At the center of this bet is a new plane from Airbus Industrie — the innocuously named A3XX, which happens to be the biggest passenger-carrying bird ever put in the sky — a plane that makes the Boeing B747-400, currently the largest airliner flying, look like a runt.

In today’s commercial airline industry, there are but two major players still in the game: the American Boeing and Airbus, a consortium of Continental aviation companies that has come to symbolize the new Europe. Both envision different solutions to the coming passenger crunch. The outcome will affect everything from bicontinental unemployment to the amount of sleep that people who live near airports get between takeoffs.

Boeing says the best way to fly us from here to 2015 is to double the number of jetliners in service, raising the present number to about 25,000. Though this could certainly work, imagine an air-traffic controller at a major airport during a peak summer vacation week, staring down at a wave of winged metal on the radar screen. Boeing’s official response: “Airline schedulers and airports will work together to squeeze in more flights.” Let’s hope it’s right.

Airbus says Boeing is wrong. “It seems to us absolutely inconceivable,” says Adam Brown, the company’s vice president for forecasting, “that the system can work without substantial numbers of airplanes larger than anything flying today.”

Which brings us to the A3XX. At this writing, the final decision whether to build the flying Godzilla — a decision once considered speculative — has leapt nearly every obstacle. It could be days away.

If the A3XX is as successful as Airbus hopes (which remains to be seen), it is likely that the planes will dominate the industry for the next five decades — and possibly much longer. Since a typical airliner has a 20-year production run and continues to fly for 30 years, the economic impact could be devastating. American prestige would also be seriously tarnished. Since the end of World War II, airliners have replaced battleships as emblems of national power. According to one aviation executive who works with both companies, “There’s a strong identity link between Boeing and the U.S. — between Boeing’s force and American force.”

For the past three years, many considered the A3XX to be a pipe dream. Since 1997, Airbus has been waiting for 30 of what it calls “public manifestations of interest” to launch production. Until last Friday, the count was stuck at 21, all slated for Emirates Airlines and Singapore Airlines.

On June 2, Airbus trumpeted the news that Air France was “interested” in buying 10 more A3XXs, with a fanfare usually reserved for firm orders. On Wednesday, the International Lease Finance Corp., the biggest buyer of airliners in the world, said it might take five. On Thursday, Virgin Atlantic added five to 10 planes to the total. It isn’t certain that these “manifestations” will turn into orders, but an engine has certainly begun to rev.

A3XX is what aviation engineers call “a very large commercial transport,” or VLCT for short. If it were a movie, it might be called “The Jet That Ate the Sky.” This is how big the airplane is: The A3XX-200, the largest model that Airbus is flogging to airlines, will seat 965 people and will be just 40 feet shorter than a regulation football field. One A3XX-200 could replace two B747-400s.

A plane this large presents a few unprecedented challenges.

The A3XX-200 will change the ground as well as the sky. Philippe Joppart, manager of technical safety issues for the Airports Council International in Brussels, Belgium, asked me worriedly: “What happens if the passenger-baggage matchup fails, and you have to get all the passengers out of the plane?” At best, your flight schedule is ruined, and you deal with an angry crowd the size of an infantry battalion.

There are other unresolved issues: maneuvering, parking space, refueling, loading, cleaning and so on. Barely a dozen airports in the world could now accommodate an A3XX.

Until the first A3XX is built — and there is a lot of infighting among the members of the consortium over who will build which parts of it (and where) before its projected maiden flight in 2006 — no one can even be sure if it will work as promised. (Airbus’ key selling point: The A3XX isn’t just bigger, it’s cheaper to fly than anything Boeing can offer.) It will require innovations like “a next-generation engine, less expensive to run, more powerful and less polluting,” says Robert Fourmental, a union shop steward and board member at France’s Snecma engine works. “The engines we make now won’t do it, and it’s the same for everyone else in the business.”

Still, the payoff could be gigantic. Airbus predicts that airlines will buy 1,300 planes the size of an A3XX at about $230 million each. Adding up to nearly $300 billion, the total represents one-fourth of all the money that will be spent on airliners between now and 2020, the biggest market niche in aviation history.

But suppose Airbus fails? Even top executives within the Airbus consortium — which includes BAE Systems P.L.C. (formerly British Aerospace) and the merged companies Aerospatiale Matra of France, Germany’s Dasa and Casa of Spain — have sometimes wondered if they are making a historic blunder.

Last year Gustav Humbert, president of Dasa’s commercial aircraft division, candidly told me in his Hamburg office: “The A3XX is a size and technology we never had before, and we’re really trying to see if the risk is on a scale we can bear.” In Paris, Jean-Frangois Bigay, managing director of the aeronautics group of Aerospatiale Matra, conceded that “we can allow ourselves a mistake, but not on that scale.” They’ve since come around.

Doubting voices are rarely heard at the Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France. It looks a lot like a luxury resort with airstrips where the tennis courts should be. Here, Airbus employees talk about the A3XX’s future in ecstatic tones. It’s a little like listening to medieval barons mapping out the Albigensian Crusade, a take-no-prisoners war on heresy that ravaged the region around Toulouse eight centuries ago. The A3XX is Airbus’ battering ram, and once again the Europeans are storming the gates of the infidel. According to Philippe Jarry, V.P. in charge of the A3XX project, “When you have a certain stature, at a certain point you start to have duties.” Likewise, Airbus’ Brown talks of a “theological difference” between Airbus and Boeing. He means it, too.

