Whether French, English or Polish, Conrad's friends and acquaintances were all struck by his amazing familiarity with, and love for, French literature. The playwright H.-R. Lenormand, who met him in Ajaccio in 1920, recollected: ‘C’était une joie pour moi de constater son amour des lettres françhises’, and in his memorial tribute he stated that he spoke about French writers ‘avec une tendresse filiale’. In his own tribute, André Gide exclaimed: ‘Comme il connaissait bien nos auteurs! ’ John Galsworthy recorded that ‘He was ever more at home with French literature than with English’, Ernest Dawson said that ‘French literature made a stronger appeal to Conrad than English’, and according to Joseph Retinger, he regarded it as ‘the most versatile, the most universal and the most cosmopolitan of all’.

This remarkable intimacy with the French literary tradition had both national and family origins. As Conrad himself noted: ‘of all the countries in Europe it is with France that Poland has most connection’ (PR, p. 121). As a member of the szlachta, or land-owning gentry, Conrad's early acquaintance with the French language was in no way exceptional. As in Russia, French was commonly used in Polish aristocratic circles throughout the nineteenth century as the language of cultured communication, ‘a state of things’, Georg Brandes says, ‘which from the beginning of the century was promoted […] by the continual intellectual intercourse with France’. Retinger points out that ‘in the upper strata of society’ Polish children ‘had as a matter of course a French tutor or governess […] and were brought up on the French educational system, chatting in French from their earliest childhood’.