That may very well have been true, but the one thing for sure was that this 26-year-old Frenchwoman was not as well-endowed as she would seem.

Describing this woman’s journey to visit her man locked up in the city jail of the northern French city of Rouen, the newspaper Le Parisien put it this way:

Before going to visit her detainee, she had pumped up her bust. Nor for any erotic reasons, but just to supply him with various products he would need. To do this, she had loaded up her bra.

I’ll say: When prison guards inspected her more closely they found in there:

• 5 “mini-telephones” with their chargers
• 1 Sim card (OK, those are small)
• 5 grams of cannabis
• 2 packages of cigarette rolling papers
• 1 recharge for an electronic cigarette
• 20 euros cash; and, get this . . .
• 2 packets of meat (further unspecified)

Quite the heavy load! I bet she was glad to get all that off her chest, even if it turned out to be in quite another room within the prison building than what she expected, prior to her being led off to incarceration herself.

The unnamed author of this piece characterizes this cargo as something out of Prévert, that is, Jacques Prévert who was a prominent post-World War II French poet. Unfortunately, I don’t know anything of his work. In any case, in view of this episode’s setting in Rouen, my own mind is cast much more in the direction of Emma Bovary, that protagonist of Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel who was so confused about love and men, and whose sad fictional existence was set in and around that city (where Flaubert himself lived most of his life).

Smuggling stuff – a lot of stuff – hidden in one’s bra to one’s lover: surely this the sort of incident Flaubert could have come up with for his fiction. Well, almost: Wikipedia reminds us that the bra was not even patented until 1889 (and that was in Germany; Flaubert himself died in 1880). Then again, the word brassiere originally came from Norman French (Rouen is the capital of Normandy) meaning a child’s undershirt. (Note: as you can see in the tweet, in French they use the word soutien-gorge.)

We all like green energy, right? In particular, we all like sun energy, and we all like wind energy. I mean, it’s like simply plucking megawatts out of the sky for free – once you’ve made your initial investment in equipment and installation, to be sure. And while we also have recently become aware of some downsides to big windmill-parks – their funny noise, their ugliness (to some), the fact they kill birds – if you just put them offshore, everything should be OK, right? Whom could they bother out there?

Well, think again. In particular, I put up that great photo of the NW France offshore cathedral/monastery Mont-Saint-Michel (credit: Olivier Boitet) for a reason, mainly to ask you to add some windmills to the picture with your imagination, and see what you think then. For that is precisely the news we get from a local French newspaper called Ouest-France (to which I was referred by an article in Le Parisien): windmills are coming, so it seems, to the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel. (more…)

Kate Brumback – a very un-French name, but there you go – writes today in the on-line Nouvel Observateur about an interesting book, published just yesterday (and only in French so far), entitled Chirac contre Bush, L’autre guerre (“Chirac Against Bush: The Other War), by Henri Vernet and Thomas Cantaloube. Both are reporters for the newspaper Le Parisien, and the research they conducted on American-French relations in the run-up to the spring, 2003 invasion of Iraq, by Coalition forces which of course did not include the French, turned up a couple of interesting revelations. (more…)

Saddam Hussein is still in US custody, held at some secret location within Iraq, but presumably he will eventually be put on public trial in some way. That is certainly the plan announced by President Bush at the time of his capture, although exact details on the form, place, and machinery of this trial have been few and far between. This still raises the issue of legal defense – as in, who will conduct that for Saddam whenever the trial does happen. Recent developments seem to point to the involvement here of French nationals. (Wouldn’t you just know it? Pass me some more of those “freedom fries” . . .)

These happenings have yet to see much coverage on the on-line American press, at least judging from what I could come up with via Google News. The best article I could find introducing Jacques Vergès, the “cigar-chomping French attorney” supposedly preparing Saddam’s legal defense, was from the New York Post (and those editors neglectfully leave out the “e avec accent grave” – that is, the “è” – that makes up a vital part of this Frenchman’s last name). But that’s all OK, because there has been plenty of French coverage, and these writers not only get the accent right but also have plenty of material in the files about the past antics of Me Vergès (“Me” for maître, the French title for a lawyer). (more…)

Now that we’ve already covered German reporting and commentary on Jacques Chirac acting to represent German interests during the second day of the European summit in Brussels (today, in fact), let’s look at the French side. Another day’s passing has even allowed the time for more detailed, nuanced coverage to spring up in the French press, and so I concentrate on these recent articles. (more…)