When Airbus was created 31 years ago, few would have predicted it would still be around today. “What amazes me most is that Airbus exists,” comments French scholar Pierre Muller, author of “Airbus: The European Ambition.” “In 1969, the chances it wouldn’t survive were much stronger than the chances it would.” Says Brown, a grinning iconoclast whose office walls are lined with arcane aviation studies: “Predicting the future is a great job because nobody knows if you’re right for 20 years.”

Airbus staffers refer to the company’s founders — Frenchmen Roger Biteille and Henri Ziegler and German engineer Felix Kracht — as “The Fathers,” in capital letters. Dasa’s Humbert calls them “pioneers,” the kind of people who didn’t panic when the Elbe River flooded the hangars in Hamburg two days before Airbus made its first deliveries to Lufthansa. Says Jarry, who grew up cutting clips on Airbus out of aviation magazines, “They had vision. If you want to succeed in aviation, you need vi-si-on.”

What Brown remembers from the early years are crazed adventures. He flew the company’s very first airplane, an A300 jetliner, to America on a barnstorming trip in 1973. “If anything went wrong,” he says, “the company was dead.” Nothing went wrong that couldn’t be fixed, but that didn’t stop American airmen from treating him and his colleagues like jerks. Brown hasn’t forgotten that, either.

At the time, American mothers (including mine) still told their kids, “Eat your vegetables — children in Europe are starving.” In the American mind, Europe was a bunch of cute little countries that couldn’t defend themselves without NATO, let alone make airliners. The same American airline executives who ripped down the street in BMWs told Brown they could never trust a European airplane.

At 1977′s Farnborough air show, Brown took a cruel hit from Boeing on his English home ground. There he was at the Airbus stand when Boeing’s Jake Steiner — “a great father figure,” Brown says, “the father of the B727″ — showed up to check out the new boys. “He said how delighted everyone at Boeing was that Airbus was there,” Brown adds, “because the business was very cyclical, and it would be wonderful to have Airbus to provide additional capacity at the peaks.” Brown recalls the story with some irony. “That’s an extremely patronizing attitude,” he says. Soon afterward, a cryptic little sign graced the front entry of Airbus headquarters. It said: “BB.” Not for Brigitte Bardot, for “Beat Boeing.” The crusade was on.

Its first great battle began when Airbus’ A320 was launched in 1983. It had 150 seats, about the same as a B737. The A320 was also much more modern in its flight controls, roomier for passengers and cheaper to fly. Brown predicted Airbus would sell 600 of the planes, far more than the combined numbers of its first two airliners. “I seriously underestimated the reality,” he says.

Through sheer Yankee arrogance, Boeing actually helped. While the A320 was in development, the American firm had ample time and resources to launch a new plane for the same short-haul niche. Jarry shudders to think how close Boeing came: “Wonder of wonders, Boeing arrives at the Le Bourget air show in 1984 with a model of their new revolutionary midrange plane. And people said, ‘If the A320 has that in front of it, good luck.’ It was scary.” But instead of building a new plane, Boeing merely retouched its bestselling B737.

“One of the reasons we’ve got to where we are,” allows Brown, “is because people didn’t take us seriously.” Boeing repeatedly declined to comment on these issues.

Remember how Detroit sneered when Japan Inc. started shipping gas-stingy little cars to the U.S. in the 1970s? Boeing had made the same mistake, with the same results. After the oil shocks of the mid-’70s jacked up the price of jet fuel, and deregulation split air routes into hubs and spokes, Airbus’ little airplane that could became a hot item. Airbus quickly spun off three mama-papa-baby-bear-sized variations of the A320, of which it has sold a stunning 2,387 to date. In the 1990s, it built on that foothold with the A330 and A340 — long-haul planes that cut deep into the middle of Boeing’s market. Boeing belatedly replied with new airliners and a price war that left both companies gasping, but Airbus stayed in the game.

And like Lee Iacocca of Chrysler, who asked Washington to hammer Tokyo on his industry’s behalf in the 1970s, Ron Woodard, former president of the Boeing commercial airplane group, went around Brussels in the late 1990s complaining that Airbus “is still trying to get state aid to launch new products.” Though Airbus does indeed get government loans, they are repaid only when the planes sell. Boeing has received governmental help itself. The company developed the B747 as a troop carrier on a defense grant, and got a reported $1.6 billion from NASA in the 1990s to work on a supersonic transport.

Airbus asserts that the real reason for its success is a humanistic view of labor relations. Unlike strike-wracked Boeing, it avoided downsizing skilled workers throughout the 1990s. “It’s a basic difference,” says Airbus spokeswoman Barbara Kracht. But that isn’t quite true.

Airbus doesn’t actually build planes — the consortium’s member companies do that — so it has few workers to lay off in the first place. Meanwhile, as price wars of the past decade heated up, its partners were decimated. In France, more than 21,000 of the 119,000 people in the aviation industry lost their jobs in 1991-94. At Dasa in Germany, a hiring freeze turned into a program called Dolores — “like ‘pain’ in Spanish,” says corporate spokesman Rainer Ohler. Two-fifths of the company’s managers and workers vanished.

What Airbus really did was to give European aviation a choice: Toughen up or die. “Airbus put us under intense pressure,” says an executive whose European company supplies both Airbus and Boeing. “They wanted more than the Americans, and they still do. They demanded cost cuts that went from 10 to 40 percent from their suppliers — even 80 percent.” He adds: “It nearly killed us, but it made us stronger. Everyone who works with Airbus is proud of it, because the result is continual improvement.”

Boeing has just one remaining asset Airbus can’t top — the B747, the humpbacked jumbo jet that inaugurated the era of mass air travel in 1969; it remains the most profitable airliner the industry has ever seen. “In the 1990s, the B747-400 sold at $160 million. One-third of that was profit, and the production rate at one point was up to six a month,” notes aerospace analyst Nick Cunningham of Salomon Smith Barney in London. When was the last time any company in your stock portfolio made $300 million in profit per month on just one product?

