Mark Zero

There are only two things in life,' Bergé said. 'Love and beauty.

This was a crime of passion, but unlike most crimes of passion, it had been meticulously and diabolically well-planned.

Bergé__ yelling had attracted the attention of everyone in the Kibati hall: champagne flutes stopped halfway to heavily painted lips, eyes widened, massive diamonds groaned scornfully in their settings. It was a stationary riot.

When you__e used to being in dangerous situations, you develop a sixth sense about your surroundings, about where possible enemies might be lurking, how many steps it will take to reach the next corner on a dead run, the best hiding places if bullets start to fly...

... she was a pudding of immaturity and precocious wisdom that had not yet set into a stable mold.

I congratulate you on your success stealing the painting.

Never run upstairs when someone__ chasing you. Don__ try to quick-draw a man who already has his gun out. Never light a match in the dark in a strange building. Half of staying safe is just keeping your head and being prudent.

It wasn__ playing both sides of the fence _ it was betting against yourself but still playing to win _ and it encapsulated everything absurd and paradoxical that I loved about the French.

In French culture, the best way of buying time or getting off the hook entirely in a thorny personal situation is to claim that it__ complicated. The French did not invent love, but they did invent romance, so they__e had more time than any other culture on earth to refine the nuances of its language.

How can you be kissing at a time like this? Have you no respect for the dead?

The French have a penchant for absolutism, for thinking that things are all one way or all another, which is why their politics are marked by a general inability to compromise and why they tend to hold their personal opinions until the bitter end, even after they have clearly lost an argument.

And I had just kissed my ex-girlfriend, who had cried, while my current girlfriend was in jail. So far, it had not been my best day.

On the morning after the daring theft of a priceless James Ensor painting from the Grand Palais in Paris, I was allowed to leave the Les Halles Police Station after only a few hours of questioning.