(about my previous post) I guess the situation of our character, wandering in the lobby in the five star hotel, hesitant to join the ranks of the rich, would feel very odd to an American audience, if one goes by stereotypes about them. It is said that for Americans, wealth is the natural reward of hard work. Besides material enjoyment, wealth enables you to meet other hard working and intelligent persons like yourself, and the higher you go, the better the company gets. After all, at the very top, there sits Bill Gates, Steve Jobbs and other really really clever and good people. Whereas at the bottom, you'll have drug addicts and all the nasty boys who tripped and pinched you in the school courtyard.

I can't help feel attracted to a country that has produced such a philosophy, even when I have read about how in fact, the dices are loaded there as much as everywhere, the schools in the poor areas are decrepit, and the wealthy make it to Yale with awful high school grades, leaving the rest of us on the roadside, looking on, jaws agape. Yet there is such energy and optimism in such an outlook.

I guess one great charm of the US, on social matters, must be that, given the size and diversity of the country, there are countless ways there of being rich, or middle class ( I am not so sure about being poor, it looks like it's got two broad categories, either you're poor in the countryside, or you're poor in town, and that's it ). Even in a relatively smaller country like France, with a more rigid social system, you get interesting variations, subjects for social comedies. A small town doctor and a lecturer in a university town - the doctor is into full contact thai boxing, and has stuffed his head with all kind of supermarket buddhism ( " it's all got to do with inner strength, in the middle of the fight, in your moment of greatest danger, you can feel it rising, the energy pouring out , it's the satori, your chakras are opening, yes, yes, my master used to say...") . The lecturer is the sandal wearing type, tousled hair and beard, dirty pullover; a fossilised marxist, he still sends half his salary to finance the sandinistas in nicaragua. He, in a way, has also stuffed his head with marxism and cannot renounce it.

Another possibility: the lecturer earns a miserable living teaching sanskrit and writes poems in ancient greek on the side, as well as a historical novel taking place in 15 th century Dordogne, inspired by the correspondence left by an ancestor, which he has happened on ( he comes from countryside noblesse de robe, members of the old provincial Parlements ). However, as he writes the novel, he cannot help feeling that he could improve it if he twists it in a certain manner, by which his ancestor would turn out to be the villain. Should he sacrifice his ancestor’s reputation, for the sake of a good novel ? His passion for the past becomes a burden on him.

The doctor also comes from good, through not well off, gentry. He owns a vineyard, an expensive and time consuming passion. He and his wife are pillars of the local Catholic church, his daughter plays the piano. He earns a good income, yet barely enough to meet his commitments - the vineyard, the daughter's Catholic school – all of which are for the sake of keeping the family standards. He knows he should sacrifice the vineyard, yet hesitates – he himself disliked the Catholic school he went at. He feels the desire to take revenge on it, and to please himself, by keeping the vineyard and sacrificing the school seat.

In a society where food, shelter and clothing are cheap, people have greater leisure to create a persona. In a medieval society this was the priviledge of the rich, hence also their gorgeous clothes, while the poor were in uniform grey and brown rags.

To come back to our character, maybe this is what he intuitively realises, while sipping a daiqiri in the hotel's beach cafe. Money gives you the leisure to create yourself a personality. " I should be passionately into something. It will make me happy and I'll meet like minded people and make friends" Problem is, he was always the average Joe. He would come back from work, heat something in the microwave, watch something on television, or play a computer game, or chat on internet. He used to have a collection of matchbox cars. "I'm not going to set up the world's largest matchbox car museum. That would be ridiculous, it would be just like what I suspected, rich people are maniacs. Anyway I don't like matchbox cars to that extent. So, what is I really like ?" he wonders.