At the Louis Vuitton flagship store on the Champs-Elysées, the Japanese tourists jostle over the famous monogrammed leather bags as if they are going out of fashion.
France may be caught up in the global economic crisis, but there is no sign of it in Paris. LVMH is a leader in a still-flourishing luxury goods market and its chief executive, Bernard Arnault, is in the enviable position of being the richest man in France.
Louis Vuitton is a French success story, which should make Arnault something of a local hero. Instead, the tycoon was treated like a social pariah recently after accusations that he was trying to cut his tax bill by seeking Belgian citizenship.
The news that the billionaire businessman might head to the land of moules-frites generated headlines, insults, a lawsuit and divided France roughly down right-left lines: those who see Arnault as a symbol of the "selfish rich" and those who see him as a standard bearer for the tax-bludgeoned entrepreneurs trying to create jobs and wealth.
Arnault, 63, a friend of former right-wing president Nicolas Sarkozy (he was a witness at Sarkozy's second marriage), denies he is planning to up sticks to get out of paying a new 75 per cent "supertax" on the rich, one of the vote-winning pillars of socialist François Hollande's election campaign in May.
The explanation from an LVMH spokesman is that Arnault was seeking dual citizenship to make "sensitive" investments in Belgium, a response shot down by the Belgian authorities, who say foreign investors enjoy the same fiscal treatment as locals.