16.14.a - La Curiosité Est Contagieuse
In this PAID le Bulletin you'll be exposed to France in all its magnificent detail: a 35-gram revelation to the art of the Parisian persuasion and an intriguing collection.
Today at a Glance: Your PAID weekly newsletter
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.
Here’s what you’ll find today:
This week’s SPOTLIGHT: Down the Rabbit Hole: Welcome to the Collection
This week’s ‘What’s happening in ‘MyFrenchLife™ Magazine’ - a selection of fresh articles.
The Writers’ Room - MyFrenchLife Magazine Contributor Profiles, where you’ll learn more about our contributors than others know!
You can also find the free newsletter ‘‘16.14 - →here, on Saturday.
Warm regards
Judy - 11.4.2026
1. SPOTLIGHT: Down the Rabbit Hole — Welcome to the French Culture Collection
There’s a particular kind of curiosity that doesn’t resolve. Mine is insatiable. Incurable, if we’re being honest. You pull one thread and find seventeen more underneath it. You file a note, then another, then a folder, then a folder inside a folder. Years pass. The questions don’t go away. They get more interesting.
That’s how this Collection began. Not as a product. Not as a content strategy. As an accumulation of things I never stop thinking about the why’s of. Why France treats its film directors like philosophers. How a white dress nearly brought down an industry. What it means that a street newspaper hawker in Saint-Germain-des-Prés has been shouting the same word for fifty years and France just made him a knight.
I’ve been filing these questions for years. Now they have a home.
The French Culture Deep-Dive Collection.
No clichés. No Eiffel Tower romance. No beret-wearing stereotypes. Just the France that argues, contradicts, refuses to simplify, and occasionally pulls off the most magnificently botched heist you’ve ever read about.
It’s been quietly growing for months now, the Collection, I mean. Fortnightly, at least, a new piece lands. And I think it’s time to show you what’s in it and what’s behind it.
A few pieces are free, including this one. The rest are exclusively for Annual subscribers and Mighty Supporters, because this kind of research takes time, and time is what your subscription makes possible.
If you’re already an ‘Annual subscriber’ or ‘Mighty Supporter’: everything below is yours. Installez-vous (make yourself at home). Every last delicious word of it.
If you’re not yet? Oh, but you will be.
Three pieces to start. No subscription required. Consider them a gift or a dare.
The Beautiful Impossibility of French Culture (French Film Series #1) opens the Collection where France itself begins: with contradiction as a philosophy. The piece I’d press into the hands of anyone who asked why France is worth this much attention. Start here. Everything else follows.
I Fell Down a Literary Rabbit Hole at Chanel is exactly what it sounds like. A rendez-vous littéraire rue Cambon (a literary gathering on rue Cambon), a fashion house that takes books more seriously than most publishers, and one writer who didn’t come up for air for quite some time. A rabbit hole with exceptionally good taste.
Paris After Hidalgo — because before you meet the new mayor on his bicycle, you need to understand what twelve years of Anne Hidalgo actually built. The bike lanes, the cleaned Seine, the debt, the car wars. The Paris that exists now because of decisions that outraged half the city and thrilled the other half.
Read any of those and you’ll know exactly whether this is your kind of France and your kind of Collection.
Spoiler: it probably is.