Bonjour, my dear friends and subscribers, both new and long-time.

Un grand merci (a big thank you) for being part of this wonderful global family of Francophiles. Your support enables me to continue growing and improving MyFrenchLife™ Magazine and the le Bulletin newsletter, offering more to this growing global community.

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Here’s what you’ll find today:

1. This week “16.22.a - The Light Changed Everything

2. Feature: Alone Together in Paris

3. Introducing new Contributor: Suzanne Rietmeijer

4. This week’s ‘What’s happening in ‘MyFrenchLife™ Magazine’ - a selection of new contributors and fresh articles from across France.

5. You can also find the free newsletter ‘‘16.22 - They Came, They Stayed, They Wrote- here during the weekend.

Warm regards
Judy - 6.6.2026

Read more

Today at a Glance: Your FREE weekly newsletter

Bonjour mes ami(e)s !

It’s wonderful to have you back here with me today. Bienvenue !

1. A New Chapter for MyFrenchLife™ Magazine Contributors

2. In this newsletter, you’ll find these wonderful fresh articles taking you to France beyond the cliché.

3. Don’t miss the PAID subscriber edition of le Bulletin in your inbox: “16.22.a - The Light Changed Everything - It’s not too late to upgrade & read it←

   À bientôt !
   Warmly,
   Judy - 6.6.2026

1. A New Chapter for MyFrenchLife™ Magazine Contributors - check out these profiles

Profile #7 - Victorine Lamothe

• To Find THE LIST of MyFrenchLife™ Magazine CONTRIBUTORS:
  [https://myfrenchlife.org/p/contributors-myfrenchlife-zine ]

• TO FIND Victorine’s WORK:
  [https://www.myfrenchlife.org/t/victorine-lamothe ]

Victorine in MyFrenchLife™ Magazine: Can be found here→
CONNECT WITH Victorine Lamothe - Blue Paris→

2. MyFrenchLife™ Magazine new articles

Introducing new Contributor, Suzanne Rietmeijer

My name is Suzanne Rietmeijer, a Dutch writer who swapped Amsterdam for Paris over ten years ago. Growing up, I spent all my holidays in the Var, in the South of France, but the dream of moving here came much later.“

I have a master’s degree in history, and in the end it was French history that got me hooked. Okay, in all honesty, it was French history, food and wine.“

By day, I’m editor-in-chief of the Dutch glossy magazine Côte & Provence, covering, you guessed it, the Côte d’Azur and Provence. I write about French culture, food, art and history. In addition I write my Substack: Baguette Gazette.”

When I’m not on the Parisian Rive Droite, you’ll find me with my dog in an old cabin I’m renovating in the mountains behind Nice.” writes Suzanne as she introduces herself.

Please help me introduce Suzanne as a new member of our Contributor team and enjoy reading her wonderful first article→

Leave a comment

a) Matisse’s new lease on life, 1941-1954
by Suzanne Rietmeijer

Matisse, Chagall, Renoir, Picasso: just a few of the many celebrated artists who settled in the South of France for a time, and whose museums you can still visit in Nice, Cagnes and Antibes. I love visiting them, but if you’re used to the grand exhibitions of Paris, the South of France does require a slight adjustment. It happens, for instance, that the handful of star works are all out on loan, and you’ve turned up for what feels like very little. Then again, not for nothing exactly, because half the pleasure is in soaking up the atmosphere, and to catch a glimpse of what these artists once found in the light, the landscape and that unhurried rhythm of life.”

The exhibition at the Grand Palais covers the years 1941 to 1954, a period Matisse spent entirely on the Côte d’Azur. So as I wander past his works inside the beautifully restored Grand Palais…” writes Suazanne Rietmeijer.

Read the full article→

Leave a comment

b) Paris Parenting Pros and Cons and Cons
by Shelby Chambers

Is it hard raising a child in Paris? Yes! Is it also wonderful, interesting, and beautiful? Yes!”

I had an idea I’d been meaning to write about for several weeks now. I thought this week was going to be the week; all signs pointed to it being the week. Only one consulting project due. No meaningful rain in the forecast. Fridge was stocked, so I couldn’t use “errands” as an excuse. It was going to be a very productive writing week.”

But I have this child, you see. He’s 21-ish months, a number that only means something if you also have a child, otherwise it’s just annoying to read/hear. Okay, okay, he’s one-and-a-half. And that kinda baby/kinda toddler loves a virus, he can’t get enough of them. And any time I have ambitious plans like “work” or “wash my hair,” he gets sick…”

Read the full article→

Leave a comment

c) French Wine: Les Bulles aka French Bubbles
by Eveline Chartier

1/4 - A series about French Wine. Each of the four articles comprises ~ 3 other articles. This first one is about French bubbles in which you can immerse yourselves

LES BULLES aka FRENCH BUBBLES!

French bubbly wines have not always been as we know them today, but they are very much an appreciated part of what makes France, France. Read about how to enjoy sparkling wines as well as their different styles.

• Why Bubbles Matter – Les bulles sont importantes!

  • Learn the tricks of the trade – by respecting the bubbles! The key to enjoying sparkling wines is preserving their bubbles, from cold bottles to seal tops. Contrary to the belief that a bottle must be finished once opened, sparkling wines can be kept for several days! Here are some rules to live by!

• Champagne – Truly Special

  • Dive into the history of Champagne, touching on its early mishaps and the breakthrough discoveries that shaped its production and developed its distinctive styles. The Champagne region grows Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Meunier grapes, each contributing to unique flavors and characteristics. Explore this iconic sparkling wine!

• Crémant de Bourgogne

  • In past articles, I have been less than kind to Prosecco. I’m extending an olive branch to Prosecco fans by exploring a traditional method sparkling wine that could appeal to Prosecco lovers too. Medium-dry traditional method sparklings pair perfectly with seafood dishes like crab cakes and tempura shrimp with a spicy sauce. Dive into this sparkling experience!…

Read the full article → a real immersion in French bubbles.

Leave a comment

3. Merci mille fois

“Thank you for subscribing to ‘le Bulletin’, the newsletter of MyFrenchLife™ Magazine.”
Judy MacMahon

Merci mille fois d’être ici, mes ami(e)s. Thanks for being here.

New contributor Suzanne Rietmeijer joins us from Paris — by way of Amsterdam and a mountain cabin behind Nice. Shelby Chambers reports from the coalface of Paris parenting. And Eveline Chartier begins a wine series that may cost you money.

And that, perhaps, is FRANCE AS IT HAPPENS this week

À bientôt,
Judy
judy@myfrenchlife.org

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Not so long ago, sitting in a cafe in Paris, quietly passing time with Olivier, a long-time friend, he told me a little story… He recounted that story:

Very soon after I moved to Paris for work, I found myself sitting alone at a café. My coffee had gone cold. I had no book, no laptop, and no friend on the way. I wasn’t doing anything at all — just occupying a chair for no good reason.”he said,

And somehow, it felt completely normal.”

Olivier continued: “Around me, life moved, with what I now know to be, that soft Parisian hum: a man folding his newspaper; two students sharing a silence that didn’t need filling; an older woman watching the street as if it were a play written just for her; a waiter balancing too many glasses with impossible grace. No one seemed lonely. No one seemed rushed. No one seemed to need a reason to be there.”

Olivier said that it struck him because if this café had been in the UK, Australia, or the US, where he’d come from:

I would have felt obliged to perform something. Read. Work. Scroll. At the very least, order another coffee to justify my existence.”

But in Paris, simply being there was enough.”

Read more

One small frustration, though, because can someone explain to me why the wall texts beside the works are printed so absurdly small? At times, it was a real squeeze just to read those size 8 captions. Grand Palais, you can do better! And even after deciphering the small print, I still felt some of the background was missing here and there. Matisse was, of course, already famous in his own lifetime, and not every great master gets to experience that, but just how successful was he in 1941? And what did his world look like at that moment? That’s what we’re diving into today.

Bisous,

Suzanne

Matisse, Chagall, Renoir, Picasso: just a few of the many celebrated artists who settled in the South of France for a time, and whose museums you can still visit in Nice, Cagnes and Antibes. I love visiting them, but if you’re used to the grand exhibitions of Paris, the South of France does require a slight adjustment. It happens, for instance, that the handful of star works are all out on loan, and you’ve turned up for what feels like very little. Then again, not for nothing exactly, because half the pleasure is in soaking up the atmosphere, and to catch a glimpse of what these artists once found in the light, the landscape and that unhurried rhythm of life.

The exhibition at the Grand Palais covers the years 1941 to 1954, a period Matisse spent entirely on the Côte d’Azur. So as I wander past his works inside the beautifully restored Grand Palais, I try to keep in mind that every one of them was made under the southern sun, in Nice and Vence. Matisse had his studio in the former Hôtel Régina, in Cimiez, the hillside neighbourhood of Nice, where you can now also visit the vivid red Musée Matisse. It was here, during the first years of the Second World War, that he became more prolific than ever. Matisse eventually left Nice with his assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya, when the city became too dangerous. They took refuge in the village of Vence, in the hills behind Nice. It was at Villa Le Rêve that his world-famous gouache cut-outs would eventually come to life.

The law student

To understand where Matisse stood in his career in 1941, we need to step back for a moment. Henri Matisse was born in 1869 in Cateau-Cambrésis, in the north of France. Twice in his life, abdominal surgery would dramatically alter his path: once in his twenties, and again in 1941. Unlike successful contemporaries such as Picasso, he was no painting prodigy, and only began to paint in his early twenties. It was while the young law student Matisse was recovering from an appendicitis operation that his mother gave him a box of paints to pass the time. Painting felt like coming home, and he decided to change the course of his life.

Shortly before the turn of the century, in 1898, Matisse married Amélie Noellie Parayre, who adopted his daughter from an earlier relationship, Marguerite, and with whom he had two sons, Jean and Pierre. Marguerite was always hovering around her father’s studio and, in time, came to manage almost everything there, including negotiations with famous collectors such as Gertrude Stein and the Cone sisters.

