Garlic & Pearls

Muriel introduces Suzanne to a teasing paradox: Monoprix stores crop up in city and town centres all over France, and yet 87% of French people never shop there. How can this be? This is a breathless tale of the buccaneering French high street, in which a thrifty magasin populaire imagined during the 1930s Depression is transformed into quite a different beast – urban, chic and pop, but still selling tins and knickers. Somewhere in the bowels of Monoprix HQ, a team of package designers are writing puns – but why? And the midst of Monoprix's history, there is an interlude when its founder joins the French Resistance. So how is Monoprix an expression of Frenchness? How do French people feel when they shop there? How does it, with its playful optimism, cater for a sort of dream life as well as real life? And, Suzanne wonders, does Monoprix have a British equivalent? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The dark is rising, and Suzanne is on hand to make the back of your neck prickle with the creepy, poetic and quintessentially British ghost stories of Montague Rhodes James, aka MR James. Enter a twilit world of marshes and mists, country houses and seaside inns, where curiosity leads tweedy gentlemen scholars to unspeakable horrors: a hairy ghoul rises out of a manuscript; a hooded figure crawls ever closer towards the edge of a mezzotint; a bronze whistle summons an ancient figure of terror. But what would you do, faced with an intriguing and sinister object? And how did Suzanne come to be in possession of a haunted portrait? Happy Halloween! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Things get rather raffish and French as Muriel entices Suzanne into that most Gallic of spaces - the boudoir - and tells her everything she ever wanted to know about it but was afraid to ask. What actually happens in that room? What is it for? We open the door on the dazzling boudoirs of the 18th-century elite, filled with art and chinoiserie, on exquisite women’s retreats and on men’s delirious dens of debauchery. The Marquis de Sade, Balzac, Baudelaire and John Malkovich put in a appearance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

They seek him here; they seek him there... Suzanne gives Muriel a riveting rendering of The Scarlet Pimpernel, Hungarian émigrée Baroness Orczy's colourful and melodramatic 1905 historical novel set during the French Revolution, in which a gallant mild-mannered fop and his associates stick it to Madame Guillotine by rescuing French aristocrats on the run from bloodthirsty sans culottes and the dastardly Citoyen Chauvelin. And why do these British heroes do this? For the sport of pulling 'the hare from the teeth of the hound', of course! This is a highly romantic rendering of the French Revolution seen from the British side of the Channel, but was there in fact a real-life Scarlet Pimpernel? And what happened to French emigrés in Britain? Isambard Kingdom Brunel guest stars. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Muriel tells Suzanne the story of the printed cotton or linen known as toile de Jouy, generally printed in a single colour on a neutral background and created in the late 18th century by an enterprising German émigré, the engraving and colour specialist Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf, at his thriving manufacture of Jouy-en-Josas. Patterns of exquisite refinement were beloved of the powerful, from Queen Marie-Antoinette to the Revolutionaries and Napoleon. They also harnessed the talent of great artists and, with their pastoral scenes, Enlightenment themes and celebration of important historical events, gained long-lasting hold of the French collective imagination, feeding into how much the French enjoy telling themselves stories about being French. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.