Ink: the 'Times,' V.O.(The Talk of the Town)('Le Monde' publishes 'New York Times' insert)

Those members of the New York newspaper-reading public who rise bleary-eyed at seven every morning to go and search for the previous day's edition of the great Paris daily Le Monde (a group that probably numbers in the low one figure) got a shock with their orange juice the other morning. Deep in the pages of the April 7th edition -- along with the usual highly philosophical op-ed pieces and highly condensed sports section and highly condescending editorials -- there was, well, us. Not us, exactly, but one of our neighbors: a twelve-page insert from the Times, a digest of the past week's stories, photographs, and reviews. There it was, bound into the voice of the French establishment: the familiar Times Gothic banner, its section heads, its bylines, even its charming way of slipping a photograph of a half-dressed babe (Kate Moss, in this case) into the paper under the rubric of social inquiry (are we fair to fat women?).

And -- this is the part that is not just shocking but earthshaking, suggesting comets bouncing off the heads of dinosaurs, the Lisbon earthquake, and the storming of the Bastille -- the entire supplement, created for the French edition, was published in English. Le Monde was announcing, blandly, that it now expected its readers to spend some time every week reading American news as Americans see it, in American (which is what the paper often calls our language). If one imagined the Times asking its readers to read twelve pages of French every week, one would still not comprehend the scale of this new idea, since the Times (a) wouldn't do it and (b) is not published in a country where a belligerent defensiveness about the national language is a defining characteristic.

Two questions immediately presented themselves: what would the Times look like in a Mondean context, and how the hell were the editors of Le Monde going to justify this to their readers? The first question was easy: the Times, surrounded by the French pages, looked virtuous and sincere, and even a little wide-eyed, like a Henry James hero entering a Paris hotel. Where the pages of Le Monde were, as always, devoted to standing conventional wisdom on its head, so that all the blood just pools there while the writer waves his feet in the air, the Times stood up and told it straight. (Even when the Times was being philosophical, it looked innocent. Might America be an empire? one writer wondered. Le Monde's readers settled that question in their own minds long ago.) The "news" stories in the French paper tended to flit by the news on the way to a Higher Theory, but the American paper was as fact-filled as a science project; you almost expected to see a blue ribbon pinned to it.

The day's lead editorial in Le Monde -- written, presumably, by ...