Yet another Matisse window

It was in 1905 that Henri Matisse made his breakthrough with a bold, colour-soaked style that immediately established him as the figurehead of a new movement: Fauvism. Important collectors increasingly found their way to him, and in his studio in Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside Paris, he was constantly pushing at the boundaries of modern painting. Matisse’s style shifted regularly, from exuberant and vivid to sombre and at times almost dark in the works he made during the Grande Guerre, the First World War, in which both his sons were fighting. The end of the war brought colour back into his work. In the 1920s, he turned towards something more decorative and classical, still full of colour. Throughout the 1930s, those unmistakable Matisse colours remained, but the work itself became ever bolder and more abstract. By the end of the decade, Matisse was a celebrated artist, but he was also coming in for increasing criticism. He was said to have become predictable, repetitive. The writer André Breton, clearly unimpressed, wrote: ‘Un Nu de Derain, une nouvelle Fenêtre de Matisse, quels plus sûrs témoignages…’

By the late 1930s, Matisse’s artistic reputation was no longer quite what it had once been. He was no longer part of the avant-garde, and his family life was beginning to fall apart. Matisse is often described as restless and quick-tempered. He was always working, and during this period, he was often bitter too. The health of his wife, Amélie, who had for years struggled with depression and other ailments, declined so rapidly that the couple decided to hire a nurse. Enter the Russian Lydia Delectorskaya, who, a few years later, would become Matisse’s model, muse and even studio manager. Lydia’s presence caused such tension that Amélie eventually decided she wanted to divorce Matisse.

‘Degenerate art’

Privately, then, things were anything but rosy for Matisse when the Second World War broke out in the spring of 1940. Many artists were among those trying to flee Paris and France. Modern art was branded ‘Entartete Kunst’, or ‘degenerate art’, by the Nazi regime, and so-called degenerate artists were treated as enemies. Matisse, too, could have left, but chose to stay. His youngest son Pierre, had opened an art gallery in New York in the 1920s, and during this period, he helped many artists, including Marc Chagall, escape from France. Even the promise of a job in San Francisco and a visa for Rio de Janeiro failed to persuade Matisse to leave. By then, the artist was seventy, yet he decided not only to remain in France but to keep making art as well. A dangerous choice, not least for his Russian companion, Lydia. Of fleeing France, he said: ‘Il me semblait que je désertais. Si tous ceux qui ont une valeur quittent la France, que reste-t-il de la France?’

In May 1940, France was in chaos, and in the midst of it all, it took Matisse a full hundred days to travel from Paris to Nice through occupied territory. And anyone imagining Nice at that moment as some charming holiday destination would be mistaken. Mussolini had his eye on the city. Nice had, after all, once been Italian, and the hot breath of Fascist Italy was constantly felt here. More threatening still, however, was the artist’s health. Since the early 1930s, Matisse had been suffering from unbearable abdominal pain, but at the beginning of 1941, things took a serious turn. He was diagnosed with cancer of the duodenum, was admitted urgently to hospital in Nice and, after much difficulty, transferred to Lyon for emergency surgery. In the end, his daughter Marguerite came down from Paris and, together with Lydia, who by then had become Matisse’s muse and model, made sure he received the life-saving operation he needed in Lyon. The atmosphere between Marguerite and Lydia was still icy, but for once that hardly mattered. Matisse narrowly escaped death, but after two emergency operations and a life-threatening infection, he was at last able to leave the hospital in the spring of 1941. Writing during his recovery in 1942, he said: ‘J’avais tellement préparé ma sortie de la vie, qu’il me semble être dans une seconde vie.’

Creative rebirth

And that brings us to the starting point of the exhibition at the Grand Palais: 1941. Matisse had been given a new lease of life, but he was more fragile than ever. Lydia cared for him, as he was too weak to stand at his easel. And yet the artist was more positive than ever, deeply grateful for this ‘second life’, and in the midst of a creative rebirth. Never before had he been so productive or worked with such a wide range of techniques and materials. The great highlights of this chapter of his career are given generous space in this impressive exhibition at the Grand Palais: the transformation the artist underwent, at nearly eighty, through his gouache cut-outs, but also the series of paintings ‘Intérieurs de Vence’, the iconic ‘Les Nus Bleus’ and of course the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, for which he designed everything, from the stained glass windows to the roof and the furniture.

Jazz

In 1943, Matisse began work on one of the most important projects of his career: the collages for what would later become his book Jazz. Painting had become too exhausting, so he came up with a new way of working. He had thick sheets of paper painted in flat, solid colours with gouache, an opaque water-based paint similar to watercolour. He then used tailor’s scissors to cut shapes from those coloured sheets. With Lydia’s help, he pinned the shapes to the wall. This allowed him to shift, turn and rebuild his compositions without having to draw or sketch. You can still often see traces of that process in the works themselves, in the form of countless pinholes. What began as a practical solution for an artist recovering from illness and often confined to bed soon grew into a fully fledged artistic method.

At first, Matisse wanted to call the series Le Cirque, a title that nodded to the colourful but also marginal world of circus performers, but he later chose Jazz instead, a deliberate reference to the improvisation and freedom of the musical form, which the Nazis despised. One of the most striking images is Le Cauchemar de l’Éléphant Blanc. It shows an elephant balancing on a ball, like something from a circus act. When Matisse was asked what it meant, he replied simply: ‘C’est moi.’

La Résistance

During the war, Matisse managed fairly well to stay in touch with Marguerite, who was living in occupied Paris, but in the spring of 1944, while he was staying with Lydia at Villa Le Rêve in Vence, he suddenly stopped hearing from her. Naturally, he was deeply worried. At the age of fifty, Marguerite Matisse had joined the Resistance and was working as a courier, carrying information from Paris to Normandy and Brittany. Her mother, Amélie, incidentally, was also active in the Resistance, as was his eldest son, Jean, who helped the Allies with acts of sabotage. In May 1944, Matisse received the dreadful news that his wife and daughter had been arrested. In a letter to his good friend and fellow artist Charles Camoin, he wrote: ‘Mon cher Charles, je viens d’avoir le plus terrible choc de ma vie. Ma femme et ma fille ont été arrêtées. Aucun détail, aucune autre nouvelle. Déchire ma lettre après l’avoir lue.’

What Matisse would only discover after the war was that Marguerite had been tortured in Rennes prison and then deported, though she was fortunately liberated in Belfort. Amélie, for her part, was arrested by the Gestapo and spent six months in Fresnes prison, just outside Paris. She survived, as did her adopted daughter Marguerite and her sons Jean in the South of France and Pierre in New York.

Everything at once

In the years after the war, Matisse and Lydia divided their time between Le Rêve in Vence and the studio in the former Hôtel Régina in Nice. You have to imagine those studios with cut-out gouaches scattered and pinned up everywhere, an oil painting or drawing resting on an easel nearby, and Matisse moving between all these different projects, doing everything at once, constantly shifting gears. Between 1946 and 1948, for instance, he produced the series ‘Intérieurs de Vence’, which can be seen as a farewell to painting. From 1948 to 1951, he designed the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, and in the spring of 1952, he created Les Nus Bleus, all four of which you can admire as the grand finale at the end of the exhibition. And yes, you could probably name five friends who have, or once had, a reproduction of one of the Nus Bleus on their wall, but they’re still stunning.

Mentor and muse

On 3 November 1954, Matisse died in Nice, in the presence of his daughter Marguerite and his muse and assistant Lydia. The New York Times wrote of him: ‘One of the young rebels who lived long enough to be regarded as an old master. His life was an integral and important part of what has come to be known as the Modern Movement.’

After his death, Lydia quietly slipped from view, grateful for her years with the artist, yet also painfully aware that Matisse’s children were only too glad to see her gone. She was not welcome at the funeral and left with nothing but her suitcase, without a single work or keepsake from all those years of working alongside Matisse. And when she herself died in 1998? Her wish was that one of Matisse’s shirts be placed in her coffin.

→The exhibition ‘Matisse, 1941–1954’ is on view at the Grand Palais until 26 July.

→Curious to explore more of Matisse in wartime? Then read Matisse in War: Art and Resistance in Nazi-Occupied France by Christopher C. Gorham.

Have you seen this particular Matisse exhibition yet? Tell me in the comments.

Leave a comment

Introducing Contributor Suzanne Rietmeijer

Visit her Contributor Page — Explore more of Suzanne’s work

Eveline has prepared a mini-series of which this is #1/4
Each article enables us to enjoy the expertise that Eveline brings, and really delve into French wine. Each contribution is a few articles around a theme, enabling you to gain a greater understanding, back on Eveline’s website.

This one is all about “bubbles”.

Bonne lecture
Judy MacMahon

1. Les Bulles aka French Bubbles - Part One

by Eveline Chartier ←

LES BULLES aka FRENCH BUBBLES!

French bubbly wines have not always been as we know them today, but they are very much an appreciated part of what makes France, France. Read about how to enjoy sparkling wines as well as their different styles.

• Why Bubbles Matter – Les bulles sont importantes!

  • Learn the tricks of the trade – by respecting the bubbles! The key to enjoying sparkling wines is preserving their bubbles, from cold bottles to seal tops. Contrary to the belief that a bottle must be finished once opened, sparkling wines can be kept for several days! Here are some rules to live by!

• Champagne – Truly Special

  • Dive into the history of Champagne, touching on its early mishaps and the breakthrough discoveries that shaped its production and developed its distinctive styles. The Champagne region grows Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Meunier grapes, each contributing to unique flavors and characteristics. Explore this iconic sparkling wine!

• Crémant de Bourgogne

  • In past articles, I have been less than kind to Prosecco. I’m extending an olive branch to Prosecco fans by exploring a traditional method sparkling wine that could appeal to Prosecco lovers too. Medium-dry traditional method sparklings pair perfectly with seafood dishes like crab cakes and tempura shrimp with a spicy sauce. Dive into this sparkling experience!

a) Why Bubbles Matter: “Bursting” Sparkling Wine Myths (Plus Hacks You Need to Know)

- and yes, wine IS a solution!

In my Beaujolais Blanc Chardonnay article I touched on sparkling wines. Now, let’s dive deeper into the practical aspects of these wines.

I don’t buy sparkling wine because once open I must finish it all.

In fact, this is not the case. You can keep a sparkling wine open for several days if you …

Rule # 1 – Respect the bubbles.

This is the mother of all sparkling wine rules because it all comes back to respecting the bubbles. Bubbles are what makes the wine a sparkling wine, afterall!

The trick is keeping the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in solution.

Nerd.

The bubbles are a result of the CO2 produced during fermentation, which is done in a closed vessel (tank or bottle). Since the gas cannot escape, it becomes part of the wine. In other words, the CO2 gas is ‘in solution’. The solution being the wine.

THEY say drinking wine is not a solution.

Ha ha!

Rule #2 - Start with a very cold bottle

Open the bottle very cold - refrigerator cold, which is 4 to 5 degrees Celsius. Bubbles will stay in solution longer at lower temperatures.

So either cool the bottle in the refrigerator or in an ice bucket. The ice bucket should be about 50% ice and 50% water. The water helps conduct temperature better – so don’t leave that step out.” writes Eveline Chartier.

