Three Fridays ago at Balthazar, the SoHo brasserie, a large cloudedglass mirror detached from a wall and landed on some people who were having breakfast. One of them was a man— debonair, in a fine scarf and a dark coat—who identified himself to police officers responding to a 911 call as Arnaud Française. He was wheeled out of the restaurant on a gurney and taken to Bellevue. Doctors examined him; he was unharmed. Later, it emerged that he was not M. Française but Arnaud Montebourg, until last August the French Minister of the Economy. One guesses that he tendered the false surname out of embarrassment, not wanting to be known, newly arrived on the East Coast—he was spending the week as the Syngman Rhee 1910 Lecturer at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, Mar-16-15