Heightening the drama, Ribière was to be married the following day, though he could expect to live to see his own wedding, Defferre having vowed not to kill him but “wound him in such a way as to spoil his wedding night very considerably.”
If you were elected President of France (or staged a coup and became the next Emperor), there is a warehouse full of valuable antique furniture just waiting to decorate your personal digs.
A sprawling Art Deco reinforced concrete building, casually tucked away in the quiet backstreets of Paris’ 13th arrondissement, has been guarding the furnishings of government buildings and royal residences since the dawn of the Second World War…
Behind its bunker-thick walls, you’ll find everything from the 82 foot-long 17th century carpet that was saved from the Notre Dame blaze, airing out in the main reserve, to a selection of 20th century presidential desks that reflect the changing tastes of each decade and leader.
A large inventory of Napoleon’s foot stools sit under plastic sheeting beside a pre-revolutionary collection of royal vases crated away and carefully inventoried on industrial shelving. In the basement, you might find a stack a French flag poles and red carpets waiting to be pulled out of storage for Bastille Day or for the Queen of England’s next visit.
At the same time as carefully conserving over 130,000 decorative items; the reserve’s mission is also to restore and manufacture. The site is home to numerous artisanal workshops, where some of the nation’s finest craftsmen are busy at work, entrusted with fixing the minor wear and tear on an antique commode from a government waiting room to restoring priceless works of art rescued from beneath the collapsing roof of a national landmark.
French hunting is different. They call their hunts “Rallyes” or “Equipages.” Their hunt uniforms are more complicated. They use circular horns and lots of people carry horns where for us only the huntsman has a horn, and where our huntsman only blows a handful of conventional signals, they play fanfares. We hunt foxes and coyotes. They hunt hare, wild boar, roe deer, and even red deer. People too old to ride car follow over here. In France, they have a load of bicycle followers.
There’s one of these cool guns for sale right now on the French Outdoor Auction site Natura Buy for €1100, not a totally appalling price, but unfortunately we lost our Freedom long ago and Big Brother won’t allow you or me to import a firearm. No, no, no! We have to use a specialized importer who, poor chap! must fill out forms roughly the size of the Holy Bible and must grovel to the minimum wage security staff at Customs. Consequently, his service fee is large, typically about a grand a gun.
Last 20th of September a similar gun went for a mere £600 (plus buyer’s premium, I expect) at Holt’s.
Stanislas Gosse, a low-paid teacher from a Strasburg engineering school, successfully removed the most valuable treasures from the collection of the Abbey of Sainte Odile over a period of years. He didn’t try selling them. He was just a connoisseur of books.
On May 19, near 7 p.m., Stanislas Gosse drove his Citroën to Mont Sainte-Odile. He brought ropes, three suitcases, gray plastic bags and a flashlight. Once inside the main courtyard, he headed straight to the second floor of the Sainte-Odile aisle of the guesthouse. He walked down a corridor, opened a door using a key pinched during a previous trip, and found himself in the church’s bell tower.
He tied the ropes to a wooden beam above a trapdoor in the floor and climbed down into a dark, windowless room of about 10 feet by 10 feet with a short 7-foot ceiling. Through an opening in the wall, he slipped into a second, narrow room. A dim light filtered through cracks in the lower part of a wall. The thief gently slid two wooden panels open, revealing rows of neatly lined up books on two shelves inside a cupboard. He took the books off, then one shelf, before sneaking inside the library. At the library in Strasbourg, he had found what he had been looking for in an article from a local history journal that mentioned a secret passage, unknown to anyone currently working at the abbey, except Dietrich, the janitor. It had probably once been used as a hiding place for the monks or as an ossuary — a place to store bones.
Gosse selected a few books, wrapped them in plastic bags, then crawled back inside the cupboard. In the second room, he flipped a wooden crate, climbed on it and hauled the bags through the hatch onto the attic. He climbed up the rope, moved the books to a nearby table to clear the hatch, and climbed back down. He repeated the operation eight times throughout the evening. By the time he was done, more than a hundred books were stacked up in the attic. Around 2 a.m., he stuffed the suitcases with books and left them behind, planning to pick them up later.
Roger Kimball admires the rapidity with which the French authorities definitively determined that Notre Dame fire was an accident and not another case of deliberate arson.
