Durandal, a mythical sword that had been lodged in a rock wall in the French village of Rocamadour for the last 1,300 years, has suddenly disappeared, presumably stolen.

Durandal was often described as the French equivalent of the much more famous Excalibur, King Arthur’s legendary sword. Legend has it that an angel gave Durandal to the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne, who in turn entrusted it to his faithful knight, Roland. It is mentioned in the 11th-century poem The Song of Roland, which claims that its magical power came from containing the tooth of St Peter, the blood of St Basil, and the hair of St Denis. Roland is said to have tried to break his trusty sword after being wounded at the battle of Roncevaux Pass, to keep it from falling into the hands of the Saracens. However, Durandal was indestructible, so instead he hurled it towards the sky, and the sword landed in a giant rock, where it allegedly remained ever since. Until recently, anyway…

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A French man is being accused of painting his Porsche sports car another color to avoid hefty penalties after being caught speeding and failing to stop despite being signaled to do so by police.

On June 2nd, French police used a speed radar to catch a motorist driving at a speed of 188 km/h on a road limited to 80 km/h near Cournonsec, southwest of Montpellier. They notified a gendarmerie unit near the Poussan motorway to stop the offender, but when they signaled the car to pull over, it just flew past them with no intention of stopping. Surprised by the car’s vehicle, the gendarmes were unable to chase down the offender or even get its license plate. However, they wrote down in their report that the car was a bright green Porsche 911 sports car, which made it relatively easy to identify. However, when the only person in the area known to drive a green Porsche turned up at the police station, officers were shocked to find that his sports car was now grey.

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A French woman is taking telecom giant Orange to court for “moral harassment and discrimination at work,” accusing the company of paying her for 20 years without giving her any tasks.

Laurence Van Wassenhove was recruited as a civil servant by France Telecom in 1993 before the company was taken over by Orange. Her original employer knew that she was hemiplegic – partial paralysis of the face and limbs – from birth and suffered from epilepsy, and offered her a position adapted to her medical conditions. She worked as a secretary and in the HR department until 2002 when she asked to be transferred to another region of France. Her request was approved, but her new workplace was not adapted to her needs, and an occupational medicine report confirmed that the position was not suited for her. Despite this, Orange allegedly failed to make any adjustments to her job, preferring to pay her full salary for the next 20 years, without giving her anything to do.

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A 68-year-old French woman diagnosed with Noah’s Syndrome has been given a one-year suspended sentence for keeping 159 cats and 7 dogs in her 80sqm (861sqft) apartment.

The unnamed woman and her 52-year-old male partner got into a dispute with neighbors in their Nice apartment building because of the mess and filth caused by their dozens of pets. Police were eventually called and the state of the woman’s apartment shocked them. There was animal excrement everywhere, over 150 cats and seven dogs, as well as at least two dead cats and two dogs in the bathroom. Many of the animals were dehydrated, suffering from malnutrition, or infected with parasites, and some of them subsequently died because of their health problems. The elderly woman admitted that she had “screwed up” while trying to take care of her many pets, but described the animals as “the love of her life”.

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This is the heartbreaking story of a 9-year-old boy forced to live by himself in a cold apartment for two years after his mother moved in with her boyfriend 3 miles away.

French newspapers recently reported the sad and shocking story of a boy who lived alone in a low-income housing unit in Nersac for two long years after being abandoned by his mother who went to live with her boyfriend in a nearby town. Between 2020 and 2022, the unnamed boy survived mainly on sweets, canned food, and handouts from neighbors, while his mother lived comfortably at her boyfriend’s house, just 5 kilometers away, in Sireuil. She only came by once in a blue moon to check up on him and bring him some food, but she never stayed long and she never once took him to her place. It was because of these sporadic visits that neighbors took so long to realize that the boy was living by himself and finally call the police about it.

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A small town in western France has gone viral for marking a busy intersection with overlapping white lines in order to confuse motorists and make them slow down.

The town of Bauné, near Angers, is home to only about 1,700 people, but it has to deal with heavy traffic on a daily basis, because of its location at the crossroads between two departmental roads – D74 and D82. Some of the roughly 2,300 that pass through Bauné every day can have speeds of over 100 km/h (60mph), even though the town’s intersection is clearly marked with signs limiting the speed at 30 km/h. In order to get drivers to slow down, local authorities came up with the idea of using confusing road markings in the form of overlapping continuous lines. Interestingly enough, the strategy worked like a charm!

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Animal rescuers in Brittany, France were stunned by a wild duck that seemed to lead a perfectly normal life despite having a knife stuck in its neck.

Nicknamed Donald the Duck by the members of the Pinocchio et Sauvageons association, the mallard with a red knife handle sticking out of the left side of his neck had long attracted the attention of people in Saint-Nolff, north-western France. What really stunned those who saw the wild duck was how unaffected he seemed by the wound, swimming alongside other ducks, walking around on its webbed feet and being able to feed normally. However, animal rescuers at Pinocchio et Sauvageons worried that the knife could become a serious problem with time, so they decided to take it out.