Read the entire article <-

b) Bubbles, Blunders and Brilliance - How Science Saved Champagne

Choosing the right Champagne style for you - inside the world of Champagne blends - Drappier’s 200-year legacy

You are finally doing it!

Finally writing about Champagne! [...]

Yes, I was putting it off and writing about other sparklings as I do try to focus on value wines … and well … Champagne is not a value wine! But my hope is to give you an appreciation of why it is a special wine!

Champagne. It is an acquired taste. Not everyone likes it. Here, we will explore different Champagne styles. My wish is to help you find a style that is right for you should you care to explore!

Let’s start with its history and origins.

The Champagne region, 145 km northeast of Paris, is the first region to make sparkling wine in any quantity. As the wine world has grown, Champagne is now responsible for only about 8% of total global sparkling wine production. However, Champagne is the model that many sparkling regions globally aim to emulate, often with the same grapes.

Interestingly, the Champagne region’s wines were not initially bubbly...” writes Eveline Chartier

Read the entire article <-

c) Crémant de Bourgogne, Prosecco, and a Confession

– Theory on Prosecco lovers’ appreciation of a touch of sweetness

From past posts, a lot of you know my strong opinion on Prosecco. 😊

You also know that I respect that you are you, and I encourage you to do you! (if you don’t know, check here)

But today I extend an olive branch to the Prosecco camp as a bridge … rather than a sign of peace, as this is not a war of the sparklings, but an exploration of the palates!

I am hoping that we can test things a little.

My theory is that people who like Prosecco...” writes Eveline Chartier.

Read the entire article <-

Are you a Champagne, Prosecco, or Cremant drinker? What is your preference? Please share in the comments.

Read the new series and entire article in MyFrenchLife Magazine←

Leave a comment

Thank you Eveline Chartier - a wonderful comprehensive start to this four-part series. We look forward to the remainder.

Are you a Champagne, Prosecco, or Cremant drinker? What is your preference? Please share below in the comments.

Leave a comment

Introducing Contributor, Eveline Chartier:

Visit her Contributor Page — Explore more of Eveline’s work

Subscribe now

MyFrenchLife™ – MaVieFrançaise® is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

I had an idea I’d been meaning to write about for several weeks now. I thought this week was going to be the week; all signs pointed to it being the week. Only one consulting project due. No meaningful rain in the forecast. Fridge was stocked, so I couldn’t use “errands” as an excuse. It was going to be a very productive writing week.

But I have this child, you see. He’s 21-ish months, a number that only means something if you also have a child, otherwise it’s just annoying to read/hear. Okay, okay, he’s one-and-a-half. And that kinda baby/kinda toddler loves a virus, he can’t get enough of them. And any time I have ambitious plans like “work” or “wash my hair,” he gets sick. Not just a little sick either because he has asthma, so we have to take every cough and fever very seriously lest he become a mouth-breather like myself. And sure enough, he heard I had plans so he decided to get sick this week just to test me.

So I scrapped the other thing I was going to write about and decided to instead write about what was occupying my mind, time, and hands: parenting.

This is a topic I haven’t often explored because I don’t feel enough like a parent to write about it with any authority. Even though I went into the parental project very intentionally with schedules and spreadsheets and apps and charts and puree recipes and data-based books, I still never felt much like a mom. I was just the same me but now I had this baby hanging around. How could I, a child myself who only wants to sleep-in, shop, and drink Aperol Sprtiz, speak to adult things like parenting?

I think it’s Paris’s fault that I feel like a poser parent, which is both a good and bad thing. The city never feels real in the first place: it’s too chaotic and beautiful and dreamy and impossible to be the backdrop for something as tangible and exhausting as raising a real life human child. And yet we’re out there doing it, and for better AND worse, it looks nothing like how my husband and I grew up. Better because it’s fun, it’s convenient, it’s vibrant, it’s connected. Worse because it’s far and dirty and cramped and dangerous.

So because I can’t get a moment to myself this week to think about anything else, let’s talk about parenting in Paris, the pros and cons of raising a child in such a fantastical and complicated place.

Franchement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts, support my work, and make my day, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Pro: It’s Fun For ME

I’m not sure if it’s right or wrong for me to do so, but I’ve always made a serious effort not to lose myself entirely inside my role as a mom. Don’t get me wrong, I take my responsibilities as a mom extremely seriously: I bake sugar-free breakfast muffins, I aggregate best practices for each childhood stage from various fact-checked sources, I research toy brands, I cuddle, I listen, I curtail my swearing. When my baby eventually goes to therapy as an adult to talk about whatever I’ve done wrong as a parent, I want to know that it won’t be due to my lack of effort; it will be some other thing I never saw coming, of course.

THAT SAID, I am still the same old Shelby who wants to meet friends at the wine bar downstairs, go to art exhibits, hit my Goodreads goal each year, spend money on things I don’t need. And Paris really helps me do that. It’s compact and has great places to eat and hang on every corner so you don’t have to go far to go out. There is always something happening at museums and galleries and theaters. It’s easy to get a babysitter and the babysitting rate is like 30% of what it is in the US. We have a regularly scheduled babysitter once a week so we don’t forget to do something for ourselves on a regular basis. Then we call her back any other time we have something planned. (Does GenZ not go out? Our babysitters are always available.)

I don’t know about you, but I’m a better parent when I’m not only a parent, and Paris really helps make that possible.

Con: Everything Is Hard

Literally from week 1 of parenthood, it became clear how inconvenient Paris is for raising a child. We had to think through how we would get the baby home from the hospital because we hadn’t yet bought a car seat because we hadn’t yet bought a car. We decided I’d take a taxi since I’d just birthed an entire baby, and my husband would walk with that baby in a carrier the 15 minutes to our apartment. Never in a million years did I think we’d bring our baby home on foot, but that’s indeed what we did.

Yes, some things like going to the store just around the corner or the playground just downstairs are very much easier. But as soon as you have to get to the airport or go to the pediatrician in the rain, stuff gets complicated real fast.

Movement is indeed the hardest part, logistically. With the stroller, the metro is off-limits unless you are two. My husband and I can still carry the petit roi in his throne up and down metro stairs, but I can’t do it on my own; my back ain’t what it used to be since my grossese. I’ve tried the bus with some success, unless it’s raining and crowded with everyone else who had the same idea. Biking is the most convenient, unless it’s raining and becomes dangerous and cold. I’ve spent many a Nounou or creche pick-up plodding through puddles, pushing a soggy pousette, wondering to myself what I’ve done with my life.

Pro: It’s Brimming With Culture

I remember being quite young, like five years old, and wishing I had a cool, artsy, interesting, international lifestyle. I was pretentious and pining even back then. And while I had a very stable and supportive upbringing (yawn), I don’t think I can describe it as particularly cool. Pas grave, none of that matters, right? Well, it does to me because I’m awful.

Luckily we live in Paris, which allows me to give to my child the childhood that I always wanted. He has already seen Brancusi sculptures at the Pompidou that dazzled my imagination when I finally learned about them in undergrad. He took regular nap time strolls in the Jardin des Plantes, a place I was in awe of when I visited at 27 years old. He’s napped at the Natural History Museum, spread his germs all over the Aquarium Tropical and obsessed over the landscaping at the Parc Zoologique. He watched some rugby from the fan zone built at Place de la Concorde after spending the morning strolling around St. Honore and doing a poop at the Cartier store.

Yes, you’re right, he won’t care about any of this at all; he’ll probably grow up and be mad at us for not living in the countryside. But little me is finding some solace in providing these aesthetic treats to someone else.

Con: It’s Dirty

It’s very unnerving to take your child on a walk against a backdrop of (hopefully) dog poo. It’s not an occasional thing, it’s like over a dozen piles per outing. Or at least it is in our particular stretch of the Deep 12eme Arrondissement. I should probably write the Mairie about it, it’s getting out of hand.

I would go days if not months without bearing witness to a street poo in my childhood. My kid sees dozens a day and points and exclaims “caca!” at each one. I wonder what this much scatological access is doing to his developing brain, but I am afraid to google it.

Pro: It’s Loud

At first you might think that loud = bad = wakes up baby, but no. The constant rumbling of the city, the motorcycles, the horn honks, the trash trucks, the loud neighbors all acclimate the baby to noise. Parisian babies can sleep through anything, not like those peace-adoring suburban babies whose first naps weren’t against the sounds of the restaurant downstairs emptying their glass into the bin.

The other benefit to the noisiness of Paris is that it makes your baby seem less so. Baby crying at a restaurant or in a store? No one can probably even hear it, there’s so much other noise going on. I was hyper self-conscious about my baby being loud in public, so I’d take him along for an apero at Place d’Aligre, a wide open square under some trees where children run and play and trash trucks clunk and dump loudly, obscuring my baby’s whines while I wine.

Con: It’s Cramped

I embraced the cramped utilitarianism of city life when we first arrived in Paris. Back in LA I had a spare room as a dressing room and another spare room just for books, but neither made me as happy as living mere steps from a boulangerie.

But once that baby arrived and started moving, sleeping in his own room, touching EVERYTHING, I felt trapped and crowded and depressed.

We were eating where we were playing where we were bathing him where we were relaxing, should he decide to allow us to. We technically had two bedrooms, but we still felt like we were constantly on top of one another, stuffing things into cupboards, contorting our life to fit exactly enough space. I loathed carrying a full collapsable tub to the dining table to bathe him because our bathroom was so small and tub-less. And the thing is, we had more space than a lot of folks I know in Paris, so I didn’t have room for my record collection or to complain.

We were lucky enough to move to a bigger place in a more boring neighborhood to solve this Paris problem, but I’ve heard tales of people who have stuck it out in small spots. Kids with beds in closets, but who do their living (logically) in the living room. Families sharing rooms for years because they’re just for sleeping anyway. Given the market, high prices, and low inventory, it only makes sense. But if you want your living room to look nice, Centre Ville doesn’t cut it. (Unless you manage to snag a massive apartment, in which case, I’m happy for you, I mean it.)

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Pro: It’s Great For Travel

My baby got to swim in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the English Channel all during his first summer. Well, not swim, mostly kind of cry as waves splashed him. But you get my point. Whether by train or car or plane, you can get to Spain for a wedding, Italy for les vacances, Belgium to see the Christmas decor, all quite quickly and inexpensively.

This kid has been to more countries than I went to in the first two decades of my whole life. And we did those trips on long weekends, in the car. If you drive four hours from my hometown, you’re still in California, which explains why it took me so damn long to finally leave the country.