Those days are over. So far this year, Boeing has sold only six B747s. But Airbus appears unwilling to wait for the jumbo to die a natural death. It wants to kill it itself. Its goal for the A3XX, says Cunningham, is “to do the final project — to cap Boeing so Boeing never again owns the high ground, as they did with the B747.”

Ironically, Airbus doesn’t really need the A3XX to beat Boeing because it already has. Since 1999 Europeans have sold more airliners than Americans. It has taken a while for this fact to sink in. Last year as I sat in Brown’s office, he swore that without the A3XX, Airbus would never “kill Boeing’s cash cow, this monopolistic B747 that throws off so much cash that they can use it to start other programs and subsidize other airplanes.” Nor, he added, could Airbus ever take half the airliner market from the Americans. Then he paused, and said amazedly: “Both those objectives have been achieved. Talk about an ingrained underdog mentality.”

Now, as the A3XX launch countdown accelerates, companies and cities across the European Union are fighting bare-knuckled for their cut of A3XX contracts. On the banks of the Elbe, civic boosters have erected mockups of cargo crates labeled “A3XX.” Inside assembly plants in Toulouse and Hamburg, visitors are shown green-primed Airbus fuselages like hollowed-out Sequoias, their cabins lined with jungle weaves of cables, tubes and insulation. The message is that no one could build an A3XX better than the fine folks on this very (French or German) factory floor.

Meanwhile, with every day that goes by, the A3XX gets more expensive to build. One reason, says Jarry, is that airlines want no less than six versions of the plane, each offering variations in passenger capacity, freight load or range. “The Japanese, for example,” he says, “want a short-range plane. The first, second and fourth air routes in the world are Japanese short-range routes.” Airbus figures that just 20 airlines will buy 75 percent of all the A3XXs ever sold, so it makes sense to build them to order. But given the chance — and the launch of a new airliner is the best they’ll ever get — airlines always demand the maximum number of options on their planes. According to former United Airlines CEO Gerald Greenwald, that makes airliners 20 percent more expensive to build than they should be. For an A3XX, the difference amounts to more than $45 million per airplane.

Numbers like that are scaring the bureaucrats who lend Airbus its development funds. When I told Jarry that the wonks at the Ministry of Finances on the Quai de Bercy in Paris, known to the French as “Bercy,” calculate that the world market for the A3XX will be no more than 450 planes, he got angry. “What’s the good of having computers if you don’t have common sense?” he snapped. “I think our planes are going to sell by the thousands. Tell that to Bercy.” Airbus is built on faith, and so far its faith has worked miracles.

As for Boeing, it’s finally taking Airbus and the A3XX more seriously. Last year Boeing spokeswoman Susan Davis told me flatly, “There is no market for a plane larger than the B747-400.” If so, then her president, Phil Condit, has stopped reading his own company’s marketing studies. He has begun pushing Airbus’ customers to buy the future B747-X, a remodeled, bigger version of Old Jumbo.

No one knows for sure what will happen in commercial aviation between now and 2020. But one thing is certain: The skies are about to become a lot less friendly.

Last year the California Insurance Commissioners office filed
suit to force a cluster of French and Swiss financial entities,
grouped around the scandal-tinged Cridit Lyonnais bank, to
cough up their estimated $2 billion gains from “a joint venture
to fraudulently and wrongfully obtain the assets” of Executive
Life. An amended complaint, filed Jan. 21 in the U.S. District
Court of Los Angeles, widened the conflict to include the rising
star of French finance, Frangois Pinault. That makes the case
what the French call “an affair of state,” and not only because
investigators from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and
the Department of Justice are also looking into it.

The Executive Life affair crystallizes the uniquely incestuous
relationship between France and the private sector, a
relationship that is under severe pressure as globalization breaks
down the walls around protected national economies. When the
deal began, Cridit Lyonnais belonged to the state, and Pinault
was a provincial industrialist eager to break into the closed
world of Parisian finance. Cridit Lyonnais gave him the loans
necessary for his acquisitions and eventually took him onto its
board, offering him higher and wider contacts in the Parisian
elite than he could otherwise have attained.

Unlike some of the Cridit Lyonnais other raider protigis –
Giancarlo Parretti (the man who looted MGM) and Bernard
Tapie (lately recycled as an actor after serving a prison sentence
for tax fraud) — Pinault emerged clean from the scandals that
headlined the banks crash in the mid-1990s. He is no longer on
the board, but one of his key employees is.

Pinault now ranks fifth among “the worlds working
billionaires,” according to Forbes magazine, with a personal
fortune estimated at around $6 billion. His friends include
French President Jacques Chirac, who personally called on
Pinault to buy and “shelter” the prominent center-right
news weekly Le Point from a takeover by the left in 1997,
according to an unauthorized biography by Pierre-Angel Gay
and Caroline Monnot. (Their book, “Frangois Pinault,
Milliardaire,” was dropped by its first publisher, ostensibly for
reasons that have nothing to do with Pinaults ownership of the
FNAC department store chain, which accounts for about
one-quarter of the retail book trade in France.)

Pinaults other assets include the auction house Christies, the
Italian luxury house Gucci (which he wrung away from
competing French finance star Bernard Arnault last fall), and a
15 percent stake in Frances dominant TV network, TF1. Those
properties — and canny investments such as bestselling author
Bernard-Henry Livys two money-losing feature films — place
him at the power center of French cultural life. His recent
acquisition of Aoba Life Insurance in Japan, aside
from demonstrating a sharp eye for value — he picked up a
company with $120 billion in assets and $650 million in
turnover for about $220 million — gives him a platform to
expand in Asia. But his declared priority for future investments
is the United States, where he already owns the Converse
sneaker company and the Samsonite luggage firm.

