A LEGAL kiss is never as good as a stolen one, according to a character in Guy de Maupassant’s A Wife’s Confessions, but the Court of Appeal down in Nîmes still ordered a lady tourist to cough up 18,840 euros to restore an entirely white canvas by an American artist, Cy Twombly, after she had given it an illicit smacker in red lipstick.

Good Lord! 18,840 euros? For a rollerful of Dulux Blanc? Even a Jersey decorator would blush before he took you for that much.

Nor does it end there, because she will also have to shell out another 2,000 euros for costs and compensation, making 20,840 euros in all. Aïe! as they say in French – which is pronounced I-ya! and roughly translates as Ouch!

Meanwhile, the prosecutor’s office at the Palais de Justice here in Dinan is currently deciding what action to take following another, more intimate moment between two sixth-formers from the school I teach at. Every weekend evening loads of teenagers get together to indulge in binge-drinking and its associated activities in the Jardin Anglais, which is the public garden high on the ramparts overlooking the viaduct and port.

This pair had slipped away to some discreet spot and were, how shall I put it, making love, but unaware that a class-mate was filming it all on his mobile phone. Now if things had stopped there, the whole incident might have been dismissed as drunken, youthful folly in the heat of a Saturday night (and I don’t know about you, but I’m in no position to cast the first stone here myself, either).
But times have changed since our day.

In the cold clear light of the following Monday morning, the video was all round the school on everyone’s mobiles. It seems this kind of thing goes on a lot elsewhere in France, even though it’s the first time we’ve ever heard of it here in Dinan. Well, we adults, anyway.

One city school nurse explained on the box that she often sees girls who have said Yes just to please their boyfriend when they weren’t really ready and are completely demolished, first by the initial experience itself and then by their very public exposure and humiliation the next day.

The easy option for our headmaster would have been to decide that it was none of our business – Saturday night and all that, co-ed private school, reputation and recruitment to think of – but he immediately informed the public prosecutor, who is now considering what charges to bring, like taking and publishing an image of someone without their consent, for a start.

Early on in the internet era, a couple of our teachers were victims of this in a larky schoolboyish sort of way – the Latin miss’s head perched on Samantha Fox’s body, the titchy PE man’s on Arnold Schwarzenneger’s, and so on – but the students were warned that they could and would be prosecuted and even sued if it happened again, and that, we thought, was that.

This time, though, gendarmes, doctors and psychologists were called in to discuss the many aspects of the problem with all the students, and 250 of our parents were concerned enough to fill the town theatre for a symposium on the whole complex question.

And although it was the least of the head’s worries, student applications for next September have actually risen significantly since the local media took up the story of the open, caring and yet no-nonsense way in which the school was dealing with the situation.

NOT that our upper-sixth-formers had much time to dwell on things, as the Baccalauréat exam season ground into gear. Mind you, many of the more able among them were disappointed to discover that making the exam more accessible to more and more students has resulted in a certain levelling out, not to say down.

For instance, in the personal expression section of her English written paper, my bilingual daughter Fleur was asked, ‘Are you a fashion victim?’, which is a good enough question and one on which she would normally have extended herself with considerable warmth and vigour, and indeed often has, verbally, to me and Mme Masstairmann, alas.

The only problem was the bit in brackets: (Answer in not more than 12 words).
Several other papers left her feeling similarly frustrated, but no doubt the Min of Ed will be trumpeting ‘best ever’ results this year, again, with the pass rate up, again, at around 80 per cent.

MME M and I have joined the masses of frazzled parents driving their exhausted kids all over the country on Friday nights – living way out here in the western wilds of Dinan, it’s not easy getting to places like Bordeaux, Strasbourg or Lyon quickly and simply – so that they can sit the much tougher, special entry exams many colleges now have to set on Saturdays in May and June to sort out who’s got what it takes for them.

Mind you, during her time in the sixth form (do you still call it that, I wonder?) she did become fascinated by the strange obsession of a great American author who was an inspiration for people like Tom Waits, Jim Morrison and Bob Dylan and, well, for me and many of my generation.

Before he died at the age of 47, ravaged by alcohol, Jack Kerouac had one last wish: to prove that he had Breton roots and to trace them back. Whenever journalists asked him about his beatnik posterity, he would reply that he would rather talk about his Breton heritage and in the Second World War he decided that as a true Breton, he could only join the navy.

‘What a strange call I feel from the ocean,’ he once wrote. ‘It’s my ancestors, Breton fishermen. Even the fish in the sea speak Breton.’

Yes, his was a vision of an idealised Brittany, of Celtic myths, of mariners and explorers and of Arthurian legend. Sadly, he ran out of time before he could complete his quest, but a new book by Patricia Dagier and Hervé Quéméner – Jack Kerouac, Breton d’Amérique – now provides conclusive evidence that the forebears of the star of the Beat Generation, a label he coined then came to regret, originated from Huelgoat in the Parc Naturel Régional d’Armorique in the heart of western Brittany, an area of almost mystically chaotic forests, rocks and vegetation.

Not far from there, specialists at the Conservatoire Botanique in Brest (they do for plants what your Durrell does for animals) have just pulled off a major coup. Their dodo-stickered ‘arum titan’ – don’t ask me what that is in English, my interest in horticulture only goes so far – is the biggest flower in the world or, to be more exact, it has the largest inflorescence. That’s the complete flowering head. (I’ve just looked it up. Honestly, the things I do for you.)

Yes, it’s purple, six feet tall and weighs around 90 pounds and they had been predicting that it would blossom between 26 and 28 June.

And Ma Doué! It did, too, having first and last bloomed in 2003, ten years after they’d sown its seeds.

Only 20 botanical gardens around the world have managed to grow one in captivity, and there are only a few endangered thousand left in the wild in Sumatra.
But don’t go rushing down there to see it, because the bloom fades again after only three days, having given off a nauseating stench rather like a decomposing corpse to attract the insects that pollinate it.

So maybe I won’t get La Patronne a bunch for our wedding anniversary after all, eh.
Kenavo!