“Auric Goldfinger, in the Ian Fleming novel, dryly observes to James Bond that “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.â€
The French investigators have such extraordinary powers of forensic penetration that they can dispense with all such inductive aids to inquiry. Here they have not one, not two or three, but twelve acts of violent desecration in the past month, including an arsonist attack against the second largest church in Paris. Then Notre Dame catches fire—and what a fire it was—on Monday of Holy Week. Even before the fire was brought under control, the authorities ruled out arson. Has the world ever seen a more potent demonstration of investigative prowess?”
Notre Dame Cathedral Fire, a few facts you should know courtesy of the mainstream media:
1. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown.
2. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but it has been ruled an accident (despite the fact that the exact cause of the blaze is still unknown).
3. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown, but Islam is the real victim here.
4. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but it’s not arson.
5. The exact cause of the blaze is still unknown which means the damage has not been thoroughly assessed, but Macron is setting up an international appeal for funding to rebuild despite not knowing how much is needed because the damage has not been thoroughly assessed.
This is the sort of information you get when journalists are in bed with the politicians.
A hollow way (chemin creux) at La Meauffe, Manche, France
Appearing like trenches dragged into the earth, sunken lanes, also called hollow-ways or holloways, are centuries-old thoroughfares worn down by the traffic of time.
As a week-to-week development throughout the entire national territory, the protest and protest movement of “Yellow vests”, I would like to express my solidarity and deep compassion for those who suffer, without resources, crushed by charges, humiliated and deprived of hope, and who have no other means of expression than to rise as one man to manifest their disappointment, anguish and anger. These French are the silent majority that has been silent for decades, some of which have forgotten existence. Today it is the people of France who stand up to defend their way of life and dignity.
It is essential to hear it, essential to take into account its legitimate aspirations.
Of course, we must condemn and ban the use of violence by certain extreme groups that seek to exploit this deeply popular movement to destabilize the state. This guilty and sterile violence can only promote the cause of those who do not want to hear the cry of a whole people.
On this day of the immaculate conception, I entrust France to our lady who is the true queen of France.
May God protect the eldest daughter of her church, may god help the unhappy, poor and suffering French. Let them give them hope and faith in the future of our country that must rise and reconnect with everything that has made it greatness as much as peace of hearts and the sweetness of living.
Emmanuel Macron is undoubtedly brilliant. He won all the glittering academic prizes. He had a supersonic ascent into the stratosphere of the French civil service. He even did a spell as a courtier with David de Rothschild’s investment bank, before ascending to minister of the economy under François Hollande, and then winning the most glittering prize of all, the presidency of the republic, aged 39¾.
But his hubris, arrogance and almost autistic detachment from the French in the street is in a class with Marie Antoinette. Except that this time around, the courtier whispers, ‘Mr President, the people cannot afford diesel.’ To which the cloth-eared Macron has, in effect replied: ‘Let them buy Teslas.’
At the blockade on the roundabout outside my local Super U supermarket, la France en bas is not impressed. There has been little violence here, though the local anarchists did attack the village petrol station, putting it out of action for two days. As of this morning, though, the main A9 autoroute between southern France and Spain has been closed for more than 72 hours. There are elements to the protest that are both surreal and terrifying. At the Pezenas exit, the gilets have moved a piano onto the carriageway, and are entertaining the stranded lorry drivers. At Narbonne, just down the highway, a gilet armed with a front end loader picked up a burning car, lifted it high into the air, and dropped it on the toll station. The ungovernable slums around the major cities in France are on the edge. The police are exhausted. Be sure of this, what is happening in France is not over.
There are elements to this affair that remain unclear if not murky. Who are the gilets? What do they want? Can this really be a spontaneous revolt, triggered by a posting on Facebook, provoked by increased taxes on fuel? Christophe Castaner, who has been minister of the interior for only a few weeks, and is already one of the most hated men in France, has rushed to blame the violence on the extreme right. There is not the slightest evidence of this. As far as I can tell, the rightists spent the weekend watching the news channels and posting acerbic comments on social media. ‘I’m running out of popcorn,’ one delighted Marine Le Pen supporter told me from the safety of his armchair, as he revelled in the humiliation of Macron.
In Paris, there were many people wearing gilets jaunes, but were they really gilets jaunes? . . .These protests have been hijacked by political and criminal opportunists, but Macron is making a fatal error if he thinks he can brush off the concerns of my neighbours, who are handing out biscuits to passing motorists, most of whom have posed a gilet jaune on the dashboard in solidarity.
“Attempts to negotiate with this Medusa-like movement are not going to be straightforward. The movement has no leader. Its demands are inchoate or naive. . . But French people are not just fed up with Macron, they are fed-up with politicians generally.”
