The new socialist president of France and his prime minister create a lefty government with plenty of estrogen and a dash of crunchy granola. Yes! See the full-size infographic.

via @pascalcardonna

In two volumes, now available through the BNF site: The Notebooks of Edgar Degas : a catalogue of the thirty-eight notebooks in the Bibliothèque nationale and other collections

Article about the notebooks (in French): Les carnets de Degas, pour entrer dans les arcanes de sa création artistique | Gallica.

A couple years after his album Préliminaires, featuring some French classics (which we covered here), Iggy Pop is about to release Après, a collection of classic torch songs, ballads and French variété. We just love the way he wraps his destroyed voice around those French songs. Seems somehow appropriate.

Read the complete song selection and more at Rock Cellar Magazine. You can buy the albums at our Amazon store! Après / Préliminaires

Perry Taylor captures the spirit of South West France in his humorous drawings of the locals, their lifestyle, culture, heritage, animals and sports.

If you’re lucky enough to be going to the Jazz in Marciac festival, he’ll have a gallery there (Galerie rue des cinq parts), and he’ll be at other events in the region as well. Visit Perry Taylor Art for all event dates and his online gallery and shop, where you can order original ink drawings or giclée prints on A4 and A3 art paper, signed by the artist!

An 18th-century portrait sold in New York to a British gallery as a “woman in a feathered hat” turns out to actually portray a man dressed as a woman, becoming the earliest known painting of a transvestite. (Read how they figured it out…)

The portrait is of Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont, a French diplomat, spy, soldier and Freemason whose first 49 years were spent as a man, and whose last 33 years were spent as a woman.

Seems the makers of the 24-episode Japanese animé series, Le Chevalier d’Eon, took a lot of liberties with the Chevalier’s history! And his appearance… Watch the trailer.

Meet Nénette who, at 40, is the oldest resident of the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris. The Parisians love her. See the trailer of the award-winning documentary about her made by French filmmaker Nicolas Philibert.

Poaching and palm oil plantations are killing off the orangutans. If you care about them, there are several ways you can help through Orangutan Outreach.

We had the pleasure to meet Ms. Kawamura when she was showing her lovely watercolors of Paris in our neighborhood, and thought we’d share her work with you. She lives in Paris and you can reach her through her Contact page.

When confined to his bed, Matisse would sketch on the ceiling by attaching brushes and charcoal to a long pole. As painting became more difficult, he focused intently on the sleek, stylized paper cutouts he had first started experimenting with in the 1930s, using scissors to create the sinewy shapes and swaths of color that he could no longer render directly on canvas.

This is currently being exhibited in Pittsburgh. Read about the work and the exhibit here: Matisse’s The Thousand and One Nights in Pittsburgh – WSJ.com.

If you’d like to sleep inside a fairy tale, you might want to pay a visit to La Balade des Gnômes, a quiet bed and breakfast where you can live out your fairy tale dreams, including one inside the belly of a wooden bull.

Details and pictures of interiors at io9.

Save the date for the Acadian World Congress 2014! Details: Congrès mondial acadien 2014.