16.29.a —French Rooms, French Rules and the Real Paris
FRANCE AS IT MEANS— four empty rooms, an unspoken code in the Dordogne, a job no one discusses, and a museum behind a green door only the curious find.
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This week “16.29.a - French Rooms, French Rules and the Real Paris
Feature: Entre Deux Saisons: What Vallotton’s Bedrooms Taught Me About Rest
This week’s ‘What’s happening in ‘MyFrenchLife™ Magazine’ - a selection of new contributors and fresh articles from across France.
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Warm regards
Judy
25.7.2026
1. Entre Deux Saisons: What Vallotton's Bedrooms Taught Me About Rest
by Judy MacMahon
Recently I spent an afternoon looking at a painting of a woman asleep in her bed, and it changed the way I think about some things. Sounds dramatic. It probably is dramatic. But stay with me as I wrestle with my reaction… how it made me feel.
Félix Vallotton’s Femme couchée dormant (1899) isn’t loud; there’s no storm, no heroic gesture, just a bedroom, a bed, a woman asleep. And yet it stops you. Well, it stopped me. The bed is ablaze with red, orange and yellow, the wallpaper behind her patterned in lavender and small florals — too much colour, really, for how still she is.
Mid-autumn. That’s what I was looking at, I realised, leaning closer. Entre deux saisons (between two seasons). Not summer, not winter. Outside the world is greying, the days shortening. Inside: colour, memory, whatever it is we don’t say out loud.
The busier the room, the calmer she becomes.
That seems like it’s the whole paradox. The chaos cradles her instead of crowding her. Which, if you think about it, is exactly how our own in-between seasons work when they’re working — obligations and memory and hope all still there, just quieter somehow.
Three more rooms wait behind this one, each one a little more Vallotton gets under your skin. Read the rest as an Annual Subscriber or Mighty Supporter, then tell me which room felt most like your own mid-autumn.
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