Take a French dinner party. In Paris. Chez Armand. A chic dinner. The kind I don’t go to. Pearls, crystal, the works.

Observe the guests. Scientifically. They turn to the left and right. Shake their heads. Gesture repeatedly with their arms in a manner known as pronation. Devote themselves to mastication, mouths closed, I should add. And between two tiny mouthfuls, I should add, they move their lips constantly. Like this.

Because for them, ladies and gentlemen, conversation has replaced everything else. They neither laugh nor belch. Belching went out of fashion with regicide. That’s the remark my brother-in-law made just to mortify me. At the table. In front of everyone. The day of the funeral. As I was choking back a hiccup between two sobs.

In the time of the Bourbon Louis, he announced with ludicrous pedantry, there was an official called the hastener who was in charge of the king’s belches. Sometimes the king’s belch was slow in coming, and all the courtiers would wring their hands, quiver with impatience, and turn sorrowful countenances toward the royal valve: But let him hasten, then, let this hastener hasten the sacred belch of the king! The hastener and his king have been done away with. And belchery with them. Those are great losses indeed.

Still, I thought, not so great as Lucienne’s death. Forgive me, but my grief is as fresh, if I may so, as a vegetable. I said vegetable. I really shouldn’t have. That’s the word I often use to evoke her, so calm, so—how shall I put it—so superbly lumpish. But let us stifle our grief. And let us return to that dinner party with which I opened my lecture. We may conclude, from our thorough investigation, that while it is generally admitted that speech is the achievement of all mankind,

That is our first and most heartening axiom. A specialty, I emphasize this, that is not exportable. Because it is not merchandise. It is even quite the opposite. I shall come back to this essential point. At the proper time. With the methodical turn of mind that is my wont.

We French, I was saying, are champions at conversation. This distinguishing trait, long elevated to the status of a national virtue, made the reputation of France and secured its reign.

Well, that art at which we excel is today in peril. I am sounding the alarm in hopes of alerting the highest authorities. Mediocrity, ladies and gentlemen, is going international. The fear of offending prevails more and more over the taste for talking. A generous spirit is discredited, if not condemned outright. It is taken for weakness of intellect. From one end to the planet to the other, conversations are all the same. Their poverty of ideas is now in fashion. And their insipidness is sickening.

That will be our second and most distressing axiom. We live, increasingly, without talking to one another. Is no life, then, worth the telling? We live without talking to one another and soon we will live without living, which gives me the shivers.

Conversation is going downhill and the country with it, they go hand in hand. And it is greatly to be feared, if nothing is done, that they will both wind up in the garbage. The vultures will finish the job. You can count them.

So here, dear ladies and gentlemen of Cinteagbelle, is my rescue plan, conceived in the utmost urgency and which I unhesitatingly declare to be of national utility, since by proposing to restore the luster of speech in the eyes of a world that has forgotten how to speak, it aims at nothing less than the civic renewal of our country and the polishing of its image so that, I’m catching my breath, so that, strong in its recovered prestige, the France of tomorrow may assure throughout the world the civilizing mission that has fallen to her from time immemorial. Might I ask you, children, to please stop snickering. And to stop moving your chairs around. It’s irritating.

The subtle art of conversation, however—to which, I venture to say, I have devoted my genius—offers, aside from that patriotic virtue I have just mentioned, other advantages no less excellent albeit less directly civil. And which to my astonishment have not yet been the object of any detailed study.

The first of these advantages is that conversation is very useful seducing women.

The second is that it’s even handier for succeeding in society.

The third and most surprising is that in bringing joy to mankind, it contributes appreciably to reducing the deficit of the National Health Service. A subject of satisfaction for our government.