Up In Time to Read the Tribune in Dijon

The other morning I awoke with a shock. I had made the classic gaffe--forgot to ask for a wake-up call, thinking hey, I get up at 7 every morning. But in those high thread count sheets, with the light blocked, and a late night watching French TV, I was jolted out of bed by the sweet voice of Jessie, the young woman from French Tourism in NYC who joined us. "Max, we're all here, and I see the bus is just arriving," she said. "Thanks!" I replied, then whipped off the covers and started a blur of packing. I scrambled to put in my contacts, threw everything into my famous "Elizabeth Taylor" huge suitcase, and made a dash for the bus. That terrible feeling of having no coffee, not shaving, and feeling totally out of sorts was with me for a while until the scenery of Burgundy revived me.

This morning I was happy to get up at 6:38 am, had some of the awful French press coffee and read the Herald Tribune. Among the stories was a piece on France's presidential "free-for-all," that brings a bunch of candidates to the fight. There is the front runner Sarkozy, who is a Bush and Iraq war supporter, (hard to believe that here) and then Segolene Royal, a woman with less experience but not tied to the infamous Jean-Marie Le Pen as Sarkozy is. In the middle is Francois Bayrou, another candidate who polls say won't make the cut.

The Tribune story: "It has become a duel betwen a self-branded mother figure and a tough-talking former interior minister, between a woman who is seen as having empathy but lacking the stature to turn France around, and a man who is more feared than loved, but considered by a majority to look 'presidential.'