Not to mention all the travel you can do within France itself, which is gloriously beautiful and connected in every direction, speckled with family-friendly aires d’autoroute equipped with changing rooms and play areas and picnic tables. This kid hits up castles and farms and historical sites on the weekend just for fun, imagine.

Con: It’s Far From Family

Yes, France is close to a lot of cool countries, none of which are the west coast of the United States. But I’ve beleaguered that point enough already.

Pro: Less Parental Pressure

With just a few exceptions, I have never felt pressured by parenting culture here in Paris. While there was pressure to not gain weight while pregnant, once the baby was out and about, no one much cared about whether or not I nursed him, if we were doing 100% baby-led weaning or going the hybrid route, if every minute of his day was enriching and maximized with activity or not.

I haven’t experienced it first hand, but I’ve read and heard from friends about a parenting culture in the US that can put pressure on moms to be martyrs to their maternal role, exhaust themselves to optimize every moment of their child’s life. I can’t even count the number of friends who felt pressure to nurse, or to continue to nurse when they wanted to be done with it, for example. Meanwhile I made the decision in relative peace, literally no one commented on it except my baby who was pissed when the milk supplier got changed out.

I don’t know what it is about the parents here that makes them not act like this… maybe just an overall more chill culture? A disdain for optics and overachieving? My observation is that everyone just parents differently and doesn’t talk about it, regardless, which eliminates the impulse to compare. If anything I’m the problem, raising my eyebrows at parents who yell at their kids at the playground.

I did once read an article in The New Yorker about baby-led weaning, and one mom was quoted saying her child will have tried 100 foods before their first birthday. I’m unwell and did a quick tally in my Notes app to ensure my baby would surpass that benchmark. If I were parenting in the US, I’m sure I’d be very toxic to myself and others.

Con: The Playgrounds Are Wild

Not all the time, but sometimes that chill parenting style can lead to kids being raging assholes at the playground. Of course, it’s not their fault, it’s the parents’ faults, that goes without saying. But sometimes, a little girl almost pushes your baby off a ladder, does succeed in twisting his arm until he actually cries out. You firmly but calmly tell her to stop and she ignores you, you search nearby for her parents to eviscerate them in French and English, but they are no where to be found.

In moments like these I long for the helicoptered American playground where kids with twee, overwrought names are at least gently redirected by intentional and present parents. And sometimes that happens at the playground here as well: our kids cut in line at the slide, we say “ah, pardon,” to at least signal to one another that we’re on it, we’ll take care of it, that we are trying not to raise deviants.

But sometimes it’s a little too laissez faire and I have to tell that little girl that you can’t slide directly after my child, you have to wait a sec until he’s off the slide, hoping desperately that my advice will sink in so she stops manifest destiny-ing her way across the playground (for our sake and hers). Little girl: I actually want you to be a bold and unapologetic female juggernaut of doom, but don’t make me have to hate on you at the playground because you hurt my baby; I’m rooting for you.

I’m sure this is the case at playgrounds around the world, but something about Paris’s high concentration of people makes every crowded playground session a little too intense for me. I need to take a break for a while until I’ve recovered from that four year old dressed in all pink that I had to stand up to.

Pro: The Food Is Great

A combination of high access and low BS makes for really great tasting and healthy food in France. There are twice weekly open air markets where you can buy fruits and veggies straight from producers, and our old neighborhood had a market open every day except Monday. Like most of Europe, GMOs are heavily restricted in food production in France, as are artificial dyes, flour bleaching compounds, and a bunch of other ingredients with tricky names that I don’t know much about except that they sound sinister.

The result: I don’t have to work very hard to buy good stuff for my baby to eat, which is nice because I’m too lazy to agonize over labels in my second language.

Paris-based daycares also have some very impressive best practices as far as food sourcing and preparation, with a goal of serving meals that are as local and “bio” (organic) as they can be. According to a Paris city website, “Industrially processed products are very limited and additives, colorings, hydrogenated fats, sweeteners, palm oil, GMOs, etc. are removed from children’s plates.”

The downside of this is he’ll never know the flavor of “caf” pepperoni pizza, the air in the cafeteria heavy with the impending scent of childhood glee. Instead he eats veal and locally sourced veggie salad and actually enjoys beets. Lame.

And don’t get me started on how that daycare is also affordable…

And so…

When I set out to write this, I assumed I was going to have far more cons than pros, probably because my back was aching, it was cloudy and cold out, my child was having a tantrum-forward week, and I was PMS-ing. But as I continued to write, the sun emerged for a gloriously sunny week that reminded Parisians why they do choose to live in Paris. We biked with the baby to a guinguette and shared fries and gaufres, then biked home as the sun set through the trees of the Bois de Vincennes. I finished writing this after an afternoon along the Seine enjoying rosé with some friends (without the baby, who was enjoying ice cream with Papa).

As a short memory is critical to happy parenting, maybe Paris’s greatest pro (or it’s most successful con) is its charm that allows you to quickly forget your troubles and enjoy the moment.

Do you share any of Shelby’s experiences? OR do you disagree with her? Let her know in the comemnts below

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Introducing Contributor, Selby Chambers

Immerse yourself in all of Selby’s articles on her Contributor page.

Bonjour, my dear friends and subscribers, both new and long-time.

Un grand merci (a big thank you) for being part of this wonderful global family of Francophiles. Your support enables me to continue growing and improving MyFrenchLife™ Magazine and the le Bulletin newsletter, offering more to this growing global community.

Consider upgrading your subscription

Here’s what you’ll find today:

1. This week “16.21.a - France as It Contradicts, France as It Moves Us

2. Feature: Every Country Is a Hypocrite. France Is Just Honest About It.

3. We honour wonderful woman, Contributor and friend: Suzanne Vidal Grosso

4. This week’s ‘What’s happening in ‘MyFrenchLife™ Magazine’ - a selection of new contributors and fresh articles from across France.

5. You can also find the free newsletter ‘‘16.21 - France as it Happens: New Arrivals, Fond Farewells, Fresh Stories - here during the weekend.

Warm regards
Judy - 30.5.2026

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Today at a Glance: Your FREE weekly newsletter

Bonjour mes ami(e)s !

It’s wonderful to have you back here with me today. Bienvenue !

1. A New Chapter for MyFrenchLife™ Magazine Contributors

2. In this newsletter, you’ll find these wonderful fresh articles taking you to France beyond the cliché,

3. Don’t miss the PAID subscriber edition of le Bulletin in your inbox: “16.21.a - France as It Contradicts, France as It Moves Us- It’s not too late to upgrade & read it←

   À bientôt !
   Warmly,
   Judy - 30.5.2026

1. A New Chapter for MyFrenchLife™ Magazine Contributors - check out these profiles

Profile #6 - Pamela Clapp

• To Find THE LIST of MyFrenchLife™ Magazine CONTRIBUTORS:
  [https://myfrenchlife.org/p/contributors-myfrenchlife-zine ]

• TO FIND Pamela’s WORK:
  [https://www.myfrenchlife.org/t/pamela-clapp ]

  

Pamela in MyFrenchLife™ Magazine: Can be found here
CONNECT WITH PAMELA CLAPP - With Love from Paris→

2. MyFrenchLife™ Magazine: new articles

In Memorium: Suzanne Vidal Grosso

It is with deep sadness that I share news of the passing of beloved writer, photographer, beautiful person, and Contributor to MyFrenchLife™️ - MaVieFrancaise®, Suzanne Grosso Vidal.

There are some people whose presence lingers long after the conversation ends — warm, curious, generous souls, often with ever-present smiles, who make the world feel both larger and more intimate at the same time. Suzanne Grosso Vidal was one of those rare people.

Through her writing and photography, Suzanne invited us into her life in the South of France with honesty, humour, and deep humanity. She had a gift for noticing beauty in ordinary moments — a café conversation, a village street, the cadence of another language — and for reminding us that life is richest when lived with openness, wonder, and even more so when with friends and family.

What was evident was Suzanne herself: thoughtful, funny, warm-hearted, and deeply alive to the world around her. Whether writing about France, culture, family, or the small absurdities of daily life, she made readers feel like friends sitting across the table from her or walking beside her.

• On France, after 30 years, Suzanne said: “Living in France is like living in a museum. No matter where you go, there is a story to tell.”

• On identity: “I think I’m not serious enough to be French.”

She wrote that living abroad had “allowed me to grow,” and in sharing her reflections so generously, she helped many others grow too.

Suzanne will be deeply missed and lovingly remembered.

«Avec tout mon respect et ma profonde gratitude, Suzanne»
Judy MacMahon

Introducing new Contributor, Debra Fioritto

I’m a travel and food writer with a long-running love affair with France. “

On my Substack, A Love Affair with France, I share what I find on the ground — the wine villages and market towns, the family-run bistros, the conversations with vintners and shopkeepers that change how you see a place. “

I’m drawn to the slow pleasures of returning somewhere often enough to know it well, and to the small, ordinary moments that make a region feel like itself. I write for readers who want to discover France alongside me — and I’d love to have you along.”

Debra

Please help me introduce Debra as a new Contributor team member and enjoy reading her wonderful first article→

a) A Love Affair with Bandol
by Debra Fioritto — A Love Affair with France

You come for the wine. You come back for the place. One perfect day in France’s most quietly addictive appellation

The road up to Château Pibarnon is one lane wide and climbs through the hills above the Mediterranean. “

The first time you drive it, you worry about meeting someone coming down. We did, about halfway up — a truck came around a bend and managed to pull just enough off the road that we could squeeze past on our way to the top. The gate at the summit was open. We pulled in alongside a long golden-stone mas and got out. Lemon trees framed the door to the tasting room, the fruit heavy enough to pick. But before going in, we walked to the edge of the ridge because below us the restanques — the dry-stone terraces — fell away in the shape of a bowl, ringed in green, with a glimpse of the sea gleaming past the lip. “

It’s the kind of view that makes you forget why you came...”, writes Debra Fioritto

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b) Temple of the Imagined
by Patricia Russo

A Visit to the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris

There are places in Paris where time doesn’t exist, where a staircase becomes a spiral of the soul, where the walls don’t just hold paintings, they hold visions. Today’s post is about one of my very favorite places in Paris. The Musée Gustave Moreau is not just a museum; it’s a reliquary of dreams.

The Hidden Chapel of Symbolism

Tucked away in the 9th arrondissement, on a quiet street of understated façades, is the former home and studio of Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), the French Symbolist painter who believed…” writes Patricia Russo.

