"No One Likes Us..."

"I don't know why." No, wait, maybe I do.

"She is lovely, no?" The agent motioned through the windshield toward the Eiffel Tower. "Have you mounted her?"

Langdon rolled his eyes. "No, I haven't climbed the tower."

"She is the symbol of France. I think she is perfect."

Langdon nodded absently. Symbologists often remarked that France--a country renowned for machismo, womanizing, and diminutive insecure leaders like Napoleon and Pepin the Short--could not have chosen a more apt national emblem than a thousand-foot phallus.

From The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown

This is so wrong on so many levels. "Symbologists"? I don't even want to know who they are supposed to be. Machismo, womanizing, "diminutive insecure leaders"? Certainly the three qualities of the French national character that always come to mind first for me.

If I was a rabid Francophobe.

But worst of all: imagine reading over 700 pages of such stuff.

And yes, it has been translated into French. So we can insult them in their own language. I can only think that if the French ever produced anything so banal and idiotic, they would have the decency not to translate it into English.

I can't wait for the movie version.

[I should have explained that this passage is in a "travel journal" about to go on sale, marketed as a way for the fans of "The Da Vinci Code" to re-trace the steps of the story. Why one would want to look at the Eiffel Tower and recall these words is a mystery best left to fans of the novel, of which, apparently, there are many.]