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Fine, you are superior.

I was going to post the scene from Casablanca again (must be plenty of people doing that today) but remembered a similar scene from perhaps a greater film, Renoir’s Grand Illusion. In a German camp, the French prisoners of war are putting on a show when they get news of a French victory.

It’s a beautiful anthem, the model for the Philippine, never mind the stuff about bathing in the blood of enemies.

We still have Paris.

Here’s the scene from Casablanca anyway. In Rick’s Cafe, Viktor Laszlo vainly attempts to get the letters of transit that will allow him and his wife Ilse to escape the Nazis. But Rick won’t stick out his neck for anyone, especially the freedom fighter husband of the woman he loves. Then the Nazis start singing and this happens.

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Merveilleux! The centrist candidate Emmanuel Macron has triumphed in the French elections, stopping the tide of far-right populism in which our global elites are flailing and bringing his infant En Marche! party’s brand of “hope” to a public dialogue grown rancid with acrimony, insult and excruciating self-interest.

But, whatever about that. Macron’s triumph should be celebrated, primarily, for the further opportunities it will allow us to ogle his wife, Brigitte Trogneux, the 64-year-old grandmother of seven who first captivated her husband when he was a 15-year-old student in her literature classes at Jesuit school in Amiens and now enters the Elysée Palace as France’s second-oldest first lady. Ooh la la!

Read it in the Financial Times.