16.37.a - Someone stole Pushkin from the BnF. Nobody noticed.

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Bonjour, my dear friends and subscribers, both new and long-time.

Here’s what you’ll find today:

1. This week “16.37.a - Someone stole Pushkin from the BnF. Nobody noticed.

2. Feature: The books were still there. Except they weren’t.

3. This week’s ‘What’s happening in ‘MyFrenchLife™ Magazine’ - a selection of new contributors and fresh articles from across France.

4. You can also find the free newsletter ‘‘16.37→ here during the weekend.

Warm regards
Judy

19.9.2026

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ANNOUNCEMENT:

The MyFrenchLife™ French BookClub is back. DISCUSSION EVENT ADVANCE NOTICE

We’re about to start reading Live Fast (Vivre Vite) by Brigitte Giraud, 2022 Prix Goncourt winner. Now’s a great time to get the book and start reading, in French or English; our discussion will be in English as usual.

Watch for the Announcement: Mid-November date, details, and RSVP link.

I’ll be hosting together with returning co-host and valued contributor Keith Van Sickle, who suggested this book.

I’m looking forward to many of you joining us in a lively chat across multiple time zones as usual…. More later

Judy

FEATURE:

1. The books were still there. Except they weren’t.
Judy MacMahon

I was researching French libraries and found myself up to my armpits in Pushkin. Hordes of extremely valuable books were missing, and a bunch of rather clever men worked out something about trust.

Once again, my friends, I seem to have fallen into a rabbit hole, and this time it’s about French libraries. You’ll read more about them soon… as it looks as if this is going to become a whole series of its own. Let’s see where we end up! before I go on, a word of warning… This is long but it has no padding. The story just keeps getting better and better. Yes, really.

I wasn’t looking for weird library stories. I was researching something else, and then I found a story that happened to take me into a library. I followed that and found another one… and you can probably guess what happened next… yes, it seems to be a recurrent theme around here, doesn’t it? The unexpected places my curiosity and research lead me.

So, there I am… digging.

And goodness, I’ve discovered there really is some weird stuff in there. By in there, I mean the archives! French libraries seem to have quite an extraordinary history ;) Who’d have known ;)

And the weirdness is not just wonderful old books, but about people and scandals and things that have gone missing… sometimes for years. There are families whose private lives have somehow become tangled up with the libraries themselves. There’s been theft. There’ve been love affairs; and even poison, believe it or not. And wait for it… even Napoleon was found to be helping himself to other people’s collections. And I’ve now found myself staring at a reference to 30,000 missing books and wondering how you lose 30,000 of anything without somebody noticing. Extraordinary really, isn’t it?

I’m still trying to work that one out.

Anyway, I now have a rather untidy pile of all these stories spread all over my desk, and I think we could explore them together because I don’t want to turn this into a formal series. That would probably spoil it. I’d much rather keep poking around and, when I find something irresistible, bring it to you.

And that brings me to Pushkin.

I was reading about some valuable nineteenth-century books stolen from the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) when I came across a detail that I thought I was misreading.

For a while, the library didn’t know the books were gone. By “they”, I mean the books, but the books were still there. Except they weren’t. Ha!

Someone had stolen the original books and left excellent facsimiles in their place.

Wow, really? Now I was really hooked!

Really, how do you steal Pushkin from the BnF’s Arsenal site in Paris and leave the BnF believing it still has Pushkin?

And that was the point where I disappeared down the rabbit hole.

What I found next took me from Lyon to Paris, across European libraries and eventually towards Russia: fake researchers, forged books, a suspicious arm sling, 170 missing volumes, and a question I hadn’t expected to be asking at all.

Why Pushkin?

→ Upgrade to continue reading the full Deep-Dive Essay: The books were still there. Except they weren’t.

→Annual subscribers and Mighty Supporters, come with me. This one gets considerably stranger.

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