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Another highly subjective and inexhaustive list of things I've learned in, about, and autour de la France
Note: I screwed up when I initially sent this out and it only reached a tiny percentage of subscribers. Here goes, one more time. Please accept my apologies if you are receiving a duplicate!
Back by popular demand! Don’t forget to add your own in the comments section. (Enormous thanks to the paid subscribers out there for spending €3.92 per month—less than the average price of a glass of wine, which in Paris is €5.63—to keep this fishwrapper in business.)
In French, you’re not naked as a jaybird, you’re naked as a worm (“nu comme un ver.”) I learned this while reporting a new piece about French naturists, not to be confused with French nudists, on the occasion of a *naked visit* to the excellent “Paradis Naturistes” exhibit at Mucem.
Bonus: the most awkward thing about being naked with a bunch of French strangers isn’t the nakedness; it’s the universal tutoiement.
In naturist jargon, clothed people are known as “textiles.”
The official anthem of the Paris 2024 games—un vrai banger—will be available from Friday on streaming platforms. It is called “Parade” and was composed by Victor Le Masne. (The Olympic theme song that Americans know and love from ABC telecasts is called “Bugler’s Dream” and was composed by Leo Arnaud, even though many people think it was composed by John Williams.)
It’s not gerrymandering. It’s charcutage électoral. It’s not a pie graph. It’s a Camembert. (The plastic pie in Trivial Pursuit is a Camembert, too.)
A person who harvests salt for a living north of the Loire is called a paludier. A person who harvests salt for a living south of the Loire is called a saunier.
Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” is two minutes and twenty-eight seconds long. The song plays a major role in Christopher Nolan’s 2010 film “Inception.” Which is two hours and twenty-eight minutes long. Did Christopher Nolan and I just blow your mind?
As a French friend recently pointed out to me, when Americans say “personal news,” they’re certain to be talking about work.
Hot wayfinding tip: Paris street numbers ascend or descend on the basis of the street’s orientation to the Seine. So, on streets that are perpendicular to the Seine the lower the building number is, the closer you are to the river. On streets that run parallel to the Seine, the numbers follow the flow of the river, meaning that they ascend from east to west. Diagram!
French healthcare will cover 65% of your stay at a thermal spa, on the condition that the stay lasts exactly eighteen consecutive days. Shorter stays don’t qualify. “It’s therapy, but it’s also a chance to get away from home for three weeks,” one lawmaker told me.
Louis XIV so loved to show off his fabulous calves that one theory holds his leg vanity responsible for the development of turnout in ballet.
The best place to have a picnic in Paris is the Pont des Arts.
The best place to have a romantic dinner is Pétrelle.
French dogs born in the same year are supposed to be given names that begin with the same letter. This year’s letter is V. (K, Q, W, X, Y and Z are excluded from the system, as they’re considered too difficult.)
According to one linguist, every French verb invented since 1950 ends in -er.
According to the U.S. State Department, French is one of the easiest languages for an English speaker to learn. (It requires approximately six hundred hours of instruction, versus eleven hundred for Pashto or Xhosa.)
One time, Napoléon III, Empress Eugénie, Alexandre Dumas, and Prince Metternich of Austria walked into a bar. No, they participated in a dictée presided over by Prosper Mérimée. Given 169 words to transcribe, Napoléon III made 75 mistakes, Eugénie 62, and Dumas 24. Prince Metternich was the winner, with only three errors.
Un éléphant is a male elephant, une éléphant is a female elephant, and un éléphanteau is a baby elephant of either gender.
Kinshasa is the world’s largest French-speaking city.
The average dinnertime in France is 7:35. The average dinnertime in America is 6:19. (Pennsylvanians eat the earliest, at 5:37.)
A man went to get a colonoscopy. His doctor gave him a list of authorized foods. Breakfast: coffee or light tea, fruit jelly, honey, white bread, butter. Lunch: veal cutlet, steak, chicken, ham, lean cold pork, brains. Yes, 🧠🧠🧠.
Non-assistance of a person in danger is a crime under French law—a legacy of Vichy, obliging French citizens to go to the aid of wounded Germans.
You can’t legally order a 23andMe or MyHeritage kit in France, which, along with Poland, is the only European country to forbid “recreational” D.N.A. testing.
Thanks to a phenomenon known as thermal expansion, the Eiffel Tower gets taller in the summer and shorter in the winter. Its height can vary by as much as thirty centimeters according to the temperature.
Marie-Louise Giraud, one of the last women to be guillotined in France, was executed on July 30, 1943 for having performed twenty-seven abortions in the Cherbourg area between 1940 and 1942.
Chauvinism was named for Nicolas Chauvin, “supposedly a Napoleonic soldier wounded seventeen times and pensioned off, who made people laugh with his extravagant patriotism.”1
If you want to be truly correct, you can’t say “the French deputy from the Ardèche” the way you can say “the congresswoman from Michigan.” By definition, each French deputy represents the entire nation. (This one goes out to my fact-checking colleague Fabrice Robinet.)
This weekend is the Journées Européennes du Patrimoine, one of my favorite events of the year. Go see the fake métro station that’s used for film shoots! Visit the president’s office at the Élysée! Walk the covered galleries and passages of Paris! I hope to be at the La Faculté de Pharmacie de Paris, looking at 18th century medicine pots. Worm oil, anyone?
From “The French: Portrait of a People,” by Sanche de Gramont, also known as Ted Morgan (it’s an acronym).
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet writes with the following clarification:
"Numbering of streets parallel to the Seine starts at Notre Dame. So any that begins West of the Parvis, such as Quai Voltaire, yes, they follow the flow of the Seine, but East of the Parvis, like Boulevard Voltaire (check on Google Maps), the numbering starts from the centre of Paris and the higher numbers are at the periphery. You will notice it’s also how the perpendicular streets are numbered: from the centre. Which makes perfect sense as when the city expands, you add numbers at the end."
The photo of Celine Dion really struck me: 1982 was the second half of my junior year in Paris, and my discoveries and escapades that year led to a lifelong passion for Paris and France more broadly - one that’s seen me return over 20 times since then. Thank you for this post and these wonderful weird factoids!