CONSULAT D'INFLUENCE.(The Talk of the Town)(New Orleans)

At the corner of Prytania and First Street, in New Orleans, stands a brick mansion with a French tricolor drooping from the gable. Eleven days after the levees failed, last August, heavily armed federal agents were banging on doors all over the city to order a "mandatory evacuation," and the residents of the mansion were hastening to comply. A thin middle-aged man feverishly loaded file boxes into the back of a silver S.U.V. He introduced himself as Pierre Lebovics, France's consul-general, and sidestepped the question about whether he felt that his rights had been violated by the evacuation order. "You have your, your--" he circled a hand impatiently in front of his face. "Your Bill of Rights, your Constitution." He flapped the hand dismissively and got behind the wheel. "I am going to Baton Rouge!" he shouted. "But I will return."

The house stayed empty for weeks, but recently Lebovics answered the door, in an open-necked shirt with a green cashmere sweater draped over his shoulders. Lebovics is fifty-four but looks much younger. He is serious to the point of dour, with longish dark curls and circular horn-rimmed glasses. "France opened its first consulate in the United States right here in New Orleans after the Louisiana Purchase, in 1803," he said as he sat himself primly on a red sofa. "But we have been in this house only since the nineteen-fifties."

Lebovics spent most of his life as a Russian scholar, and after becoming a diplomat he was assigned, with the logic of foreign ministries worldwide, to two non-Russian-speaking countries: Israel and the Czech Republic. He took over in New Orleans less than a month before Katrina hit, and, despite the chaos the storm has wrought, he relishes serving in this most French of American cities. "There is a part of French culture tinged with Cajun and Creole culture," he said. "These roots run very deep in France."

New Orleans has long been a tourist destination for the French, several of whom got a lesson, from Katrina, in how American the city also is. "The Saturday ...