There were a few different languages moving around the air, French and English and something Russian-like and Italian, and Turin cocked his head at them. "The French like luxury," he said, looking thoughtful and sipping something, "but what the French call luxury is actually call-girl chic. Put it this way. After finishing secondary school in Milan at sixteen, I went back to Paris to go to university, Paris XII, Pierre et Marie Curie. I rented a room from Madame Clouzot, the sister of the film director Henri-Georges Clouzot, right near the Champs Elysées. She explained that there were only really two great French perfume makers. Guerlain and Caron. Guerlain, she said, was for cocottes-kept women. Caron was for the duchesse. But in fact it is 1880s cocotte style that today passes for chic in France. What the French consider 'chic' is actually a sort of kept-woman vulgarity." He looked very grim, then permitted himself to pronounce "Hermès" and then "Vuitton." "Caron, on the other hand," he said, brightening, "is absolutely proper, proper chic." And what is that? He laughed, thought about it, said "um" and "oh God." "Chic is, first, when you don't have to prove you have money, either because you have a lot and it doesn't matter or because you don't have any and it doesn't matter. Chic is not aspirational." He sighed, despondent. "Chic is the most impossible thing to define. Luxury is a humorless thing, largely, and when humor happens in luxury it happens involuntarily. Chic is all about humor. Which means chic is about intelligence. And there has to be oddness-most luxury is conformist, and chic cannot be. Chic must be polite and not incommode others, but within that it can be as weird as it wants...