At that very moment, Lévy sashays into the room. He is wearing the foundation required by his televisual activities, and this clearly bothers him enough to affect his manners. As I go to shake his hand he says: 'I don't usually wear make-up, you know.'

Lévy's reputation for narcissism is unparalleled in his home country, and he's not unaware of the fact. The headline of one article about him coined the immortal dictum, 'God is dead but my hair is perfect'. He has been known to say that the discovery of a new shade of grey leaves him 'ecstatic', and that people who vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen cannot buy Philippe Starck furniture or Yohji Yamamoto clothes (as if their aesthetic taste were their greatest offence). Maybe it's the make-up, but Lévy seems a little tense. He's keen to get me out of the sultan's salon and into his far more austere study, where a modern sculpture of a deliberately empty-headed Lenin provides an unwitting reminder of Lévy's own relationship to Pascal. He sits down, furrows his brow, makes a few bossy demands about how the interview is to be conducted, and proceeds noisily to inhale substantial amounts of phlegm at regular intervals.

Observer: Je suis un superstar