Longer lunches, easy elegance and passion aplenty. What’s not to love about life on the Left Bank? .

I don’t think I’m supposed to admit this as an Englishman, but most of the men I have truly admired in my life have been French. I had a full-on man crush for Mr Albert Camus as a teenager. Was it the humanist existentialism or the way he held his Gauloises? I fell deep for Mr Arthur Rimbaud as a student, marvelling at the wildness of his poetry and the off-the-scale adventures. Now I cannot get enough of Messrs Claude Debussy and Erik Satie, with their elegance and profundity. And on through Messrs Jean-Paul Belmondo and Romain Duris and Serge Gainsbourg and François Truffaut and Eric Cantona and Gustave Flaubert and Daft Punk and whoever it was who invented the Breton top, Ossau-Iraty cheese and Châteauneuf-du-Pape. I’m not supposed to admit this because the French really don’t need the ego boost.

When I was a student in Pau, I shared a flat with an archetypal specimen named Sébastien, who kept his Camembert in the cupboard (the stench!) and maintained that the French were better than the British in pretty much every respect.

“You have no philosophers, no painters, no literature,” he would contend.

“Erm, Shakespeare, Dickens, Eliot, Chaucer?”

“I have never heard of them.” I’m exaggerating only a little bit.

Most of what makes the French infuriating – the Wednesday closures, the wildcat strikes, the protectionism, the arrogance, the certainty – is also what makes them enviable. I mean, what’s not to like about a 35-hour working week? I would take that over the Anglo-American chained-to-your-desk culture any day. And then there’s the three-hour lunches and the peerless cinema and the wanton philosophising and sex in the afternoon. That’s not to diminish the American can-do spirit, British humour, German efficiency, etc. But we could perhaps admit that we’re a little bit jealous.

There’s a certain je ne sais quoi that they don’t teach you in GCSE French class; here then, MR PORTER shares the five central tenets you need to master to earn your Breton stripes. Manage these and the nonchalant Gallic shrug is yours.