🇫🇷 France
Oddlets from France.
The Vanishing of the Inventor of Cinema
Three weeks before the demonstration that would have made him the undisputed inventor of cinema, he boarded a train and stopped existing.
I Have Not The Time
In prison, drunk for the first time, he told his cellmates he would die in a duel over a woman. Nine months later, a woman wrote him a letter.
The Guest of Honor
What does it take for a toll collector who painted tigers in his off-hours to end up enthroned on a packing crate at a banquet thrown by Picasso?
The Valet
How does a disguise that fooled 116 French sailors for sixteen months collapse the instant its wearer steps onto a Tahitian beach?
The Woman Who Wouldn't Look Up
She rode on crusade, got hauled out of Antioch in the dead of night, was caught fleeing in men's clothes at fifty, ran England at sixty-seven — and then she designed her own tomb.
The Chevalier Who Wouldn't Lie Down
What kind of person enters a fencing tournament against an entire garrison while their brain is swelling inside their skull?
The Man Who Kept the Schedule
What do you find when you open a grave that belonged to a man who never stopped walking?
The Man Who Called for a Fictional Doctor
A man who had invented 2,472 people died asking one of them to save him.
The Woman Who Rewrote French Opera With a Sword at Her Hip
She broke a woman out of a convent by stealing a dead nun's body, and then went back to singing.
The Paper Men Who Launched a Barnyard Into the Sky
The king suggested testing the balloon on condemned prisoners. The Montgolfiers had a better idea.
The Postman Who Built a Palace
He tripped on a stone in 1879 and spent the next thirty-three years building a palace out of the ones he found on the way home.
The Man Who Never Opened His Mail
When Satie died, his friends entered his apartment for the first time in twenty-seven years.