DAVID GUNN wishes he could be confused with Louis Gallois. Here in the United States, Gunn, the new president of Amtrak, has emerged from his gloomy jousts with Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta with the impression that even if Amtrak survives, it will be an indentured serf leaning on a scythe and gazing longingly at the Ford Expedition rolling into the castle.

All Mineta gave Gunn was $100 million of a requested $200 million in emergency loan guarantees. The money averts a July shutdown but runs out by summer's end, leaving the White House and Congress to decide again what gruel to spoon out to the scraggly serf.

The same lords of transportation confer knighthood on giant cars with billions of dollars of silent subsidies in low gasoline taxes. The airlines are the court jester. They make cattle pens seem like condos, teenagers seem fiscally responsible, and Fenway security look like the CIA. The lords throw them a $15 billion tip for their jokes.

Lord Mineta was kind enough to say, ''No wants to see Amtrak die,'' but it is clear that severe dehydration is unworthy of his attention. Speaking of his negotiations with the Bush administration, Gunn said, ''We listened to their ideas, and, while I wouldn't say it was a dry hole, there wasn't a lot of water in it.''

In not-so-medieval France, the well overflows with wine, with passengers who are figuratively quite tipsy. Gallois is the chairman of France's national rail company, SNCF. A year ago France opened a high-speed rail line that goes from Paris to Marseilles in three hours. The distance between that nation's two biggest cities is virtually the same as the distance from Boston to Washington.

Imagine. Boston to Washington. Three hours. By train! No one in his right mind would ever again drive eight to nine hours down the scenic and gastronomical nightmare of the New Jersey Turnpike. For a lot of people, a comfortable three-hour train trip from downtown to downtown, during which books can be read, laptops plugged in, and people met would seem to beat showing your hooves at the X-ray machine for the right to be herded into an arthritic cattle pen, zipping through the clouds in an hour and a half merely to stand in line for a cab for the privilege of idling in rush hour.

Given a legitimate choice, the French have decided it was no choice at all. The service from Paris to Marseilles is averaging 1.5 million passengers a month, dwarfing the 273,000 that used the Acela Express between Boston and Washington in May.

Rail service now constitutes 61 percent of travel between Paris and Marseilles. Trains also carry 60 percent of the passengers between Paris and London.

As a measure of how much travelers in the Northeast Corridor want trains, Amtrak's New York-Washington run since the birth of the Acela has captured a similar 58 percent share of rail/air travelers even though it is no match for the French service. In the same time the Acela goes from Washington to New York, the French train would be approaching Boston.

Since the terrorist attacks, the Acela has helped Amtrak double its share of rail/air passengers between Boston and New York to 38 percent. Any further improvement requires new rails and ending the logjam with commuter trains in Connecticut.

That will take an investment on the level of the French, who subsidize their trains at a cost of $3 billion to $4 billion a year. Based on population, the same investment in the United States would be $20 billion. That is still less than the $32 billion a year we lavish on highways, and it is not even half of President Bush's proposed increase for the military.

Americans have chosen individual convenience, or the illusion of it, at the cost of horrible rush-hour congestion and pollution. The French and other congested European nations have chosen to understand that the benefits of having trains that go 160 to 180 miles an hour far outweigh the costs.

Pierre-Bernard Fauverge, a spokesman for SNCF, said, ''Our trains work because they are nationalized, not run for profit, but as a public service.''

Gallois, the president of SNCF, said, ''There is a feeling in France that SNCF belongs to the nation.'' There is, of course, no such feeling for Amtrak. For all his jousting, Gunn ended up with gruel.

As autos and airlines feast on the black holes of the White House and Congress, Gunn stares into the well and can hear a resounding echo of emptiness. The well might not be completely dry, but what is at the bottom is hardly not wine for royalty. It is vinegar for the serfs.

© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company

###