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This article presents information about two unpublished and incomplete articles on France by William Makepeace Thackeray, dating from the early 1840s. The longer of them is a dutifully dull piece on Louis Philippe. It was written as part of the author's unsuccessful bid to acquire the editorship of the periodical "Foreign Quarterly Review," and was never completed out of sheer boredom, as Gordon Ray plausibly surmises. Any person who has lived much amongst Frenchmen must have remarked the strange faculty of imitation which characterizes them more than perhaps any other race of men, and which the grinning satirist who wrote the parable of Panurge and his sheep discovered in his fellow countrymen three hundred years ago.