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A young couple in France is currently engaged in a legal battle for the right to name their baby ‘Hades’, a name made famous by the god of the underworld from Greek mythology.

Kristina Desgres and Rodrigo Velasquez, a young couple from the historic French port city of Saint-Malo, which happens to have the highest and most spectacular tides in Europe, had their first baby in September of last year. However, they still don’t have their ‘livret de Famille, a mandatory document obtained when a child is born or adopted by an individual or a couple, because the public prosecutor of Saint-Malo refuses to accept the baby’s name. Baby Hades is a little angel, but to anyone familiar with Greek mythology, his name is synonymous with the god of the underworld, the realm of the dead.

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A 23-year-old successful French YouTuber recently shocked her nation by announcing that she plans to undergo assisted suicide to deal with her dissociative identity disorder (DID).

Le Journal d’Olympe is a popular YouTube channel with over 250,000 subscribers where a young French woman documents her life with dissociative identity disorder a mental condition formerly known as multiple personality disorder. The 23-year-old was reportedly the victim of severe trauma growing up and has developed a number of alternate personalities as a result. They sometimes take over and constantly having to struggle with this has apparently become too much for the young woman. She recently announced her plan to undergo assisted euthanasia in Belgium at the end of 2023.

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A French homeless man who built his own intricate castle out of recycled foam after losing his apartment has been notified by authorities to tear it down because it poses a danger.

David, a 53-year-old former animator from Toulouse, France, has been homeless for over a year, after reportedly losing his apartment to squatting. With nowhere else to go, he had no choice but to sleep in a tent on the outskirts of Tournefeuille, a town on the banks of the Touch River. One day, an old woman stopped in front of his tent and said “that’s not very clean,” so he decided to upgrade his temporary abode to something more visually appealing. Using his experience as an animator, he steadily built himself a fairytale castle out of recycled and painted blocks of foam found in dumpsters. Before long, his home became a popular attraction for both children and adults.

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A French court recently ruled that a man fired from a consulting firm for not being fun enough at the workplace has the right to be as boring as he likes.

In 2015, Cubik Partners, a French management consultancy based in Paris, fired Mr. T, whose full name was not disclosed for privacy reasons, arguing that he was difficult to work with, a poor listener, and simply boring. What the company apparently meant, however, was that Mr. T didn’t go out with his colleagues enough after work, as part of the company’s “fun-based” approach to team building. The employee, on the other hand, clarified that he simply refused to forcibly partake in various excesses, such as consuming large quantities of alcohol and even sharing a bed with colleagues afterward.

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Pheasant Island is a tiny island on the border between Spain and France that alternates ownership status between the two countries every six months.

Located on the Bidasoa River, the natural border between Spain and France, Pheasant Island is a deserted patch of land with a rather fascinating history and political status. It might not look like much today, but hundreds of years ago it was where the Thirty Years’ War between Spain and France finally ended. The two countries sent a couple of their most important dignitaries to the island to negotiate, with their respective armies gathered on both sides of the Bidasoa, in case things went wrong. 11 years and 24 summits later, a deal was struck, and Pheasant Island became the world’s smallest condominium, under the joint sovereignty of the two nations.

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Saint Malo, a historic French port on the English Channel coast, is famous for having the highest tides in Europe, with breakwater defenses barely keeping giant waves from slamming into residential buildings.

Seeing Saint Malo at low tide and then again at high tide is like looking at two completely different towns. The buildings and the way they are laid out are the same, but the existence of a beach as wide as the eye can see at one point, and the complete lack thereof just a few hours later is truly strange. And not only does the ocean come in hard at high tide, but it’s strong as well, with giant waves pounding against the waterfront and splashing up to the top of exposed buildings.

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A 31-year-old woman was recently sentenced to 2 years in prison for impersonating a physician and then an ophthalmologist for years without any medical training.

It all started in 2018, when Sonia, a 31-year-old woman from Meaux, in northern France, decided to try her luck as a physician, without undergoing any medical training. Sonia had a bachelor’s degree in real estate management, but she didn’t let that get in the way of attaining a lucrative job as a general physician. The woman forged a bunch of diplomas from the Faculty of Strasbourg and a false certificate on the board of the Order of Physicians, and not only got the job, but saw patients for three years before anyone noticed she had no business being a doctor.

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For centuries, people have been asking themselves what the source of the underground spring known as Fosse Dionne spring in France’s Burgundy region might be, but they never got to the bottom of it, because they literally couldn’t get to the bottom of it.

The Fosse Dionne is a huge upsurge of water around which the town of Tonnerre was built. For as long as anyone can remember it has been spewing massive amounts of water, with a flow of around 311 liters of water per second on a regular basis, which can increase to 3,000 liters per second in rainy weather conditions. The Romans used it for drinking water, the Celts considered it sacred, and the French used it as a public bathhouse during the 1700s, but no one has ever been able to locate its source. Many have tried, some have died trying, but the source of the Fosse Dionne remains a mystery.

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