Well, it means "excited," all right--just not the kind of "excited" you might initially imagine. Something I found out a good month into my stay. Only the French.
My favorite false cognate--one much less likely to get you into trouble--is the word décadence, used not in the sense of a dear, metabolically-blessed friend's dessert specialty (a Nutella-berry-ricotta pie) but rather to signify moral decay and social decline (pies = immorality?!) I picture decadence as a combination of the English and French senses of the word: a luxuriant, silk-swathed, chocolate-covered, hedonistic degeneration of civic virtue.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is really a portrait of decadence in turn-of-the-century England. As you probably know, it's the story of a beautiful young Adonis who, Faust-like, compromises his soul for eternal beauty and youth after realizing that "the life that was to make his soul would mar his body." His consequent descent into corruption and cruelty leaves him unscarred, while his portrait becomes increasingly wizened and gruesome--a meter of his actions. He's egged on by Lord Henry, the symbol of corrosive hedonism, who gets all the best lines in the book: "The only difference between a caprice and a lifelong passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer." "I wonder who it was who defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given." And my favorite, "To define is to limit," which could be the manifesto for my generation's "hookup culture."
The book goes from zero to Poe--twisted and gothic--in the course of a few chapters, which I probably should have expected but didn't, and by the surreal, horrifying end, I was shivering under the covers (and had to sleep with the lights on). Dorian Gray was fascinating and brilliantly-written...but don't read it in the dark.
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