Money talks - in English

Zut alors! Patricia Russo, an American, took over last week as chief executive of Alcatel-Lucent, the combined Franco-American telecoms equipment group, and she doesn't speak - nor plans to learn - French, writes David Gow.

Pas un seul mot, even though she will be based in Paris most of the time.
Jacques Legendre, a French senator and vice-president of the Senate's cultural affairs committee, finds that shocking, according to a news agency report. "If I worked in New York I would try to speak English." Evidemment, mon brave.

But the senator, clearly a paid-up member of France's "civilising mission," is talking rubbish. Here in Brussels, where President Jacques Chirac memorably stormed out of an EU summit in March because Ernest-Antoine Sellière, French head of business lobby group Unice, spoke English, French has been virtually replaced as the lingua franca of EU institutions by English.