What, exactly, are he and the other defendants supposed to have
done? California claims that the Executive Life buyout was
secretly directed by Cridit Lyonnais, in violation of state and
federal banking and disclosure laws, which at the time forbade
ownership or control of insurance companies by banks (let alone
a bank owned by France). Moreover, as a Parisian bank analyst
who requested anonymity comments: “When you look at the
people involved in the deal, and you know the links between
them, there are grounds to suspect parking” — an illegal
practice on both sides of the Atlantic, in which one or more
investors serve as fronts for a party who wants to avoid
disclosure of the investment. Californias lawyers claim the
French did just that.

As it happens, another co-defendant, Jean-Frangois Hinin,
formerly known around Paris as “the Mozart of finance,” is
reported by Gay and Monnot to have managed the Executive
Life junk-bond portfolio for both Cridit Lyonnais investment
firm, Altus, and Pinaults holding company, Artimis. (Both
companies are named as defendants in the case.) According to
Karl Belgum, one of Californias attorneys, the Americans have
obtained “five different versions” of a parking contract between
the Cridit Lyonnais and its alleged fronts, each tailored to a
specific investor. “Theres a large number of them floating
around,” he adds.

But Californias lead attorney, Gary Fontana, admits that
Pinault’s name isn’t on them. “Pinault’s problem was that he was
aware of the agreements and went in anyway,” says Fontana.
“He made various filings with the Department of Insurance, and
failed to disclose the agreements.” Maybe, but Fontana does not
yet have hard proof of that.

The Paris press has largely abstained from digging into the
affair. Pinault, however, has responded as though to a serious
threat, promising to “strike back hard” in an interview with the
Wall Street Journal. (How, he didnt say.) Artimis released a
statement refuting Californias complaint point by point:
“Artimis provided in all transparency all of the facts requested
(by Californias insurance commissioner, and thus) had no
reason to suspect irregularities could appear. … Artimis
participated in no other agreement besides the acquisition
contracts, signed with the vendors (of the junk bonds), which
were revealed to the (California) Insurance Department.”

There follows a curiously precise statement: “In fact, Artimis
didnt even exist at the moment when the agreements mentioned
in the (lawsuit) were signed.” This is not a denial that there
were illegal agreements between Cridit Lyonnais and its
syndicate, only that Artimis had knowledge of them. (Pinaults
spokespeople at the Paris public relations firm Image 7 did not
return repeated calls for comment.)

And that is not exactly how Gay and Monnot reported the deal,
months before Pinault became a defendant. As they tell it, in
1992, when the bank was desperate to find investors for the
Executive Life portfolio, Pinault agreed to buy in, but only on
condition that Cridit Lyonnais loan him the $1.5 billion or so he
needed for the deal. In exchange, the bank got 25 percent — and
no control whatsoever — of Artimis, into which Pinault folded
his previous holding company. “It was as though the bank
agreed to throw away the power that it could legitimately
command (over Pinault),” note Gay and Monnot.

Cridit Lyonnais is trying to deal its way out of the jam. Last
May, as France prepared to sell its controlling stake in the bank,
its directors issued a bone-dry analysis of their exposure: “This
affair principally implicates certain former managers of Altus
and the Group (Cridit Lyonnais) … at least one current
executive of the Group knew after the fact about information
related to the practices charged in the Executive Life case.”

In other words, if heads must roll — Cridit Lyonnais warns that
there may be “penal responsibilities” to share — that will not
interfere with the banks future development. Nor will the
financial bite of losing the case, which will be borne by the
state-engineered consortium that inherited Cridit Lyonnais
debts, and ultimately by French taxpayers. They have already
paid $20 billion to cover the dreadful investments made by the
banks managers in the recent past, and may well cough up a
billion or two more.

The greatest risk the bank faces is that investigators at the
Federal Reserve will conclude that the U.S. government should
yank Cridit Lyonnais license to operate its New York branch,
which contributes a disproportionate share of the banks
worldwide profits. (Both the Fed and the Securities and Exchange Commission refused to
comment on the case.)

Some in the international community think that would be
overkill. “The allegations are of a serious nature, and the Fed
has wide latitude,” notes a London-based bank analyst familiar
with the European banking sector. “But the bank has cooperated
with the Americans. Its strategies today are very different from
its history, and would not give rise to this kind of problem
again.”

That is a major change for what investigative journalist David
McClintick once called “the dirtiest bank in the world.” No one
will ever know all the malversations that went on there, because
in 1996, as French judicial investigators closed in, the banks
archives were destroyed by arson. What we do know is that
Cridit Lyonnais, and with it the French banking sector, has lost
the chance to be “one of the three or five European leaders
between now and 2005,” says the London analyst.

Pinaults personal exposure in the case, according to Fontana, is
“somewhere north of $1 billion.” But the greater costs to
Pinault could also include unprecedented (for him) disclosure.
Anyone who reads SEC filings regularly is struck by the paucity
of French corporate disclosure, and holdings like Artimis are
not bound even by those minimal rules.

Unlike France, where there are no written transcriptions of trial
testimony (unless the presiding judge orders one, which has
happened three times in the past 15 years) and no guaranteed
legal access to case files for reporters, an American trial record
could provide more details on Pinaults operations and assets
than has ever been available. And California has asked for a
trial, which Fontana thinks could happen within two years,
barring a settlement.

