‘How about a quick shag, love?’ isn’t really the same as ‘voulez vous coucher avec moi?’ Which I’m pretty sure French people don’t actually say (at least I’ve never been thusly propositioned). One thing is sure though – sex sounds better in French.

But despite France long being seen as the guardian of the French kiss and smouldering sexual values, Britain has nevertheless raced ahead in recent decades. Far from the prudery associated with our chilly, repressed stereotype, we now boast a commercial sex-shop industry far more advanced than that of France. But whilst it’s kind of cool to have an Ann Summers in between McDonalds and Superdrug on every high street, and whilst it is kind of convenient to be able to order your vibrators from Amazon, where is the glamour, the luxury, the good taste?

That’s right, it’s still in France, hiding out along with the newly-exiled G-spot, which in recent debate, a group of British scientists, in their infinite wisdom and knowledge, decided didn’t exist. French scientists begged to differ.

Welcome to Paris. A city whose glossy travel-mag veneer only barely disguises its ancient and dirty heritage, a city which, as the writer Andrew Hussey puts it, ‘seduces without mercy.’ Since its mucky emergence as the capital of pornography in the 18th century, Paris has enraptured the collective imagination as a place of deviance, lust and adventure. The birthplace of the libertine and of the erotic freedom that nourished the Sapphic languishings of Colette, Anais Nin and Simone De Beauvoir, a place of exhibitionism, immorality and, above all, sex.