Returning this morning from three days of tasting wines in Gaillac, I found an e-mail awaiting me from my incomparable translator, Ariane. She and Gilbert (who designed the French book cover), were in one of the biggest bookstores in Paris yesterday - chez Gibert in the Boulevard Saint-Michel. On the table, on the first floor, prominently displayed amongst the bestselling books, they discovered a pile of copies of "Meurtres à Pékin" snuggling up to some anonymous book called "The Da Vinci Code" by someone called Dan Brown. Who he?

Chez Gibert, Paris