Could the profits to be had on the Executive Life deal — an
estimated $450 million for Pinault alone — have sufficed to
involve him in an illegal scheme? He has played close to the
legal edge before. After minority shareholders were screwed in
one of his takeovers, and filed a highly publicized lawsuit,
French law was changed to ensure that raiders like Pinault pay
the same price per share to anyone owning a piece of the
company.

But he has never been charged with a crime. It is, likewise, very
hard to imagine that he would play the stooge in a conspiracy he
didnt control, led by a bank he treated like a lackey. But it
would have taken a true visionary to imagine back in 1992 that
an obscure California official could someday make Paris
tremble, if only in rage.

Finally someone says: “He doesn’t want to go back to Paris.”

“Who does?” comes the reply.

For most people, Paris is a city of dreams, and most of those dreams are true. But Paris is also what the French escape in the summer. Paris is where you make the money, and where there must be more money, as D.H. Lawrence’s rocking-horse winner said before he died. Paris is where everything you do must have a purpose, because it is the capital, the place where you find all the brains, prizes and risks.

The Creuse belongs to an anti-Paris, another France, that was rich when Lutetia was still a swampy Roman outpost. Its wealth is in the ground, and the ground has been shaped by humans for millennia, until you can’t always tell where nature stops and human nature begins. It’s damp, misty and wild — capital-R Romantic country, if you judge by the fact that Georges Sand and Chopin summered in Gargilesse, where the moonlight on the castle overlooking a strategic bend in the river Creuse makes you hungry for a deep kiss.

After 17 years in France I don’t mind playing tourist — hey, the French do it, and it’s their country — but the only tourism I really like is parking myself in a place long and often enough to forget that I don’t live there yet. And the Creuse, unlike a lot of paysan France, allows me that illusion.

In medieval times it was called La Marche — the last long blood-soaked step between the lords of Limousin and Aquitaine to the south and the church-backed kings to the north. The highest hilltop for 15 miles in any direction from Mischa’s terrace is capped by the sinister ruins of Brosse, a 12 century fortress ringed by a stream and stone terraces, staring down on the ghosts of shivering battalions armed with dented iron and wood. Local lore tells that after one battle, 100 defenders were hanged from the walls. Well, anyone who survived an assault on that hill would be eager to celebrate with a lynching.

Most of the high ground is just high enough to make pushing a bike over it pleasant work. The bottom land is sculpted by sand-bottomed streams like the Anglin, the pastures divided by stone walls into pastures for sheep, cattle and donkey (the main cart animal here until World War II), bordered by beech, oak and thorn hedges, with marked trails cutting across the hills. The weather can be hard: One April day, I saw snow, hail and rain in a single afternoon. Winter comes early on the sorth wind from the Massif Central. But I’ll take that blast any day to escape the monotonous plains of grain and sunflowers 40 miles north, broken only by the forests and lakes of the Sologne, where nobles and executives and politicians keep their hunting lodges and castles and drink Chinon and Touraine wines.

I haven’t seen evidence of great fortunes like that in the Creuse, just well-kept fields and houses that speak of a solid prosperity. The few chateaux are either in ruins or small, like Gargilesse. Even the owners of the shirt mills in Argenton-sur-Creuse — once counted in the dozens, but now only two — were discreet with their wealth, and Georges Sand’s house is too small for company (Chopin excepted). It’s a sweet contrast to the wannabe rusticism of the Vaucluse, which like much of Provence has become a Gallic version of the Hamptons.

The Creuse is too far from Paris (three hours south by car) to be completely overrun, but the locals say that within five years it will be another kind of place. The English and Germans and Swiss and Belgians and Dutch have found it, and their Rovers and Mercedes can be spotted beside quietly ostentatious rebuilt stone houses in the summer. Mischa, who drives an Opel with the back seat torn out and the top dented from transporting anything he can tie to it, pioneered that change in a low-budget way. He bought his barn and an acre of stone-fenced land for a few thousand dollars and started learning how to fix it up. Aside from the time he found himself standing on a ladder with one of the main support beams loose in his hands, and a hand infection that nearly turned to gangrene this summer, he’s avoided disasters, though locals say that if he cuts one more window into the barn it might come down on anyone inside.

The locals are changing, too. A certain kind are disappearing, the kind who knew animals better than machines. One of them was Marcel, who last winter was standing on a ladder pulling a bale of hay out of the barn to feed his platoon of goats, when the bale slipped and drove him into the ground. They say in the village that the fall isn’t what killed him, and I believe it. Marcel had to be pushing 70, but he was built like a beech tree, purple where the sun raked him and with arms like heavy branches. So it’s easy to suspect that the hospital cut him down to coffin size, putting a needle filled with the wrong stuff in the wrong place. His sister may not keep the farm, a three-sided complex of barns, sheds and a house with a few half-wild mongrel dogs and a pack of cats dominated by a chatte with three legs, because the other heirs are fighting for it.

There were 6 million farmers in France when Marcel was a young man. Now there are 300,000, whose wives go to the coiffeur (like Madame Bernard in the next village, who sells us our milk and fromage frais) and whose kids go to the university to study agronomics. They still eat what they grow (Madame Bernard also gives us her spare beans), but their notion of economy is closer to Greenspan than Thoreau. They make their cheese in outbuildings that look and smell like laboratories, and they don’t live as close to their animals as Marcel did, either. The distance from his front door to both barns is about five running steps, which leaves you time to hear a certain sound in your sleep and get up, shod and out to the animals before they kill a goat that got herded into the wrong shed by mistake.

