It's a warm spring afternoon and Alain Leclair, chairman of AFG-ASFFI, the French fund management association, is trying to force open a window in his overheated boardroom.

Wrestling with original fittings is one of the downsides of working in a grand 18th century town house, but Leclair proudly declares the building was once home to Grace Elliott, a Scottish aristocrat who bore a child to the future George IV before moving to Paris where she became the lover of Philippe, Duke of Orléans, just before the French Revolution.