Dear Croissant,

What if the goal of the path isn't to get anywhere at all, but to find yourself, to discover who you are?

« The Odyssey » (2026) by Christopher Nolan

“A WESTERN AT SEA”

THE REAL HISTORY

Four centuries passed from the time real Bronze Age warriors saw their cities fall (1200 BCE) until a poet named Homer turned them into a book (800 BCE). It is the equivalent of us writing an adventure novel today based solely on rumors and songs passed down orally about the year 1626.

PARIS PARIS PARIS

In the center of Paris (75004), there is a tower standing in the middle of a park. It is the Tour Saint-Jacques, built in the Flamboyant Gothic style (1509–1523), and it marks the beginning of the Camino de Santiago from Paris via the Via Turonensis, which passes through Tours. Legend says the church was founded by Charlemagne, earning it a UNESCO World Heritage inscription in 1998 alongside 70 other buildings in France.

Dear Croissant,

This is the aperitif for this new article series: Imaginary. With our heavy, constant use of screens as well as the use of AI (like this very article), we are being stripped of something as basic, necessary, and easy as the imagination.

EXPO: UNICORNS AT THE CLUNY MUSEUM

A museum to literally lose your head over—you can ask the kings and saints who used to hang on the walls of Notre Dame many years ago. Recently, I went to the unicorn exhibition at the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art. It’s a very old institution, dating back to the 19th century, and it already had millions of visitors when it first opened back then. I hadn't been until now…

Dear Croissant,

A while ago—not a year, but several months now (I wish much more time had passed, to be honest—laughs)—I went out on a date with a guy who asked me if mermaids exist. I didn't find it cute; he was asking in earnest, and according to what he’d told me, he’s a doctor. Oh well. I told him they did exist, and there was no second date: you start by believing in mermaids and you end up believing that relationship is real. Keep my secret—I do believe in them, in unicorns, and in dragons. Understand me, I believe in them knowing they don’t exist, but I think it’s better to believe in beautiful, magical things than to accept that the world is cold and boring.

Originally, sirens in Classical Greece were birds with the heads of women who lived on rocky islands. In art and cinema, women were depicted as a danger to men.

"Miss Mermaid" Pauline Brunner and Marion Verlé (2026)

Everyone knows that moving back into your parents' house makes you act a bit like a teenager, and Fanny doesn't tell them about her aspirations: becoming professional mermaid.

Dear Croissant,

This Sunday, breakfast is a glass of wine during a medieval siege of our tower. For lunch, meat pie—it’s the closest thing to pastry that appears in this serie. Of course, it is poisoned right up to the table; everyone knows that in "Game of Thrones," you win or you die. The air in Paris feels like it's coming out of an oven, and in the chambres de bonne they are—we are—at 60°C. Well, not in mine, at least not for now. I’m lucky; mine is small but it has 3 windows and 2 fireplaces. Destiny brings unexpected gifts; I always wanted to live in a Parisian attic room with an antique fireplace, and I got not one but two. Cool fireplaces, though—making fires is forbidden. Despite the heat…

Dear Croissant, this week we continue our journey through fiction, today to an imaginary future. At their core, utopias and dystopias are two sides of the same speculative coin. Here is a concise breakdown of how philosophers, theologians, and authors have shaped these concepts, along with their modern subgenres and their specific relationship with Paris.

Dear Croissant, this week we continue our journey through fiction, time and space and, this time, in very good company with our friends the robots. Funny, necessary, dangerous, disturbing... just like what we are experiencing right now with AI, in fiction these new lives, these technological lives created by us, are also protagonists of their own circumstances, duties, dreams, and adventures.

18 ROBOTS MOVIE & SERIE LIST

38 SCI-FI MOVIE LIST

Sci-fi fashion uses clothing to show future societies technology or human evolution Famous designers often collaborate with directors to create iconic looks.

This week we continue with the series "Fiction but Future. Chapter 2: SCI-FI," where we explore the universe of narrative, storytelling, and fiction in its most imaginative genre: science fiction. Since AI is all the rage right now, and this whole thing is really a personal exercise to understand it and become friends—almost like a Self-Sci-Fi experiment (a nod to last week's article)—this Sunday I’ve let AI co-write the information with me. This leaves me with more time and energy for what I love and what is mine to do: conceptualizing and drawing.