Paris in the 1920s is such a glamorously evocative concept … You can’t help but think Ernest Hemingway and highballs, Josephine Baker and dances of wild abandon, Coco Chanel and beaded black party frocks, avant-garde artists and smouldering muses … And, most of all, fun — crazy-mad fun. Paris didn’t call these years les années […]

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France is one of the world’s leading producers of oysters, its seaside towns brimming with shacks that serve up freshly shucked delicacies from local farms. And Parisians are among the world’s most passionate consumers of oysters, that mollusc with the most seductive of reputations. Perhaps it’s because oysters have a long history of esteemed Parisians […]

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Like the perfect pas de deux, ballet and opera have been in sync in Paris since 1669, when the Sun King Louis XIV — who fancied himself as a gifted dancer as much as a benevolent patron of the arts — founded the Académie d’Opéra. Ballet was originally performed as an entr’acte during an operatic […]

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For a proudly republican country, France sure loves its traditionally religious holidays. Take, for instance, La Chandeleur — or, Candlemas — which falls on February 2nd, forty days after Christmas. Thing is, these Christian holidays are deeply embedded into the cultural fabric of France because so many go back to ancient times, being reworkings of […]

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