My NewsSign Out Sign InCreate your free profileSections news Alerts With fewer than 10 days until France casts its votes in the first round of the presidential election suggesting his deft handling of last month’s shootings in Toulouse won’t be enough to protect him from anger at the state of the economy Three opinion polls showed the incumbent's narrow lead over challenger Francois Hollande is steady or shrinking for the April 22 first round and Sarkozy is still expected to lose the subsequent May 6 runoff "He’s been trailing Hollande in the second round pretty consistently," Justin Vaïsse a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution "It’s hard to see where the reservoir of votes would come from to make him win." Sarkozy saw his lead for the first ballot slip to half a percentage point from two points a week ago in a poll by Ipsos Logica with 29 percent support to Hollande's 28.5 percent Socialist Party candidate for the 2012 French presidential election poses for a photo with a supporter in Aubervilliers The same poll showed Hollande retaining a 10-point lead in voting intentions for the May 6 runoff with 55 percent to Sarkozy's 45 percent An Ifop Fiducial poll showed Sarkozy with 28.5 percent to Hollande's 27 percent in round one unchanged over the last month - but Hollande's lead in the run-off narrowed to six points from eight points two weeks ago A third poll by Harris Interactive gave Sarkozy a one-point lead in the first round at 28 percent to Hollande's 27 It too put Hollande ahead of Sarkozy 53 to 47 in the runoff All three polls indicated far-right candidate Marine Le Pen had strengthened her position in third place ahead of hard left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon in fourth bringing political ads to radio and TV stations and giant posters to the streets But the race started months ago for the 10 candidates and some experts say the most interesting days are already behind us France's National Front head and far right candidate for 2012 French presidential election "Overall it’s been a boring campaign," Vaïsse said adding that over the past few weeks the race has been bogged down by small issues such as halal meat and the cost of earning a driving license the 2007 race that Sarkozy won focused on issues such as unemployment and European disunity Polls show the electorate is growing weary of the rhetoric as well A recent national survey found 32 percent of respondents don't plan on hitting the polls nonresident senior fellow at Brookings and term member of the Council on Foreign Relations The turnout in the 2007 elections was about 80 percent The shift in campaign rhetoric occurred early this year when Sarkozy went from talking about his important role in the partnership with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in saving the Eurozone to discussing immigration and threatening to pull France out of Schengen He went from being the "locomotive of Europe" to playing the anti-Europe card the nation's debt and deficit and education are bigger priorities than Islam and immigration But for the right-wing voters Sarkozy is trying to coax to his side That conversation took center stage following a deadly shooting in Toulouse a 23-year-old Frenchman killed three Jewish schoolchildren a rabbi and three French paratroopers in three separate attacks The Toulouse shootings allowed Sarkozy to act presidential His handling of the crisis was reflected by a slight uptick in the polls but Vaïsse said the Toulouse effect is unlikely to make a big difference in the long run the election is a referendum on how Sarkozy and his government handled the economic crisis With unemployment at a 12-year high and France stripped of its AAA status by one credit rating agency the Bank of France offered no redemption for Sarkozy's economic record Sarkozy advocates financial discipline and austerity but that's not enough to solve the growth problem Hollande has pledged to balance the budget in 2017, Bloomberg reported while Sarkozy promised to reach the target a year earlier the country's public deficit stood at 5.2 percent in 2011 "We will keep to the fixed plan of reducing our public deficit to 3 percent [of GDP] in 2013," Hollande said in an interview with La Tribune Hollande said he would finance his plan of increasing spending by 20 billion euros by repealing 29 billion euros of tax breaks for the rich While the race for re-election is an uphill battle for Sarkozy there remains a small possibility he can scrape his way to a second term in office if he wins in the first round and picks up some support from the centrist candidate's electorate it’s hard to see how he’ll be able to make it," he added North Korea's rocket breaks up after launch Ex-spy chief looms over election in Egypt 'Fit as a fiddle' Mugabe returns to Zimbabwe after illness rumors Aged-nun accused in Spanish baby-stealing cases London bans 'gay cure' ads from buses Follow us on Twitter: @msnbc_world The economic ravages of the First World War had cut her annual income by about sixty per cent She’d recently bought and begun to renovate a country house where she installed new black-and-white marble floors in the dining room replaced a “humpy” lawn with seven acres of lavish gardens She was still paying rent at her apartment at 53 Rue de Varenne in Paris—a grand flat festooned with carved-wood cherubs and ornate fireplaces New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows. and Dutch-still-life feasts that populate these tales of the one per cent The glamour and excess is bait for readers and viewers who want to admire the trappings of wealth even as they root for the downfall of the wealthy the novel is conditioning its readers in how to watch and judge All the main players are in their opera boxes observing one another instead of the production of “Faust.” Newland Archer enters the club box at the old Academy of Music “the foremost authority on ‘form’ in New York,” swivels his opera glass toward the same box and catches a glimpse of Ellen Olenska who takes in the Countess Olenska—freshly returned home to the United States abusive marriage in Europe—and proclaims his amazement that she would dare to show her face in public We’re watching the characters watch one another “One can’t be alone for a minute in that great seminary of a house or a newspaper,” Ellen complains about Skuytercliff “Is there nowhere in an American house where one may be by oneself?” Newland and Ellen dash around looking for privacy that they can only find far outside the city when they lunch along the river outside Boston or rattle home in a carriage from the train station in Jersey City Dinner-party guests glance down the table to see what affects