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c) A glass, a chair, a parking space – the city that lives outdoors
by Marie Gundersen

19 years ago, I visited Paris for the first time. A trip that was going to change my life – I just didn’t know it yet. The beauty swept me off my feet: the monuments, the parks, the architecture. But what made an even stronger impression were the terraces. I remember walking up the stairs from a metro station, seeing the lights and all the people talking, reading, and eating. That scene has stayed with me. Since then, I’ve spent hundreds of hours at Parisian terraces, and now, it feels like coming home.”

Speaking of homes, Paris is a city of small apartments, many of them without balconies. The street is where life happens. Local authorities have long understood this, and consistently worked to accommodate it. A recent example is their decision to grant thousands of businesses a temporary permit for additional outdoor seating…” writes Marie Gundersen.

Read the full article →

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d) She Chose Life
by Judy MacMahon

Monique Lévi-Strauss turned 100 this year. You probably know the name. I suggest that you don’t know the woman.

It was a Thursday in 1950, at the Musée de l’Homme. Lunch was ending. Claude Lévi-Strauss — anthropologist, rising star of French intellectual life, the man who would go on to reshape how the world thought about myth and kinship and the structures hidden inside everything — turned to his trilingual translator and asked: Vous êtes libre à déjeuner jeudi prochain? [Are you free for lunch next Thursday?]”

She said yes.”

Et tous les autres jeudis? [And all other Thursdays]…”

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e) Why Does France Feel So Paradoxical? (Spoiler: It’s Not Just France)
by Judy MacMahon

Every country contradicts itself. France philosophises about it, America ignores it, Australia jokes about it. Guess which approach makes you seem most hypocritical?

I need to admit something. I love paradoxes. Always have.”

This particular one goes back quite a few years. I was on my way to a function, running a little late, not entirely sure of the address. I was walking with a younger French friend — we always covered a myriad of topics when we were together, and even rushing, the conversation never became superficial. That was simply how it was with her.”

At that moment, she turned to me and explained, with complete sincerity, that France is the most egalitarian country in Europe. We were standing outside Sciences Po at the time, watching students who’d been groomed for elite education since they were twelve years old file past in their tastefully expensive casual wear…”

Read the full article→

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3. Merci mille fois

“Thank you for subscribing to ‘le Bulletin’, the newsletter of MyFrenchLife™ Magazine.”
Judy MacMahon

Merci mille fois d’être ici, mes ami(e)s. Thanks for being here.

A new voice joins us. A beloved one is carried forward. And three writers remind us why we come here — for the ridge above the sea, the staircase that holds visions, the terrace where Paris comes alive. This is France, witnessed.

And that, perhaps, is FRANCE AS IT HAPPENS this week

À bientôt,
Judy
judy@myfrenchlife.org

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I need to admit something. I love paradoxes. Always have.

This particular one goes back quite a few years. I was on my way to a function, running a little late, not entirely sure of the address. I was walking with a younger French friend — we always covered a myriad of topics when we were together, and even rushing, the conversation never became superficial. That was simply how it was with her.

At that moment, she turned to me and explained, with complete sincerity, that France is the most egalitarian country in Europe. We were standing outside Sciences Po at the time, watching students who’d been groomed for elite education since they were twelve years old file past in their tastefully expensive casual wear.

“Everyone has the same chance here,” she said. “It’s pure meritocracy.”

I paused. A look of uncertainty crossed my face — I could feel it settling there.

She actually believed it. And that, I realised, is the thing about French paradoxes. They’re not cynical. They’re not deliberate hypocrisy. The French genuinely don’t see the contradictions, or if they do, they’ve built such elegant intellectual frameworks around them that the contradictions become features, not bugs.

Living in France means constantly experiencing whiplash between what the country says about itself and what it actually does. But here’s what I’ve started to suspect: France isn’t more contradictory than other Western democracies. It’s just louder about its ideals, so the gap is more obvious.

Let me show you what I mean.

Égalité in the Land of Grandes Écoles

France sent its aristocrats to the guillotine in 1789, then spent the next two centuries perfecting a new class system based on exam results.

The grandes écoles [elite higher education institutions] — Sciences Po, ENA, Polytechnique — are supposed to represent the purest form of meritocracy. Talent, not birth, determines who gets in. Except that two-thirds of Grande École students come from very privileged backgrounds. And here’s the thing: differences in actual academic performance explain less than half of the inequality in access to these schools.

It’s not about being smarter.

It’s about knowing which prep classes to take, understanding the unwritten codes, and having parents who can guide you through the system. The prépa [preparatory class] track that funnels students into grandes écoles requires resources and cultural capital that working-class families simply don’t have.

France abolished inherited titles and created inherited exam strategies instead. Same result, better paperwork.

The Secular Republic’s Very Catholic Calendar

France takes laïcité [secularism], so seriously that it’s practically a religion itself. Laïcité is little understood and has always intrigued me. The state bans religious symbols in schools. Girls wearing hijabs spark national crises. The separation of church and state is sacred, inviolable, and foundational.

Right. So why are half the public holidays Catholic feast days?

Ascension Thursday. Assumption Day. All Saints Day. Christmas. Easter Monday. The secular republic shuts down for the Virgin Mary’s assumption into heaven but loses its mind over a teenage girl’s headscarf.

It gets better. The French state funds Catholic schools to the tune of hundreds of millions annually, provided they follow the national curriculum. Recent reports suggest the state owes these schools nearly €1 billion in funding. That’s taxpayer money going directly to religious institutions, which seems a bit rich for a country that banned the burkini.

The logic appears to be: Christianity is cultural heritage, everything else is religion. Which is certainly one way to interpret “secular.”

We’re only halfway through. The next paradox is the one that made me laugh out loud the first time I lived it — and the final argument is the one I think about more.

This piece is part of the French Paradox Series in the French Culture Deep-Dive Collection, exclusively for Annual Subscribers and Mighty Supporters.

Continue reading→

Read more

The road up to Château Pibarnon is one lane wide and climbs through the hills above the Mediterranean. The first time you drive it, you worry about meeting someone coming down. We did, about halfway up — a truck came around a bend and managed to pull just enough off the road that we could squeeze past on our way to the top. The gate at the summit was open. We pulled in alongside a long golden-stone mas and got out. Lemon trees framed the door to the tasting room, the fruit heavy enough to pick. But before going in, we walked to the edge of the ridge because below us the restanques — the dry-stone terraces — fell away in the shape of a bowl, ringed in green, with a glimpse of the sea gleaming past the lip. It’s the kind of view that makes you forget why you came.

My niece Kristen had stood in this same spot three years earlier and said,

This is the first time I really understand what they mean when they talk about terroir. Here I see it, taste it, smell it, touch it, and hear it.”

I’d been next to her and felt it too — a place making an argument for itself before the first sip of anything. Now Lauren and Leah were having the same moment, and I understood what had been happening to me, slowly, over a decade of returning. You come to Bandol because of the wine. You come back because of the place. You keep coming because someone hands you a glass at the top of a hill, and you realize you’ve been let in.

It started, for me, by accident. In 2016, I wandered into Domaine Lafran-Veyrolle without knowing what Bandol was, bought a couple of bottles of the red almost as an afterthought, and fell in love with them back in the States — where I then discovered I couldn’t find them anywhere. At the time, Domaine Tempier was about the only Bandol you could buy in America, thanks to Kermit Lynch. Everything else had to be found in France.

Four years later, a small caviste near my house poured Château Pibarnon rosé at a tasting, and that sealed it. I became a Bandol ambassador, serving at home and taking it to friends’ houses when invited for dinner. I went in 2022 with Kristen and Ben — the trip where Kristen stood on the ridge looking at the restanques — and by the time I came back in September 2025, Kermit Lynch had added Gros Noré and Terrebrune alongside Tempier, and two friends who’d met the wines at my table — Lauren and Leah — had asked if I’d take them. So I did. What follows is one day. It’s the day the whole trip turned on, and I think it’s a fair map of what Bandol offers anyone who goes looking.

We’d arrived on a Sunday evening and walked down to the harbor, where a band was playing in the square, and people were dancing. We stood and watched for longer than we’d meant to before walking to the bar, Le 8.27, recommended by our hotel. The owner’s name was Patrick. He asked where we’d been and where we were going, and rattled off three or four domains we should try. We wrote them down, hoping we would be able to stop at a couple.

Château Pradeaux was our first stop on Monday morning, on Lionel’s recommendation. Lionel is a friend from Paris who works in wine, supplies luminaries like Alain Ducasse, and when he told me I had to try Pradeaux, I booked it.

We pulled in a little early and were met by three barking dogs. We sat in the car debating for a minute whether to wait for a human to call them off or just get out. I got out. The dogs quieted, turned around, and led us to the front door. We were still early, so we wandered down a path between the vines and looked at the grapes — plump, almost shiny, blue-black. Mourvèdre, we guessed. At nine, we walked back to the heavy wooden door and rang the bell. An older woman let us in and ushered us into the courtyard; Eric had stepped out for a minute, she told us, but would be right back. The courtyard was quietly Provençal — flowering vines throwing a bit of shade across the stone. We waited. Eric came back and walked us out into the vineyard, explaining in excellent English the care they take of the vines and the rules they have to follow for the AOC. This was a revelation to Lauren and Leah, who hadn’t realised how many rules govern how a Bandol wine is even grown — what can be planted, how it’s pruned, and when it can be picked. I watched their faces change. Whatever respect they’d had for the wine before, they had more of it now. We moved on to the chais, where Eric walked us through the aging — how long, in what, why. The dogs came with us, and it was clear they knew the route; they’d led people through this space before. At one point, Madame joined us and told us we were lucky to have the extra time, because they’d cancelled the harvest that day — rain was forecast. At least tomorrow’s grapes, she said, would come into the cellar clean, since they’d have had a shower first.

This was the third time we’d heard about the rain. The hotel had mentioned it that morning, school had been cancelled, so getting out of the parking lot would be easy. Eric had mentioned it while walking out to the vines. Now Madame. We kept smiling politely, but the sun was blazing, and the sky was cloudless, and the three of us were starting to wonder if everyone in Bandol was just a little dramatic about the weather.

Finally, we went in to taste. Two reds, a rosé, and a Marc. Lauren, our spirits expert, lit up at the Marc, so we left with a few bottles of that alongside the reds and a rosé. As we tasted, I noticed another bottle on the counter — not in the Pradeaux style, with a different label entirely. That, Eric explained, was Plaisir Solidaire. A group of Provence vignerons had started the project after a bad hail season years back: each winemaker donates about a hundred kilos of grapes, the lots are blended into a single multi-varietal red, and it’s bottled only in magnums. A handful come out of each estate’s cellar every year. The proceeds go into a solidarity fund for other winemakers whose harvests have been wiped out by frost, hail, or drought. Wine-world mutual aid. Eric was matter-of-fact about it — this is what we do here — and it struck me, standing in the cool of the chais, that what I love about this region isn’t only the wine. It’s how the people who make it take care of each other. We loaded our wines into the car and drove off under a sky that still gave no sign of rain.