Nature is still violent, even in a countryside as civilized as France. One of the reasons I go to the Creuse is to remind myself about that violence, and how to handle it. It’s simple, really: You watch where you put your feet, head and hands, whether you’re shaking plums off a tree to feed yourself and the yellow jackets or crossing the Anglin. That isn’t the way you move in Paris. Urban alertness means knowing what’s coming down the street at you, not worrying about whether you’re stepping on a crack or a piece of dogshit.

The Creuse requires that you watch the grass you’re walking on, because that tangled carpet could hide a hole, and that shady spot might be a lounge for snakes. There is a drugstore in nearby Chaillac with a deep collection of vipers in glass jars, and they weren’t imported. Nor does local lore recount the legend of a viper that turned into a woman for the sake of pornographic fantasy. Our neighbor Chris, a Parisian who married into the Creuse, casually asked Mischa one night as we were sitting around a fire beside the apple tree, “How many vipers are there on your property?”

“I’ve never seen any,” said Mischa.

“That’s right. There’s at least a dozen, but you haven’t seen them.”

Chris, a bearded former radical anarchist, has had surprises of his own in the woods. He was taking apart a junk car he found one day, when he heard humming inside the door panel. “So I opened it slowly,” he said.

More exactly, he slowly opened a nest of frelons, a species of large, slow-moving and terribly venomous wasps. They followed him back to his house at the edge of the village, but he had enough of a running start to close the door and windows before they arrived.

So when I walk across Mischa’s acre, which hasn’t been grazed in years and is now overrun by neck-high nettles, I look first and test the grass with a beech stick I cut in the woods. You think I’m chicken? The yellow jackets whose nest I discovered and avoided might agree, but a snake didn’t, and his opinion counts most with me. I saw only his back end as he rocketed away from my stick into the weeds, and it was big for a viper, maybe too big, a good couple inches in diameter. But it was the right color for a viper, a dull brown like dried manure, and the right shape, the blunt back narrowing in a taper that looks hacked-off.

The only time you see the unmistakable triangular snout of a viper is when you surprise him or he rears back to strike. A desperate, wounded viper showed me his fangs in the Pyrenees, a few hours’ hike from the nearest help, and I haven’t forgotten the sight. Nor do I possess the skills of the local kids, who test their courage by trapping vipers with forked sticks.

Chris says he’s seen vipers swimming in the Anglin, which gave me a chill after spending an afternoon probing the bottom rocks with my hand for a pair of sunglasses his little daughter Diane owned until I dropped them crossing the stream one night. But vipers don’t really dive under rocks.

Crayfish do, though, and walking along the Anglin with my lover Sophie, Antoine and two other borrowed kids, we met a young man catching them. He told us the technique, maybe because we didn’t look like competition. You take a wire basket that costs $4, a fish head doused with a fluid fishermen use to excite their prey and put it in a shady part of the stream. “They like the shadows,” he said. That’s all, but his haul that day included eleven crayfish in one basket, and one of them was nearly as big as his hand.

That was a good sign. A few years ago fertilizer runoff had poisoned the Anglin, but now even the trout are back. So are the children, mainly kids of summer people from Paris, but with enough local relatives to be accepted in the village. Even the farmers turned out when the children staged a Sunday night party, to watch the older girls show off the latest dances from the city. There hadn’t been a village festival in years before that. The “animations,” as they’re called here — fireworks, an occasional flea market, a weekend of sideshow rides for the kids and disco for the teenagers — are concentrated in St.-Benoit-du-Sault, a town with a stunning medieval back end of winding terraces and a hideous front of cheap 1960s roadside construction. Most French politicians took a cut of everything built in this country until the latest generation of magistrates indicted them for it, and it shows.

Yet this little corner of a little country is so perplexingly deep, so tough, that it is hard to wound. One day we took our bikes down a dirt road in the next village, and found ourselves in a marshy lowland where the pastures had gone wild. It only takes one wet summer for that to happen, as Mischa knows. After three blistered mornings with fresh-sharpened sickles, we had barely and badly cleared a small room’s worth of nettles and thorns off his acre, and the roots remained. When I asked a farm woman what we could do, she said with the faintest shake of her head: “Plow it under.” When we are gone, the ground will remain.

I believe in omens, and we saw one on the dirt track that a Roman legionary would understand. A bird of prey — a very big hawk, or an owl — exploded off a branch, showing us the way down the road. Fifty yards along in the woods, we found what looked like an iron mine — the same rusted rock face you see in the Mesabi range, the same still water that’s turned black, the outbuildings equipped with a sluice — but I rejected the idea out of hand until a local told me that many were started in the Creuse after World War Two. In one of the outbuildings, its walls overrun by vines, someone had set up home with junk furniture. I followed Sophie up the trail in back of the mine, but I kept an eye out for whoever lived there. If he was around, he didn’t show himself till we rode back.

I know where he found his furniture, because I’ve been there. The town dump here is called the dicharge, and Chris goes there nearly every day. His barn is filled with junk lumber he chops for the cooking fire in his kitchen, and a dozen junk bikes he’ll never fix up, but which we cannibalized to fix ours. We drove over with Mischa one morning and threw out our kitchen trash, then started picking until the car and the roof were full. Among the haul were a push lawnmower in working shape and a pair of Sunday shoes with the box they were bought in before I was born. They were probably a dead man’s shoes — which is why no one would take them when we met up with friends at our hangout in Argenton, a terrific bistro called the Potiron.

