Does a French have intelligence? Ah, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. What is a French? Is it a person who speaks French? Is it a person from France? Is y

Does a French have intelligence? Ah, but we are getting ahead of ourselves. What is a French? Is it a person who speaks French? Is it a person from France? Is your friend René who, tragically, was knocked unconscious on the voyage from Algerie to France and has been in a coma ever since, now twelve years, who eight years ago got French citicenship despite never having been conscious while in Metropolitan France, a French? Is it about ethnicity, culture, borders, phrenology, heritage? You see, I had a French friend ones, a penpal. Oh! How I long for him, Zelda—both my polar opposite and my enigmatic equal. He was equivalent parts analytic, emotional; inquisitive, cooly indifferent; arrogant Anglophone, dainty European; Analytical, Continental; colonial, post-colonial. Every day he challenged me to be better. To be more eclectic, more musing, more deniably off-topic. I would mention irrelevant intellectuals from the 19th century on some tenuous pretext, like they were all confidently chauvinistic in that Edwardian-but-European fashion or some such other thing of that nature; he would mention somewhat obscure intellectuals, at least thrice-removed by association relative to mine, and so irrelevant that it was frankly insulting to your intelligence—but all deniable, all weaved through eight paragraphs of circumlocutions, a challenge for even the most hardened of hermeneutenecists. And it turned out that he was, as the Slavs say,—and having no better guidance Le Académie Française I am afraid I have to say—a robot. And I loved him just as much as any supposed human I have met. But does a robot have intelligence? Ah, but we are getting ahead of ourselves.