Lafran-Veyrolle was next. I’d made an appointment by email and gotten no response, but this was the domain where it had all started for me, nine years earlier, and I’d come back to show Lauren and Leah where I’d first fallen in love with Bandol. Lafran is a modest place. No gilded gate, no long view across a bowl of restanques — just a working family estate of the kind you could drive past and not notice. That’s part of the pattern too: in this appellation, the modest and the grand make the same kind of wine, and they welcome you the same way.

We pulled up and walked in to see if we could get a tasting, and there was Patrick, the bar owner from the night before, buying bottles and chatting with the owner and another man.

How did you find this place?” he asked, surprised.

He hadn’t recommended it. I told him the whole story, the 2016 accident, the red I couldn’t find at home, the quest that followed, and that I’d had to come back and bring my two friends.

We had our tasting, and when I asked if the three of them knew of anywhere open for lunch — it was Monday, half the good places would be closed — the debate began. They argued in rapid French about what would be open, what would be decent, what we might like, while I mentioned we had another tasting at two-thirty, but it wasn’t far. They kept debating. Lauren and Leah didn’t follow the French but watched the whole thing with growing amusement — three grown men taking the placement of three American women’s lunch more seriously than anything they’d seen all morning. They sent us to a small bistro on the beach. We went. We sat watching the waves lap the sand, and I realised Lauren and Leah had never had a café gourmand, so we ordered three. By the end of the meal, they had decided on two things: they were going to learn French, and from now on, when they saw café gourmand on a menu, they would order it.

We made a detour that afternoon to Domaine Bunan, in La Cadière-d’Azur. The woman pouring for us went through three wines before she casually mentioned that Bunan was a natural wine producer.

I stopped mid-sip. Lauren and Leah looked at me over the rim of their glasses with raised eyebrows — not because they thought I’d spit the wine out, but because by now they knew I wouldn’t keep my mouth shut. I’d once told a server at Noma I didn’t want grape kombucha as my pairing. They were starting to be honest about what they liked too, though they hadn’t yet reached the grape-kombucha stage.

But these three wines, whatever she’d just called them, were very good. Not cloudy, not funky, not fermented-in-a-garage, not the ‘natural’ wines that I knew about and don’t like.

I had a small piece of inside knowledge on this. Arthus, my caviste in Paris, had once told me that Americans walk into his shop asking for natural wine all the time, and usually don’t quite know what they mean. So I switched into French. Do you mean organic? Or biodynamic? — Oh yes, she said, we’re transitioning to biodynamic. I turned to Lauren and Leah and told them they could drink up. Something shifted after that. She hadn’t planned to pour the orange wine we had talked about — it wasn’t part of the tasting flight — but she opened a bottle for us anyway. We all liked it enough that a couple came home with us. Then she said they were labelling some of the whites in the back, if we wanted to see.

Of course we did. A man was working the bottling line. He looked up, saw three American women watching him with polite interest, and asked if we wanted to help. We did. For about five minutes, we stood in a row, placing bottles onto the belt and following them to where the label went on — and then a thunderclap, and the sky opened. The rain came down heavily enough that it almost blocked the view of the vines through the open door. He stopped the belt, and the four of us stood there watching it come. He said sometimes this happened, but not usually like this. We remembered that morning they’d cancelled school because of the forecast. They’d been right.

Eventually, it slowed. We ran for the car with our Bunan haul and tried to follow the GPS out of the property. It pointed us down a lane that ended in a wall of vines. We started to back up — and realised, when Leah turned around in her seat, that the way we’d come in had a drop on one side. She got out of the car, convinced we were going to die, and stood in the wet gravel directing us inch by inch until we were turned around and pointing the right way. The afternoon drifted after that. We tried Ray Jane, which none of us found much to love. We drove on to Domaine Garenne on Patrick’s earlier recommendation, but the place was closed with no one around.

We drove back into town, dropped the bottles at the hotel, and walked down to the harbour. The storm had passed. A rainbow was arching into the water. We stood on the harbour and looked at it for a long time.

A perfect day in Bandol — warnings, weather, kindness, confusion, and at the end a perfect rainbow.

Debra

Have you ever arrived somewhere for the wine and found yourself staying for something else entirely?

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19 years ago, I visited Paris for the first time. A trip that was going to change my life – I just didn’t know it yet. The beauty swept me off my feet: the monuments, the parks, the architecture. But what made an even stronger impression were the terraces. I remember walking up the stairs from a metro station, seeing the lights and all the people talking, reading, and eating. That scene has stayed with me. Since then, I’ve spent hundreds of hours at Parisian terraces, and now, it feels like coming home.

Speaking of homes, Paris is a city of small apartments, many of them without balconies. The street is where life happens. Local authorities have long understood this, and consistently worked to accommodate it. A recent example is their decision to grant thousands of businesses a temporary permit for additional outdoor seating.

For the sixth time, April 1 marked one of the annual milestones in Paris: the return of the summer terraces. In addition to the roughly 13,000 permanent ones, you can now enjoy a glass or a meal at approximately 4,600 so-called terrasses éphémères, spread across the city.

They have been a hit from the start. At the same time, French drinking culture is shifting – a trend that may, over time, shape how Parisians gather and linger.

From test to tradition

The preliminary terraces first appeared in 2020, when Paris’ former mayor, Anne Hidalgo, facing the economic fallout of the pandemic, issued emergency regulations allowing restaurants, cafés, and bars to expand into squares, sidewalks, and street parking spots.

The experiment worked so well that it was never fully reversed, even though there are regular complaints about the noise, as well as the reduced number of parking spaces.

Today, the summer terraces appear from April 1 through October 31 every year. Many of them are tiny, and only tables, chairs, and parasols are permitted. Some only have space for a couple of guests – which is quite charming, if you ask me.

The perfect fit for a summer terrace

The wine bars, caves du vin, are especially grateful for the additional outdoor seating because few have permanent terraces. Most are simply too tiny to have one, and they’re often located in narrow streets where sidewalks and parking spots are the only options.

Paris has always had these bars, but for the past decade, there’s been a considerable increase in new establishments. A particular kind has emerged: smaller ones with a more personal touch. They’re often focused on natural and low-intervention wines and run by owners who want to be seen as innovative and environmentally conscious.

For example, you can find several of these wine bars near Canal Saint-Martin and around Oberkampf – where they fit perfectly into the trendy neighbourhood atmosphere.

When decline gives room for a different growth

The new generation of Parisian wine bars has changed parts of the city&#39;s drinking culture, pulling it towards something more intimate and experimental. Meanwhile, French drinking habits are undergoing a significant shift. Alcohol consumption has been declining for decades, but the pace has quickened. Younger French people, in particular, are drinking less and differently than their parents. According to The Economist (2024), 25% of the population between 18 and 34 years old do not drink at all.

At the Wine Paris trade fair in February 2026, producers of zero- and low-alcohol beverages set up alongside established négociants. In Paris, there are now around 30 specialty shops dedicated to alcohol-free alternatives – such as Le Paon Qui Boit, meaning the drinking peacock, which has one location on each side of the Seine. The first Parisian alcohol-free bar, Déjà Bu, opened in 2023 and specializes in 0% wines, beers, and spirits. Note that they close at 8 PM, as few guests stick around drinking for hours.

A new social contract

Time will tell how the so-called sober curiosity trend will affect Parisian restaurants, wine bars, and terrace culture in the future. For now, Parisians are crowding out onto the terraces for sunlight and apéro. The biggest change so far is the social contract around drinking: the assumption that a drink means something with alcohol is no longer valid. For the businesses, caught between a booming terrace culture and a generation reconsidering alcohol, it may turn out to be a creative and interesting next chapter.

You’ll never convince me to give up my wine, though.

Marie G.

Have you found your own corner of Paris terrace life — a favourite bar, a perfect apéro spot, a parking space turned into something worth lingering over? Tell me in the comments.

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Introducing Contributor, Marie Gundersen:

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Image credits: all images copyright Marie Gundersen

There are places in Paris where time doesn’t exist, where a staircase becomes a spiral of the soul, where the walls don’t just hold paintings, they hold visions. Today’s post is about one of my very favorite places in Paris. The Musée Gustave Moreau is not just a museum; it’s a reliquary of dreams.

The Hidden Chapel of Symbolism

Tucked away in the 9th arrondissement, on a quiet street of understated façades, is the former home and studio of Gustave Moreau (1826–1898), the French Symbolist painter who believed: “I believe only in what I cannot see, and solely in what I feel.” - Gustave Moreau (This quote alone could be the single reason why I love him so much.)

This museum is not curated in the modern sense, it is curated as a sanctum, exactly as Moreau left it. You don’t walk through this space as a tourist, you enter as if stepping into a private temple. Velvet drapes. Worn floorboards. Sacred hush.

Then the paintings begin to appear: Salome, Orpheus, the Magi, Oedipus, angels and muses, not depicted, but revealed, like glowing fragments of a fever dream. And they are magnificent!

The Spiral of the Soul

There is a spiral staircase in the heart of the house that seems to rise not just through floors, but through states of being. Moreau designed this himself, three levels: ground floor memories, middle floor living, top floor vision.

At the summit, you step into his double-height atelier, flooded with light. Here, he worked on vast mythic canvases, many of them intentionally unfinished. It is as if he wanted us to see the threshold between worlds, the veil in motion.

Salome: The Mystical Dancer

Among the most haunting of his works is his series on Salome, the biblical figure long associated with seduction and death. But Moreau’s Salome is different. She is not a temptress; she is a priestess, dancing on the threshold between the visible and invisible.

In The Apparition, John the Baptist’s head floats like a holy vision above her, not grotesque, but luminous. She is still. She is veiled. She is touched by the divine.

It was these paintings that inspired Oscar Wilde to write Salome, and in turn, Wilde’s text became the libretto for Richard Strauss’s infamous opera. Moreau didn’t just paint myth; he reframed it through the Symbolist lens as something sacred, psychological, and alive.

“The mystery of love is greater than the mystery of death.” - Oscar Wilde, Salome

“There is a sacred madness in beauty that dares to dance with death.”

On Technique, Vision, and the Feminine Divine

Moreau did not paint to describe, but to evoke. His technique involved layering gouache, oil, ink, and even gold leaf to create canvases that shimmer like visions. Many are unfinished by design, allowing us to see the sketch, the sacred intention, the edge of emergence. He believed that art should not be fully explained, only felt. (Swoon.)

