The French Secret

Here, for your viewing pleasure, another picture of the 61 year old Catherine Deneuve aging well.

I’ve added a page that has a few brief reviews of travel guides for France. There’s not much there yet, but I’ll be adding to it as we go forward here.

Catherine Deneuve should be the official mascot of this blog. She’s everything that this blog stands for, the meeting of French culture, French habits and French beauty.

Here she is at 61 looking better than most women look at 21. Yes, she started out nearly perfect, but time has not been unkind to her. Perhaps it is that chain smoking, after all.

Since most of what I’m posting today is about what I hope to do in this space over the next few weeks, one of the items that deserves mention is my blog roll. If you look at the right hand side of this page you’ll find my list of links, which is a work in progress. Please tell me if you know of any blogs or sites about France that should be added to my list. I’m eager to learn.

In the meantime, while I put the finishing touches on the blogroll, allow me to recommend to you two or three of my favorites: The Paris Photo Journal, which is exactly as its name implies, a blog with many pictures of Paris; A Day in Paris which is full of Parisian goodness; and fianlly, La Coquette, who just makes me laugh.

All of them are worth visiting.

From the inimitable Manolo comes word that the feet of the average French woman have grown more than an inch in the past forty years.

The average French foot has grown by three centimetres in the past 40 years, and the French now buy more shoes, mostly made in Asia, than any other nation barring the United States, a new survey said.

The average shoe size for a French woman has risen from a 37 to a 40 (a seven in Britain and Australia, and a seven and half in the US), said the survey by the Centre Technique Cuir (Technical Leather Centre).

The French also now buy an average of 5.3 pairs of shoes a year, compared with 4.8 in the rest of Europe. The Americans remain the top buyers, treating themselves to 6.3 pairs of new shoes a year.

Of course, it’s no suprise here that the French are shoe shoppers. What’s more surprising to me is that Americans are the biggest shoe buyers of all. Hard to believe given the shabbiness of the shoes worn by many of the people I see on the street.

More on this subject from Jason at NYC à Paris.

Welcome! This blog is not just a celebration of all things French, it’s also a serious exploration of, as the subtitle says, French diet, beauty, culture, and style, in short those very things that make the French the French.