It was always said that the big distinction between the French and the English is that the English are intelligent and the French are intellectual.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You know French means like sophisticated, well educated, so far.
The more English is heard in the world, the more gratifying it seems to speak French, and above all to know the culture of our country. They find a kind of French social grace in the language and culture.
French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic.
The French are very individualistic.
I read French much better than I speak.
The great watershed of modern poetry is French, more than English.
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
Americans and French are notoriously monolingual, especially earlier generations. Language is a sense of pride in both cultures. I think that the French and Americans are like brothers or sisters who are so similar that they irritate one another.
French are what they are without excusing themselves to be.
You get the feeling that many of my guests feel that the French language gives them entry into a more cultivated, more intelligent world, more highly civilised too, with rules.