WHERE can a Frenchman find romance, happiness and the best baguettes in the world? The answer — according to the country’s most popular author — is South Kensington. It is an answer that has raised eyebrows in Paris.

Marc Levy, 44 — who has been France’s most successful writer every year since 2000 — is occupying his customary place at the top of the bestseller lists this summer with Mes Amis Mes Amours, his latest blockbuster.

The novel contains the humour and the sentiment that have helped Levy to sell more than ten million works worldwide. But perhaps the most striking feature of Mes Amis Mes Amours is the backdrop, which has disturbed some deeply held French beliefs.

The semi-autobiographical story is set in London, the home of Levy for the past six years and a city with which he says he has fallen “madly in love”. He presents the British capital as a sort of Gallic ideal, where the large French community can enjoy a quality of life that has disappeared in their own country.

In 1991 Peter Mayle highlighted the attractiveness of France for the British with A Year in Provence. Fifteen years later Levy’s novel may come to be seen as a similar yardstick in the French vision of Britain.

“There is an energy, a creativity and a craziness, which was in Paris in the 1960s and New York in the 1980s,” said Levy on a trip back to Paris yesterday. That much is grudgingly accepted by his fellow countrymen, among whom London’s commercial and artistic boom is well-documented.

However, Levy also says that London has a “sweetness” that makes it a suitable home for lovers. In this, he has stirred a new and anguished debate. In French eyes, Britain is where you go to earn money. But for love, Paris remains the unchallenged champion — or at least it did until Levy wrote Mes Amis Mes Amours as a tribute to his adopted home. “What city could be more romantic than London?” he said. “I always tell people that when you go there, you get rid of the grey skies in your life.”

If a Briton extolled London’s virtues in this way, he would probably be dismissed as a jingoistic crackpot by the French. Coming from Levy the view is more difficult to ignore.

His work sparked a debate on France Inter, the state-run radio, with listeners, including a number of French residents in London, ringing to contradict him. They said that Britain was good for the bank account but certainly not for l’art de vivre. But he himself says: “You have no idea how many e-mails I have received from people telling me they want to go to London after reading Mes Amis Mes Amours.”

The work — which features two French men who decide to share a home before love pulls them separate ways — is notable for the way it portrays the 150,000-strong French community in London as a bastion of old-fashioned Gallic values.

In London Levy maintains that the French have re- created a conviviality lost in Paris, notably around the French lycée in South Kensington. “The coffee shop, which is run by an Englishman and where most of the staff are Italians, has the best baguettes I have ever eaten,” he added.

Levy turned to look out of the window of his agents in Paris, and a wry smile spread across his face. It was drizzling. “I always tell my French friends that the weather is better in London,” he said. “You never get a completely grey day, like you do here. There’s always a ray of sunshine.”

LIVING THE DREAM?

A Year in the Merde (2004) by Stephen Clarke

Paul West, a young businessman, comes to Paris to work on a chain of tea rooms. His days are a mix of frustrating bureaucracy, double-dealing by his French boss, and treading in the dog excrement of the title.

“I understood a lot more about Parisians’ attitude to work. Workdays became a mild irritant inserted between weekends.”

A Year in Provence (1990) by Peter Mayle

Classic ex-pat story of a businessman moving to the South of France. It spawned two sequels and encouraged thousands to leave Britain for rural France. Quaint tales of whimsical locals and gastronomic delights are tempered by serious teething problems with Mayle’s house.

“The mistral can blow the ears off a donkey.”