Graeme Macrae Burnet

If asked how one’s business is doing, the customary response is: ‘Could be worse,’ or ‘Just about surviving.’ Anything more upbeat is reckoned insufferable boasting. Personal achievements should be dismissed as flukery and mentioned only after an extended period of arm-twisting. It is regarded as a great misfortune for one’s daughter to be too pretty or one’s son to be too bright. In Saint-Louis, as in all provincial backwaters, the inhabitants are most comfortable with failure. Success serves only to remind the citizenry of their own shortcomings and is thus to be enthusiastically resented.