Archive: July, 2011

A stone’s throw from Avenue des Champs-Elysées and just around the corner from the Arc de Triomphe runs Rue Le Sueur. It is not a very long street and it is quite narrow. Unless one lives on the street there is perhaps no reason to walk along it. But – it is the Paris street […]

Destiny is a funny thing. For example, when Tsar Nicholas II of Russia wooed an Imperial Ballet dancer – Mathilda Kschessinskaya – in Saint Petersburg, did she think that one day she would lie buried in a simple grave in a cemetery outside Paris? And did the dashing Prince Félix Yusupov, the wealthiest man in […]

Each year at the military parade on Paris’s Avenue des Champs-Elysées in celebration of the French Revolution (Bastille Day: July 14) the biggest cheer is always for the fire fighters. This year the cheer will be even louder, because it is 200 years this September that Napoléon formed the fire brigade – les sapeurs-pompiers de […]

It is a dismal set of cancer statistics France’s Institut de Veille Sanitaire (InVS) – Sanitary Surveillance Institute – has released. There are more and more cases of cancer here in France each year- and the death rate’s increasing too. (The institute falls under the Ministry of Health.) Judging by the current rate of cancer […]

For about a month already now firemen (sapeurs-pompiers) have been selling €2 tombola tickets. To see a dashing fireman in his navy-blue uniform stopping passersby and offering them a ticket explaining that they can win a car or a cruise has been an annual occurrence now for some years. This year I bought several tickets […]

When I first came to live in Paris I was taken to Rue Volta – it was red-light district then but don’t worry that was not why I was taken there. I was taken to Rue Volta’s No. 3. “It’s the oldest house in Paris,” I was told. It was. Then. It was however dethroned […]

A cemetery is not usually a place of tourism, now is it? Paris’s cemeteries however are: they are a must for thousands of the 80+ million tourists who come to France each year. I recommend that you should include a visit to Père Lachaise cemetery should you live here in Paris and have not yet […]

There is an explosion of articles about Princess Diana again right now : today, July 1, 2011, she would have turned 50. I wrote about her death – all about it:  the facts, the doubts, the rumours. You can read it here