to mention Argentina, Russia, Chile, and many others.

As a Frenchman who watched with a mixture of sadness and humiliation the behavior of the French national team, on and off the field (happily, the torture is over), the image in the mirror makes a lot of sense.

Who would have predicted thirty years ago that British soccer fans would have cheered for a London team full of Africans, Latin Americans, and Spaniards, coached by a Frenchman? Or that the national English team would be managed by an Italian?

PRINCETON How the mighty International Monetary Fund has fallen. More than a decade ago, the French magazine Paris Match carried a picture of the Fund s then Managing Director, Michel Camdessus, with the title The Most Powerful Frenchman in the World.

Perhaps the first example of organized human computing was by the Frenchman Alexis Claude Clairaut (1713 1765), when he divided the computation to determine timing of the return of Halley's Comet with two colleagues, Joseph Lalande and Nicole Reine Lepaute.

And she pulled back, threw down her arms, put them on her hips, turned around and yelled across the room, This guy is built like a god damned mountain of muscle, and he's grabbing me like a fucking Frenchman, which I found encouraging.

Instead, they should look closely at the face of our president, Viktor Yushchenko, ravaged by poison during last year s election campaign, and recall the words of the great Frenchman André Malraux, for whom the most beautiful faces are those that have been wounded.

As a Frenchman who watched with a mixture of sadness and humiliation the behavior of the French national team, on and off the field (happily, the torture is over), the image in the mirror makes a lot of sense. But can one go so far as to say that a depressed country can produce only a depressed team?