My prize was an illustrated edition of Alexandre Dumas’s version of the legend of Lyderic, first Count of Flanders, whose magic powers didn’t save him from investing a fatal confidence in his jealous friends (well, Paris still works like that). Beside it on the dirt were a full set of between-wars wedding photos, plus one lonely picture of a young man in infantry regalia. Judging from the county’s ever-present monuments to the war dead, his chances of returning weren’t higher than his sisters’ chances of finding a husband instead of ending up in an Argenton shirt mill.

Scholastic notebooks dated from 1936, decorated with Popular Front-style photos of workers’ pavilions from international fairs — the Creuse still votes on the Left, unlike most of France — told a tale of academic misery across three Republics. Creusois children learned French (as opposed to the local dialect) by copying out dictations, losing one point out of ten for every mistake. A farmers’ union taught them home economy, including how to calculate the monetary value of their butter and beef. These people — one of whom was born in 1952, the year of my birth — are probably as dead as the ghost in the Sunday shoes, their attics emptied by relatives eager to sell the house or newcomers with junk of their own to store.

Antoine went back to Paris with his mother — “Antoine is crying! Antoine is crying!” yelled Fabien, another of the summer kids — the morning I set out with my Frenchwoman to pick blackberries for jam. We learned one rule fast, following the vines along the hillside trails by the Anglin: Don’t get greedy. A perfect berry always hangs just within your reach, but your fingers will come back with thorn points stuck in them, and they’ll still hurt when you spot the next cluster within easy picking range. The vines look pliant until you realize that they’re woven through every branch and stem for a radius of at least five yards (folks say they can run like that for a kilometer, and I believe it).

But only a fool or a politician gets greedy here. And I’m sorry, but only a fool would tell you the name of the village where he wants to find his own piece of ground and peace of mind. Antoine is still just a kid, but he isn’t crying for nothing.

Let’s look at the case, which rests entirely on circumstantial, often unspeakably tendentious, evidence that the cops have fed to the press.

1. The Ramseys did not act normally after JonBenet’s death.
As Vanity Fair recounts it, as John Ramsey laid his daughter’s body on the floor after discovering it in his cellar, “he started to moan, while peering around to see who was looking at him.” Hmmm. Suspicious. Left unspecified is what constitutes normal behavior when your child has been murdered in your home. Vanity Fair goes to great lengths to portray John Ramsey as a man lacking the ability to express emotions, and it might very well be normal for such a man to moan and look around for help at such a moment.

It might also be normal for this man, in particular, to feel overwhelmed by sick destiny, inasmuch as his wife had been stricken with breast cancer and he had already lived through the death of another child. — reported by the Globe with the following headline: “DADDY ABUSED JONBENET’S SISTER!: Ramsey girl was killed before she could tell.” Actually, the sister died in a car crash, and there is so far no proof that Ramsey “abused” her, however that word is meant.

2. John Ramsey found the body without even looking for it.
According to Vanity Fair, John Ramsey, after being told by a Boulder cop to search for the missing JonBenet, “bolted from the kitchen and headed down to the basement. Fleet White [Ramsey's former friend] told us that Ramsey went directly to a small broken window on the north side of the house and paused … John said, ‘Yeah, I broke it last summer.’” From this, an investigator talking to Vanity Fair concludes, Ramsey “wanted Fleet to see the window to set up an intruder theory, but no one but a small child or a midget could have crawled through that space. While Fleet is looking at the window, John disappears down the hall directly to the little room where the body is.”

Of course, there are other uses for a broken window other than crawling through it. Like reaching through the hole in the glass from the outside and opening the lock. But why did Ramsey go directly to that little room? Perhaps because he had a dreadful intuition of what he might find there, or because of some small sign that only a man who lived in that house would notice.

3. The Ramseys refused to cooperate with police, hired attorneys and went on CNN to cry their innocence.

This is the Ramseys-protest-too-much theory. But since when was calling an attorney evidence of guilt? Any competent attorney would have advised the Ramseys that they would be the immediate prime suspects, because most child murders are committed by parents or relatives. Being told to be wary of the police would seem to be quite sound legal advice. Going on CNN was bizarre, not to mention a ghastly PR failure. But, despite the National Enquirer “experts’” supposed detection of falsehoods in John Ramsey’s voice, it proves absolutely nothing. Vanity Fair found it shockingly significant that Ramsey told CNN, “I don’t know if it was an attack on me, on my company …” Well, Ramsey is in the software business, which may politely be described as cutthroat. He may suffer from the egocentric delusions that are fairly common among self-made men. But that is hardly proof he murdered his daughter.

4. Crucial forensic evidence was apparently removed or erased from the crime scene, or was compromised when Ramsey picked up JonBenet’s body.

Cops have been known to bungle evidence — anyone remember the O.J. trial? — in the most extraordinary ways. And if it was the killer’s work, how does that point ineluctably to John Ramsey? Is he the only one in the state of Colorado who might have read any number of detective novels and police procedurals that provide advanced courses in forensic cover-ups? As for picking up his daughter’s body, with no police officer around to tell him not to, maybe it was the action of a shocked, grieving father. Unless of course, as Vanity Fair insists, the man has no heart.

5. The handwriting on the note.

The only suspect, according to a handwriting analyst, whose writing was in any way similar to the ransom note was Patsy Ramsey. And the note contained a phrase she had been heard to speak: “Use that good, Southern common sense of yours.” First of all, the comparisons are inconclusive, at best. Second of all, handwriting analysis (as Seymour Hersh will mournfully tell you about the fake Marilyn Monroe-JFK letters) is often about as accurate as farting at the moon. But if it was Patsy Ramsey spending hours at the crime scene after the murder painfully composing the “ransom note,” then what was John Ramsey doing? Covering for his wife, as presumably he has been ever since?
Or is it the other way around? Why one would cover for the other, however, is not clear. These are not poor people without means of their own. And if anything, obtaining sole possession of their joint means might be ample reason to turn the other over to the cops.

