I Fell Down a Literary Rabbit Hole at Chanel
Lauren Bastide, first-time novelists, literary questionnaires and a bibliothèque at Rue Cambon: the French resource I’ve been hunting for years
I have been searching for years.
Not for anything dramatic. For something to listen to in French that doesn’t make me feel like I’m being patted on the head.
If you are somewhere around B2, maybe edging toward C1, you know exactly what I mean. You have a reasonable French, hard-won, genuinely loved, and you go looking for something to feed it, something with the same intellectual nourishment you get from the English-language podcasts and long interviews you love. And you find: slow French for beginners. Grammar explainers. Conversations about going to the market. Content that treats you, in the kindest possible way, as someone who needs to be managed.
What I want, what I have always wanted, is The New Yorker in French. Long, serious, intimate conversations where someone unexpected says something that stays with you for days. The kind of thing you listen to twice, not because you missed a word but because it was worth it. And alongside those longer immersions, a scattering of shorter pieces too: a questionnaire, a reading list, a glimpse into someone’s bibliothèque [library], something to pick up and put down according to your mood and your minutes.
France produces this. Of course it does. The country that gave the world the café philosophique [philosophy café], that considers intellectual life a form of pleasure rather than a duty, does not lack for serious conversation. The trouble is that it doesn’t always travel. It stays in France, in French, for French people, and those of us loving the language from the outside have to go looking hard.
I have found things over the years. But the discovery I want to tell you about happened recently, and it happened in a place I wasn’t expecting at all.
I was on the Chanel website.
Yes, that Chanel.
I was there for reasons entirely unrelated to literature, and I found myself clicking, almost by accident, into something that stopped me completely. A literary world, quietly and seriously built, sitting on a fashion house’s website, free to anyone who knows it’s there.
For me, it was a near-perfect fit: in French, about women, about fashion, about literature, writers, and creatives. I have spent a very happy number of hours in it since.
It is called the Rendez-vous littéraires rue Cambon [Literary Rendezvous at Rue Cambon], and it has been accumulating since 2021.
The woman behind it
The project was conceived by Charlotte Casiraghi, House ambassador and spokesperson for Chanel. If that sounds like a purely decorative role, let me tell you who she actually is: a woman who studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, who co-founded a philosophy salon in Paris called Le Nouveau Rendez-vous, and who writes seriously about Hegel. She moves between the world of ideas and the world of luxury not because they are the same thing but because, in France, they have never been required to be separate. The idea that she would build a real literary project from within a fashion house is, once you understand that, not a paradox at all. It is France being France.
The Rendezvous brings together women writers and friends of the House to discuss women’s empowerment through literature, through their own works and those of the women writers who shaped history. Since 2021, it has welcomed Leïla Slimani, Camille Laurens, Marie NDiaye, Léonora Miano, Chantal Thomas, Siri Hustvedt, Rachel Cusk, and others of equal weight. These are not press appearances. They are real conversations about books, writing, ideas, and what literature does to a life.
All of it free, all of it online, at chanel.com.
The moment I properly stopped
Nested within this literary universe is a podcast series called les Rencontres [The Meetings], 41 episodes dedicated entirely to women publishing their first novels. Two interviewers share the work: journalist and activist Lauren Bastide conducts the French-language episodes, and author and critic Erica Wagner conducts the English ones. The series alternates between the two languages.
When I saw Lauren Bastide’s name, I smiled.
I had been listening to her podcasts for years before she ever appeared on MyFrenchLife™ – MaVieFrançaise®’s radar, though we did eventually name some of her work in our 2020 French podcast roundup. Before she became one of France’s most significant feminist voices, she was deputy editor-in-chief of French Elle, a world I know something about, which makes her trajectory, out of fashion media and into something altogether more enduring, all the more fascinating to me.
Lauren Bastide built La Poudre from 2016 to 2023. The title is a deliberate double pun: face powder and gunpowder. Très elle. The podcast accumulated more than 20 million downloads, interviewing women artists, writers, activists, and intellectuals in those long, unhurried conversations that French broadcasting does so well. That archive is still there, still listenable: hundreds of hours of exactly the kind of French I have been hunting, interesting enough to make you forget you are studying. Her current podcast, Folie Douce, continues in the same spirit, exploring mental health through a societal rather than clinical lens, all in French, all with the same quality of attention.
Finding her here, on the Chanel website of all places, felt like running into someone you’ve long admired in a room you didn’t expect. And then immediately understanding why she was there.
Her French-language episodes in les Rencontres are, for those of us at B2 and above, precisely what we have been looking for. She speaks the way someone speaks when they genuinely love words: measured, warm, alive to nuance, never simplified. Her guests are French women publishing serious literary fiction, and the conversations run between 30 and 47 minutes. This is not slow French. This is real French, spoken at natural speed by people for whom language is not just a tool but a deep preoccupation. I have listened to several episodes already and started a reading list from each one.
For those earlier in their French language journey, the English episodes with Erica Wagner are equally serious and satisfying. The whole ecosystem works as a resource at any level.
The shorter pleasures: questionnaires and the bibliothèque
One of the quieter joys of the Rendezvous is what it offers alongside the long-form conversations: a series of literary questionnaires, in English, completed by women from the House’s orbit, actresses, filmmakers, writers. Brief, beautifully done, and several of them genuinely stopped me mid-scroll.
Elsa Zylberstein, the French actress whose relationship with books is practically a character trait, on making room for reading: “I need to empty my mind and create space to welcome a new book.” On what literature gave her as a young woman: “I discovered women with incredible destinies and felt a great will to live and emancipate.” Both sentences short. Both true.
Rosalie Varda, daughter of the filmmaker Agnès Varda and director Jacques Demy, asked whether she identifies with any fictional heroine: “I don’t see myself as a fictional heroine. I’d rather imagine myself as a puzzle made of my own life experience and those of many women, famous or not, that I ran into through literature or in real life.” That is not a press quote. That is someone who has actually thought about the question.
And Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the Iranian-French actress who won Best Actress at Cannes in 2022 for Holy Spider, who fled Iran in 2006 and rebuilt her life entirely in France: asked about the most liberating book she had read, she named Romain Gary’s La Promesse de l’aube [Promise at Dawn] as the first book given to her in France, something she carried in her bag for months as she found her footing in her new country. Her book recommendation to give as a gift: Shaun Tan’s The Arrival, which she described as the most beautiful book about exile she had ever read. The quiet weight of that, from that particular woman, is everything.
Charlotte Casiraghi also publishes seasonal reading lists, summer and winter, curated with real personal attention. Her 2024 summer selection included Dorothy Parker, Caroline O’Donoghue, Abigail Assor, and Tove Jansson. And the bibliothèque series offers short filmed pieces, intimate glimpses into the personal bookshelves of women connected to the House, the kind of thing you watch over a coffee and feel quietly fed by.
Where to begin
Everything described here is free and publicly available at chanel.com. Nothing requires an account or a purchase. The Literary Rendezvous hub, the podcast series, the questionnaires, the reading lists: all open, all waiting.
Les Rencontres is also available on standard podcast platforms, so you can take Lauren Bastide’s voice wherever you take your French.
I have been hunting for this quality of French to live inside for a long time. I found it, of all places, at Chanel. France, being France, puts serious ideas exactly where you least expect them, and makes it feel entirely natural.
Bookmark it. You’ll thank yourself.
À bientôt,
Judy
Introducing Contributor, Judy MacMahon:
Visit her Contributor Page — Explore more of Judy’s work
All images are screenshots of the Chanel website.