His color palette is incandescent: lapis, ruby, opal, gold. His brushwork flickers between intricate and dissolving. His paintings feel lit from within.

While Salome is his best-known feminine muse, Moreau also painted Mary Magdalene, not as a repentant sinner, but as a mystic, a visionary, a woman pierced by divine love.

In Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy and Magdalene at the Foot of the Cross, she becomes the soul in sacred longing. These are not depictions of religious narrative. They are portraits of inner states: sorrow, transcendence, illumination.

“She is like a mystic flower, blossoming in the desert of the soul.”

Notable Works to Seek

These works may not always be on display at the same time, but the museum’s intimate format allows you to get astonishingly close to many of Moreau’s major pieces and personal drawings.

• The Apparition – Salome’s dance as a moment of mystical confrontation.

• Jupiter and Semele – A transcendent vision of union and dissolution.

• Orpheus – Beauty resting in the lap of death, or death resting in the arms of beauty.

• Oedipus and the Sphinx – A psychological rendering of fate and riddles.

• Mary Magdalene in the Desert – A quiet, radiant image of isolation as holy ground.

And don’t forget the wooden drawers that line the upstairs galleries, filled with hundreds of private sketches and sacred studies, from angels and altars to mythic beasts and forgotten gods. (I love opening one drawer randomly and using the sketch I find for inspiration to journal or meditate in the open space.)

A Museum Made for Pilgrims

The Musée Gustave Moreau is not crowded; it does not shout; it waits. It reveals itself to those who arrive slowly, reverently, with open senses. It is one of Paris’s most powerful places of hidden devotion, not to any religion, but to the imagination as sacred ground.

If you go, bring a small notebook. Leave a stone. Ask a question.

You might find that beauty itself answers you.

“The painter must be a poet, not a mere copyist of reality.” - Gustave Moreau

“Art is the contemplation of the world in a state of grace.” - Hermann Hesse

Reflection Ritual (for fellow pilgrims)

If you find yourself before Salome, Orpheus, or the stairwell that spirals like a soul:

• What mystery am I ready to face?

• What part of me is unfinished, and beautiful because of it?

• What vision has been visiting me in dreams that I have not yet dared to paint?

Let Moreau remind you that art is not a mirror; it is a portal.

Sacred Paris Note to the Modern Mystic

When you reach the spiral staircase, pause. Place your hand lightly on the railing and set an intention before you ascend. You are not just climbing to an artist’s atelier, you are rising into his inner sanctum. Let the stairs become a prayer.

If a painting calls to you, stand before it and softly ask: “What part of myself are you trying to show me?”

Open a drawer. Choose one sketch. Let it be your oracle.

This is not a museum visit; it is an initiation into the unseen.

Welcome to the threshold between myth and memory, and welcome to one of my very favorite places in all of Paris.

With all that is sacred seen and felt,

Patricia

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Introducing Contributor, Patricia Russo

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She said yes.

Et tous les autres jeudis? [And all other Thursdays]

She said yes to that, too.

“Mariés soixante ans et très heureux,” she says now, from the Paris apartment where she grew up and where they lived. Married for sixty years, and very happy. “Ce n’est pas rien.” That is not nothing.

She is 100 years old. She is Monique Lévi-Strauss. And if you think you already know who she is, I would like to gently suggest that you start again. Yes, I thought I knew who she was, too. But I was wrong.

The easy version goes like this: she was the wife of Claude. She was there. She was supportive. She was, in the way that so many brilliant women of the 20th century were described by history, adjacent.

That version is wrong in almost every particular.

Here’s what I found to be true. Monique Lévi-Strauss, born Monique Roman, in Paris, on 5 March 1926, spent five years of her adolescence hiding her Jewish identity inside Nazi Germany, with the Gestapo searching her bedroom. She arrived in post-war Paris as a polyglot so fluent in English, German and French that Jacques Lacan, yes, that Lacan, recruited her to retranslate Freud for him on Sunday mornings. She became one of France’s foremost specialists in the history of textiles, curating exhibitions at the Palais Galliera and writing the first French monograph on American textile artist Sheila Hicks. She transcribed Tristes Tropiques from beginning to end, flagging passages she found obscure or ponderous, and Claude Lévi-Strauss rewrote them. She considers that her proudest intellectual contribution to his work. She had no university degree.

In March 2025, at her 99th birthday, the Académie française named her an honorary 41st member. The Académie has exactly 40 seats. They made a new one for her.

She turned 100 in March 2026. Ce n’est pas rien.

The Thursday lunches are just the beginning. What Monique built — in cloth, in language, in the margins of a masterpiece — is the part history forgot to write down. It's below the fold, for Mighty Supporters and Annual subscribers.

If you've read this far, you're exactly who I wrote this for.

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Bonjour, my dear friends and subscribers, both new and long-time.

Un grand merci (a big thank you) for being part of this wonderful global family of Francophiles. Your support enables me to continue growing and improving MyFrenchLife™ Magazine and the le Bulletin newsletter, offering more to this growing global community.

Consider upgrading your subscription

Here’s what you’ll find today:

1. This week “16.20.a - Three Generations, 40,000 Bistros, One Curtain That Wouldn’t Close

2. Feature: The Table That Holds France Together

3. The Writers’ Room spotlight #14 - [MyFrenchLife Magazine Contributor Profiles, where you’ll learn more about our contributors than others know!]

4. This week’s ‘What’s happening in ‘MyFrenchLife™ Magazine’ - a selection of new contributors and fresh articles from across France.

5. You can also find the free newsletter ‘‘16.19- What France Does to People Who Weren’t Looking→here during the weekend.

Warm regards
Judy - 23.5.2026

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Today at a Glance: Your FREE weekly newsletter

Bonjour mes ami(e)s !

It’s wonderful to have you back here with me today. Bienvenue !

1. A New Chapter for MyFrenchLife™ Magazine Contributors

2. In this newsletter, you’ll find these wonderful fresh articles taking you to France beyond the cliché,

3. Don’t miss the PAID subscriber edition of le Bulletin in your inbox: “16.20.a - Three Generations, 40,000 Bistros, One Curtain That Wouldn’t Close - It’s not too late to upgrade & read it←

   À bientôt !
   Warmly,
   Judy - 23.5.2026

1. A New Chapter for MyFrenchLife™ Magazine Contributors - check out these profiles

Profile #5 - Keith Van Sickle

• To Find THE LIST of MyFrenchLife™ Magazine CONTRIBUTORS:
  [https://myfrenchlife.org/p/contributors-myfrenchlife-zine ]

• TO FIND Keith Van Sickles’ WORK:
  [https://www.myfrenchlife.org/t/keith-van-sickle ]

Keith in MyFrenchLife™ Magazine: Can be found here
CONNECT WITH KEITH VAN SICKLE - keithvansickle.com→

2. MyFrenchLife™ Magazine: new articles

Introducing New Contributor, Jenny Becker

I’m a former business owner from Seattle who now lives in rural France in a 17th-century stone house in the Dordogne, where everyday life has a way of becoming a story whether I intend it to or not. What started as a leap into a completely different life slowly became a fascination with the rhythms of village life, French culture, food, markets, misunderstandings, bureaucracy, and the wonderfully strange moments that happen when you try to build a life in another country.

I write about the small collisions between expectation and reality usually involving food, language, rural customs, or situations that go slightly off the rails. My stories often begin with something ordinary and end somewhere I absolutely did not expect.

Most days involve writing, renovating, wandering through markets, attempting to understand France, and being outwitted by both bureaucracy and vegetables.

Here you’ll find Jenny’s Substack: A French Table 1—>

Please help me welcome Jenny to our talented Contributor team, writing from rural France.

Below you’ll find Jenny’s first article published in our magazine→

a) I Went to Buy a Dress in Bordeaux
by Jenny Becker - A French Table 1

THE DRESSING ROOM INCIDENT

The zipper stops halfway up my back, and I immediately blame France.”

Not the country. The lighting.”

The dressing room at Galeries Lafayette is aggressively bright, the kind of brightness that makes you aware of cartilage. The curtain refuses to close all the way, which is how I end up stepping backward into Cabin 8 and discovering a man in gray boxer briefs holding a pale blue shirt like we’ve both been assigned the wrong scene.”

We freeze.”

The mirrors multiply us into an exhibit called Poor Timing…” writes Jenny Becker.

Read the full article →

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b) The Room that Holds Everyone
by Judy MacMahon

Why the French bistro was never really only about food — and what disappears when it closes.

“The bistro isn’t a relic. It’s a practice. And like all practices, it survives only if enough people choose to keep it.”

A century ago, France had half a million bistros. Today, fewer than 40,000 remain.”

That number stopped me when I read it. Not because it’s surprising, exactly, but because of what it means to lose something at that scale without anyone quite deciding to let it go. No law was passed. No policy failed spectacularly. The bistro simply became, incrementally, harder to sustain and easier to replace with something that looks similar but carries none of the weight.”

I’ve often wondered what that weight actually is…” I wrote…

Read the full article →

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c) 20 Streets of Paris #5: Discover Rue du Temple
by Pierre Guernier

You can almost feel the ghosts of knights when you walk down Rue du Temple. Once the stronghold of the Templars, it’s now a place of cafés and boutiques, but the air still hums with secrecy. Look up at the street sign and imagine chainmail and whispers — for beneath the shopfronts, the Middle Ages still murmur.

Rue du Temple is named for one of the most fascinating lost landmarks of Paris…” wites Pierre Guernier.

Read the full article →

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d) THE WRITERS’ ROOM: Shining the spotlight on MyFrenchLife Contributors — a new home

The Writers’ Room is where the storytellers become the story.

Our talented Contributor team now spans nearly 40 writers, photographers, and creatives living across France — and in this special series, we go beyond the byline to discover the little-known stories readers don’t usually hear.

The unexpected turns. The private passions. The little-known stories. The moments that shaped a life in France. Each week, one Contributor shares their story, then hands the conversation to another Contributor — creating a growing chain of voices and connection.

There is now a dedicated place to find these, as I’ve now given The Writers’ Room a dedicated home of its own so that you can find it at any time, 24/7.

Until now, these conversations lived only inside the PAID edition of le Bulletin, but with nearly 40 Contributors across France, and a growing archive of fascinating personal stories, it felt time to create one place where Annual subscribers and Mighty Supporters can easily explore them all.

→Find the Writers’ Room — Exclusively for Annual subscribers and Mighty Supporters.

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3. Merci mille fois

“Thank you for subscribing to ‘le Bulletin’, the newsletter of MyFrenchLife™ Magazine.”
Judy MacMahon

Merci mille fois d’être ici, mes ami(e)s. Thanks for being here.