their remarks provoke; they spy carriages that are in front of houses they ought not to be; Newland notes that even the “livery-stable-keepers butlers and cooks” know who is free each evening Novelists before Wharton understood that storytelling was an act of exposure but she built it into the architecture of “The Age of Innocence” and weaponized it And status made her story more than believable—it made the story real When Wharton showed her dear friend and lover Walter Berry the book But of course you and I are the only people who will ever read it We are the last people left who can remember New York and Newport as they were then and nobody else will be interested.” Wharton writes in “A Backward Glance,” that she “secretly agreed with him.” But readers on the cusp of the Roaring Twenties were hungry for glitz for entertainment that ran contrary to their own depleted With an exacting penchant for real-life details (she researched what months and years “Faust” played at the opera and what flowers men wore in buttonholes in the evening) Wharton homed in on the details that would make “The Age of Innocence” feel like a tour of a mercifully bygone era Although Wharton spent her youth observing people like these up close a series of unusual decisions—her broken engagement to the son of a déclassé social climber; her marriage to the down-and-out unstable Teddy Wharton; her pursuit of a public career—pushed her further and further outside the nest Wharton occupied a strange place among the moneyed—still respected but just enough of a wild card to get away with living however she pleased who lives in a strangely furnished mansion “in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park,” after her great-aunt Mrs but it’s hard not to see shades of Wharton herself—remote because of its near-fetishistic attention to household detail—Mrs Wharton would have expected nothing less.) Wharton’s taste is what makes the minutely chronicled interiors of “The Age of Innocence” such artful character assassinations The general style is for what Wharton cuttingly calls “a grim harmony of cabbage-rose-garlanded carpets round-arched fire-places with black marble mantels and immense glazed book-cases of mahogany.” May’s drawing room which is considered “a great success” by her peers features “sofas and armchairs of pale brocade  cleverly grouped about little plush tables densely covered with silver toys porcelain animals and efflorescent photograph frames.” It’s cloying and claustrophobic “boldly planned” mansion is so overloaded it might as well be neon with every expense put on display for maximum effect Even the plants are expensive; in the conservatory “camellias and tree ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo.” When Newland imagines himself trapped in his future marriage to May it’s the house that he pictures: “a Pompeian vestibule into a hall with a wainscoting of varnished yellow wood,” “purple satin and yellow tuftings,” “sham Buhl tables and gilt vitrines full of modern Saxe.” A stilted life of repetition and tchotchkes In “A Backward Glance,” Wharton railed against cramming “every room with curtains wobbly velvet-covered tables littered with silver gew-gaws and festoons of lace on mantelpieces and dressing-tables.” She knew that these private homes were practically sacred to their owners and that unveiling and ridiculing them publicly was aggressive But their proportions and embellishments are also awe-inspiring—malachite fireplaces three drawing rooms in a row (one done in sea-green These are houses we now visit in their new iterations as museums and post to our Instagram feeds as markers of culture The sheer bounty of stuff is impressive to most A French billboard advertiser scaled back a campaign for the Jewish dating site JDate after its billboards were vandalized a regional director for the JC Decaux billboard giant said his company decided to pull 18 billboards out of 100 advertising JDate and which carried the site’s Star of David-shaped logo The reason was “vandalism against out property (swastika graffiti and broken windowpanes),” he told the French Jewish news site Juif.org it was to avoid the proliferation of such acts,” he added “was commercial and does not represent any position on the issue.” Many of the withdrawn posters advertised JDate in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre Jewish worshippers found the remains of a freshly slaughtered wild boar on the doorstep of the Saint-Brice-sous-Foret synagogue north of Paris swastikas were discovered on the façade of the Chabad synagogue as Boulogne- Billancourt I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward American Jews need independent news they can trust At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S rising antisemitism and polarized discourse This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up Copyright © 2025 The Forward Association French supermarket chain Carrefour has launched a new pet store concept in Paris in collaboration with Invivo Retail’s pet care brand Noa The new 190sqm shop-in-shop opens at the Saint-Brice-sous-Foret hypermarket to the north of the city featuring a broad selection of petcare products (including specialist brands) sold by expert vendor-advisers responding to an increasing trend in owner investment in pet health and wellbeing coupled with a rising demand for personal advice and support from experts Visitors to the store can elect to have their pet’s wellbeing checked in the “paravet” area as they shop “The Noa concept is in line with Carrefour’s desire to provide new in-store shopping experiences through specialist offerings and bespoke advice for dogs and cats,” said Carrefour Hypermarkets in France executive director Marie Cheval “This project is in line with our plan to transform accelerate and give impetus to our new Noa pet care brand as part of an original shop-in-shop concept,” said Invivo Retail CEO Guillaume Darrasse “enhancing the customer experience and more specifically serving animal lovers” Contact our editorial team Octomedia publication Start Your Plant-Based Journey For $8/month* With The Forks Meal Planner! Get It Now Over the last year, I’ve lost more than 60 pounds. The benefits go deeper than the weight loss. I cut my weight in half on a whole-food, plant-based diet. My total cholesterol dropped to 122, and the painful bloating I’d struggled with for years finally subsided. culinary tips and special offers from Forks Over Knives and our curated partners By providing your email address, you consent to receive newsletter emails from Forks Over Knives. We value your privacy and will keep your email address safe. You may unsubscribe from our emails at any time.