6. Sick parents exploited, abused and psychologically destroyed their too-beautiful child.

Even before she was murdered, goes the media wisdom,
JonBenet was figuratively dead, her childhood sacrificed on the altar of her parents’ deviant desires. Specifically, the tabloids have suggested that JonBenet was murdered either by accident, in the course of a sex game gone awry or in a panic, brought on by fear she would expose her parent-abuser. The current issue of Globe says that Patsy killed JonBenet in a rage over her bed-wetting (there were urine stains on the
underwear of the victim) and that John is merely covering up for her.

In the classic study of such killings, Philip J. Resnick’s “Child Murder by Parents: A Psychiatric Review of Filicide,” such “accidents” accounted for 12 percent of Resnick’s 131 cases. But most of them happened when the killer was in a sudden rage over something the child did (or was seen as having done). JonBenet was garroted — the autopsy report notes the “deep furrow” on her neck — which does not suggest a spontaneous assault. While it doesn’t rule out a deliberate murder, it is very rare for a husband and wife to collude in such a crime. Resnick notes “scattered reports where both husband and wife planned the murder … usually because they could see no way out of their poverty.” Does that sound like the Ramseys?

What it comes down to is this: The Ramseys are being accused of an abomination less on the basis of evidence than on our censorious expectations about what parents should be. The Ramseys do not weep enough. They dressed up their little girl like a grown-up — like a whore. They made her perform for strangers. They wanted her to be a paperback version of themselves. By destroying what is left of the Ramsey family, we can persuade ourselves that they inhabit another world, one that the rest of us of course renounce.

But that doesn’t make the Ramseys killers. Sure, there are troubling aspects to the case. If it was an outsider, where are the footprints? What are we to make of Patsy Ramsey’s broken paintbrush? Still, I would rather be wrong about their guilt later than wrong about their presumption of innocence now. And I won’t believe they are guilty until I see much better evidence than the unexamined bits and pieces and groundless suppositions thrown at us by a blitheringly incompetent police department and a sensation-seeking press corps.

That the Front is a mere blip in the National Assembly is beside the point — the party is not that concerned with national victories at this stage. Its real strategy is to conquer France piece by piece, town by town, region by region. During a year I spent with the Front in 1995-96, its cadres kept dropping references to the party’s policy of “local implantation,” and they weren’t just referring to the fact that in June 1995, the Movement (as its militants call it) captured three major towns in Provence — Orange, Marignane and Toulon — to which they added a fourth, Vitrolles, in February. They meant that the Front knows it can never take France the way Hitler took Weimar, from the top down. It has a slower but surer plan.

The Front is banking on a recent major shift in France’s governing institutions, something akin to allowing the Deep South, Northeast, Midwest and Pacific Coast to set up their own governments. It began in the early 1980s, when the Socialists, in the name of “decentralization,” apportioned potent new powers to 22 regional councils, including Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur. The immediate, predictable result was an explosion of taxes — in the midst of a deep recession — and corruption, as local leaders on both the mainstream right and left milked their magnificent new fiefs. That played right into the hands of the Front, which quickly fastened on taxes and corruption as issues, right up there with getting rid of immigrants. The Front’s mayor of Orange, Jacques Bompard, came in and cut his city’s exploding tax rates, a singular rarity in France.

France’s electoral system has also helped the Front locally. Representation in the regions (like the towns) is determined by a proportional voting system. When that system was devised, nobody figured the Front would benefit, because it was pulling barely 1 percent of the vote in national elections. But with the disciplined activism of the Front’s militants, the number of National Front regional councilors grew from 139 in 1986 to 239 seats in 1992, including a gigantic bloc of 34 — more than one-third of the total — in sweet Provence.

What happens if the Front, as seems likely, captures Provence in the 1998 regional elections? It will settle in to cultivate crucial new electorates, according to an analysis prepared by the party’s Secretariate for Elected Officials. It won’t hurt that the roads and railroads are planned by the regions in concert with the national government. In Orange, one of Bompard’s cadres told me that if they can swing a deal for a highway bypass, “We win the next elections in a walk.”

And that’s just a start, marveled the Secretariate: By 1998 “the regions will have complete control of the ensemble of professional training for the young under 26 years of age, (a power) previously exercised by the State.” Provence will become the laboratory for the Front’s “French first” employment policies, and a billboard to attract more working-class voters, the fastest-growing share of Le Pen’s electorate. Nationwide, the Front now holds 30 percent of that demographic slice, more than any other party in France.

And last but hardly least, the Front will get control of construction, maintenance and support services in every institution of secondary education throughout Provence, from high schools to farm schools — “a heavy budgetary power,” as the Secretariate put it. It could eliminate pork-free school lunches for Muslims, as the Front’s new mayor did in Marignane. It could hammer principals who allowed their professors to teach, for example, that racism is an abomination, as did teachers in Toulon after the Front conquered the city in 1995.

Provence will always be beautiful, its wines will always be heady — I never had a better bottle than a ’90 Chateauneuf-du-Pape that a Front winemaker uncorked for me in his cellar — its sun will stay bright, its mistral bone-chilling, its girls and boys as pretty as any you’ve seen in Malibu. But with due respect to Peter Mayle, Provence in 1998 may be a replay of Munich in 1938. Once again, the democratic powers that be are getting ready to cede a large slice of territory to the folks who want to bury them, on the theory that it doesn’t matter. It does — it matters to the Front, and they’re not as stupid as everyone likes to think. They have their own version of toujours Provence, and the next chapter is about to be written.