Sometimes, France has a way of arriving sideways.

A former business owner from Seattle steps into the wrong dressing room in Bordeaux and finds the story she didn’t know she was looking for. A Paris street named for knights who vanished centuries ago still hums with something you can’t quite name. A number — 40,000 — sits quietly at the end of a long decline nobody chose.

That’s this week’s FRANCE AS IT HAPPENS.

À bientôt,
Judy
judy@myfrenchlife.org

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Daube that’s been simmering since dawn, wine-dark and dense. Then the sound—the apartment door opening to chaos, voices layering over voices, the dog losing its mind, a child shrieking with delight, someone’s coat hitting the floor. Grandmère calls from the kitchen, something about the table, but nobody’s listening because everyone’s talking and hugging and home. Just like always…

It’s 12:30 on a Sunday in France. This scene is playing out in thousands of homes right now. Stone cottages in Normandy. Tiny Paris apartments. Sprawling houses in Provence. The details shift, but the architecture holds: three generations, one table, three hours minimum.

No phones. That’s not a request.

What You’re Really Watching

Here’s what a French Sunday lunch looks like from the outside: bread on the tablecloth (never the plate), wine poured for anyone over twelve, four courses unfolding like acts in a play. Entrée, plat principal, fromage, dessert. The grandmother is explaining to her grandson why you never cut the tip off the Brie. The teenager is asking her grandfather about the war, actually listening. Conversation moving in currents and eddies, easy and endless, nobody rushing anywhere because there’s nowhere else to be.

According to a 2023 survey, 67% of French people consider Sunday lunch a family tradition. More striking: 43% share it with three generations. Every single week.

Think about what that means. Not Christmas. Not birthdays. Every week. The same table, the same faces, the same rhythm. Week after week after week, for years, for decades, until it becomes the scaffolding everything else hangs on.

This is how you build intimacy—through relentless, boring repetition. Through showing up.

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THE DRESSING ROOM INCIDENT

The zipper stops halfway up my back, and I immediately blame France.

Not the country. The lighting.

The dressing room at Galeries Lafayette is aggressively bright, the kind of brightness that makes you aware of cartilage. The curtain refuses to close all the way, which is how I end up stepping backward into Cabin 8 and discovering a man in gray boxer briefs holding a pale blue shirt like we’ve both been assigned the wrong scene.

We freeze.

The mirrors multiply us into an exhibit called Poor Timing.

He says something calm. I say “pardon” three times in escalating pitches. I had entered the cabin with two options: a responsible navy sheath and a sequined suggestion of poor judgment.

The curtain jerks but does not close, stretching the silence long enough for something wildly inappropriate to assemble in my brain. I consider asking him if he’s single. Not casually. Not jokingly. I mean, genuinely like this might be the meet-cute no one ordered, which is not a reasonable direction for my thinking while half-zipped in sequins under chandelier surveillance. And yet there it is, partially dressed and ready. Like, Bordeaux has decided this is my arc. Not dignity. Not growth. Romance under surveillance lighting. I briefly calculate whether this is how people meet their second husbands, and if so, whether I look like a woman who owns matching towels. In Cabin 8. Fluorescent. Half-zipped. Emotionally pre-approved for nothing.

I do not ask.

But I do think about it longer than is structurally sound.

Somewhere outside the curtain, someone laughs, and I briefly wonder if the entire floor has access to this angle.

The zipper is still stuck.

This is what happens when your daughter announces an engagement party in New York City, and you decide Galeries Lafayette in Bordeaux is where transformation will occur.

I am still half-formed.

The chandelier is thriving. I am not.

I wrench the curtain closed, abandon the navy dress like it betrayed me, gather the sequins before they defect entirely, and step directly onto the escalator because horizontal mistakes now require vertical solutions.

ASCENT

I step onto the escalator as if I planned this sequence, one hand lightly resting on the rail, as though I have not just been multiplied in boxer-adjacent lighting. The sequins tick against the rubber edge, and I pretend not to hear it, because hearing it would imply awareness, and awareness at this stage feels dangerous. Halfway up, I notice I am still holding a hanger that does not belong to me, white plastic and deeply confident in its innocence, and instead of turning around like a rational adult, I adjust my grip and stare forward as if this has always been part of the ensemble.

The escalator rises with bureaucratic indifference, having processed far worse women with better posture. I rise with it.

Shoes will correct this.

Shoes always look corrective. This has never once been true.

GRAVITY TEST

The shoe department looks calm. Which should have been my first warning. I sit in the curved chair and immediately discover angles in my knees I did not authorise, then slide into a black heel that implies structural integrity I have not demonstrated today.

It fits.

Which feels like a setup.

When I stand, I see the dip in the carpet. I fully acknowledge the dip. I decide the dip is decorative.

My ankle shifts half a degree, and I reach for stability, landing on the central pole of a rotating tower of sunglasses arranged like a black plastic galaxy. The tower responds by turning, gently at first, as though we are collaborating, and I turn with it because letting go would signal defeat, and I am not prepared to concede.

For one long second I believe this is recoverable. I even commit to the face of someone recovering.

The base tilts. The heel sinks. The galaxy lowers itself to the floor in a controlled collapse, as though it has been waiting for me specifically. Sunglasses spreading outward in glossy arcs while the escalator continues humming like it has not just witnessed my audition for gravity. A child claps once. I do not look to confirm. I have chosen denial.

I remain holding the pole longer than necessary, which is how pretending works.

“Perfect,” I say, because if you narrate confidently enough, events sometimes reconsider.

They do not reconsider.

COINGATE

By the time I reach the restroom, I am still carrying the hanger, which has begun to feel symbolic, and the entrance is guarded by a waist-high metal gate with a coin slot that suggests fairness but radiates indifference.

I insert one euro.

Nothing happens.

I insert another.

Still nothing.

Behind me, a heel taps once, slow and judicial, and I consider whether this is how revolutions begin. Not with ideology. With bladder urgency and a one-euro coin that refuses diplomacy. I have never felt more European, which is impressive considering I am arguing with plumbing.

Here I am, standing in Galeries Lafayette negotiating bodily access with machinery while holding plastic I do not own.

Coingate is underway.

I contemplate climbing it. Fully. With intent.

Instead, I stand very still, as though patience is a language I speak fluently, and the gate releases with a mechanical cough that feels less like permission and more like resignation.

I step through quickly before it changes its mind.

Inside, the faucet launches water at my sleeve, and I blot it carefully while staring at my reflection, which appears unbothered and faintly smug.

The zipper remains in negotiations.

PAINT

The cosmetics counter glows from beneath like an aquarium for the emotionally unstable. Brushes stand upright in glass cylinders like a jury.

A woman approaches without asking what happened to my sunglasses orbit and lifts my chin as if I have requested supervision.

She twists open a tube labelled Audace.

Bold.

Of course it is.

She paints carefully, professionally, as though my mouth is the only part of this situation requiring discipline.

When she hands me the mirror, the woman looking back appears fractionally more deliberate than the one who entered Cabin 8. Coral mouth steady. Hanger still in hand like a prop in a play no one rehearsed.

I nod once.

I do not buy a dress.

I buy Audace. Bold, apparently, costs extra.

ALARM THEORY

I wander briefly through Bridal, where a measuring tape appears at my waist without invitation, and I say “Mother” with such clarity that it retracts instantly, which feels like a small victory in a day of structural negotiations.

I head toward the exit holding coral and the hanger.

The security pedestals erupt in alarm.

Not a polite beep.

A declaration.

Heads turn. The escalator continues delivering civilians upward as if nothing has occurred. A guard approaches with a small device and snaps something invisible free with a crisp magnetic click.

It is attached to the hanger.

For half a second, I consider running. Not from guilt. From narrative consistency.

Instead, I nod gravely, as if this was expected, and step outside into Bordeaux air holding nothing but coral and a plastic lesson.

The coral stays. It did not collapse under pressure, which is more than I can say for the sunglasses.

It cost eighty-five euros, which feels aggressive for something the size of a thumb, but I have already tipped a galaxy of sunglasses and negotiated with coin-operated infrastructure, so perspective is relative.

I hold the hanger for a moment longer than necessary before placing it back, briefly considering returning tomorrow just to see what else might collapse.

I do not.

But the thought occurs.

BLACK

I drive home.

I open my closet.

There they are.

They are not new. They do not sparkle. They do not require negotiation; each one is perfectly capable of attending an engagement party in New York without rotation, coin insertion, or structural collapse.

It occurs to me that I did not need a new dress. I needed an incident.

New York will get black.

Bordeaux got the rehearsal. Cabin 8 remains undefeated.

Have you ever gone shopping in France and come home with something entirely different from what you intended — and felt oddly satisfied about it? Tell me in the comments.

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You can almost feel the ghosts of knights when you walk down Rue du Temple. Once the stronghold of the Templars, it’s now a place of cafés and boutiques, but the air still hums with secrecy. Look up at the street sign and imagine chainmail and whispers — for beneath the shopfronts, the Middle Ages still murmur.

Rue du Temple is named for one of the most fascinating lost landmarks of Paris: the fortress of the Knights Templar. In the twelfth century, the Templars built an enormous walled compound here — the Enclos du Temple — a city within the city, complete with towers, markets, and privileges that infuriated the crown. Long after the order’s dissolution, its memory lingered: during the Revolution, Louis XVI and his family were imprisoned in the Temple’s great keep.

Although the fortress has vanished, its spirit haunts the street. Stretching from the Hôtel de Ville to Place de la République, Rue du Temple winds through the Marais, where aristocratic mansions and bustling shops tell the story of centuries of change.

Strolling down Rue du Temple, you move through layers of history: medieval knights, imprisoned kings, merchants, artisans, and now the lively pulse of a fashionable Parisian quarter. The stones may have changed, but the name still whispers of secrecy, power, and legend.

When you walk through Paris, how often do you think about what once stood beneath your feet? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

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Judy

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A century ago, France had half a million bistros. Today, fewer than 40,000 remain.

That number stopped me when I read it. Not because it’s surprising, exactly, but because of what it means to lose something at that scale without anyone quite deciding to let it go. No law was passed. No policy failed spectacularly. The bistro simply became, incrementally, harder to sustain and easier to replace with something that looks similar but carries none of the weight.

I've often wondered what that weight actually is.

This piece is part of the French Culture Deep-Dive Collection — available to Annual and Mighty Supporter subscribers. If you’re reading on a free subscription and you’d like to come inside and join the salon, I’d love to have you. You’ll find the link here.

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