Seventeen for the Seventeenth

Before we begin: between this issue and the last, Lettre Recommandée officially crossed the 10,000 subscriber mark! Thank you for your support! Should we celebrate 🪩🪩🪩?

1. Can you guess the all-time bestselling PSG jersey? Mbappé? Nope. Dembélé? Nope. (Though I invite you to watch the sickest goal of the week and possibly the season. And to admire its auteur watching tennis in Agnès B.) Zlatan? I know the suspense is killing you, but you’re gonna have to guess again. It’s Kang-in Lee!

2. Let’s say you want to criticize someone’s penmanship in French. The phrase is “pattes de mouche.” Fly’s paw writing, instead of chickenscratch.

3. Or maybe you want ice in your wine. You can ask for a “piscine de blanc” or a “piscine de rosé.” (Proceed at your own risk with “piscine de rouge,” but know that my father-in-law has established precedent.)

4. Mark Twain was obsessed with Joan of Arc.

5. Joan of Arc did not have long, flowing hair. She had a bowl cut.

   

6. If you know here to look, you can find rare vintages of highly coveted wines—Romanée-Conti, Château Lafitte-Rothschild—in the wine departments of certain French supermarkets: the Intermarché La Teste-de-Buch, the Carrefour de la Toison d’Or, the Auchan in Roncq, etc.

7. What’s an “ésitériophile,” you ask? A person who collects transport tickets.

8. The Association of Accidental Americans helps people who hold U.S. nationality by flukes of birth to shed their unwanted passports. “Accidental Americans” is my favorite unintentionally existential bit of legalese since “the right to be forgotten.”

9. The fee for doing so just dropped for $2,350 to $450, thanks to a lawsuit by said association.

10. With 396 million speakers worldwide, French just passed standard Arabic to become the world’s fourth-most-spoken language, behind English, Mandarin, and Spanish. After English, it’s the second most “vehicular” language—a language that circulates beyond those who speak it as a first language.

11. 65% of the world’s francophones reside on the African continent.

12. The column on the Place de Vendôme is made from 12,000 melted down cannons that the French seized from the Russians and Austrian armies at the Battle of Austerlitz.