Ok, for anyone in the future (including me) who may be looking to this platform for an answer to this very question, the answer is it's totally normal and don't worry about it. Also, when at the machine you swipe the phone closed, not open. You are welcome.

RT @niewview: ✨ FAIR is Book of the Day in The Guardian ✨

Is it normal, when you've bought a RER ticket via Bonjour RATP app, to open your Navigo app and see only the home screen? I am told my ticket is stored on this app, but. nothing showing.

RT @bphillipsonMP: It’s time we got our country reading again. We’re joining with @Literacy_Trust to make 2026 our national year of readin….

RT @NinaParish: Looking forward to receiving and reading your books!.

RT @french_studies: Submissions for the 2025 R. Gapper book prize are now open. The closing date is 29 August 2025. For more information….

RT @branwenjeffreys: In my interview with him Arif Ahmed made it clear that peaceful campus protests are key to freedom of expression - and….

Anyone else been asked by a publisher if you are happy to have your book sucked up by AI in return for a royalty payment? I am impressed that the publisher is asking for permission but suspect we are not talking about a lot of money.

RT @WendyBennett21: Jonathan McBride looks at the power of stories in the language learning classroom in this week's LSP opinion piece. He….

Did they imagine their friend would be somehow embarrassed by these images, were he to see them? Whatever Jeanne's motivations, it seems clear that she is presenting, in these portraits, her own version of herself. Chapeau, Jeanne. It's so lovely to see you. 13/13.

(Baudelaire was well known by now, so perhaps she made the sensible argument that an image of her would be worth something)? Nadar's photo has lain undiscovered for 160+ years, and Manet seems to have kept his portrait from Baudelaire's sight. 12/13.

to his close friend and publisher Auguste Poulet-Malassis, to make money, but also, he suspected, to embarrass him. Might she have asked both Nadar and Manet, both also v. close friends of the poet, to make her portrait in return for much-needed money 11/13.

Her fan is pointing to it. (Weirdly, the exact same fan -- same colour, same position -- features prominently in Manet's Music in the Tuileries, also of 1862). Anyway, a few months before the photo was taken, Baudelaire alleged that Jeanne had tried to sell his books 10/13

(or am I seeing things?). In some cultures, this is the wedding finger. 9/13

Duval, known as "Baudelaire's Mistress, reclining", from the same year, 1862. It is not a very flattering painting. In it, Jeanne (if it is indeed her) extends a strangely oversized right hand. If you zoom in, again, she seems to be wearing a ring on the fourth finger 8/13

Jeanne was certainly presenting a different version of herself, in this photograph, than the one that was in circulation at the time, and that continues to circulate, thanks to Les Fleurs du Mal: a vampire-like devourer of men. There is a painting by Manet, apparently of 7/13.

Zoom in on the left hand. The wedding finger. She surely wouldn't have borrowed this ring. She and Baudelaire were effectively married as common-law spouses, though they had broken up well over a year before this photo was taken. 6/13

But the really interesting thing for me is the (hyper) bourgeois self-presentation. (@summerbrennan .has a fascinating insight about the bonnet + bow on her substack.) Jeanne may of course have borrowed the clothes from Nadar's studio. But there's something more here. 5/13.

The foot cushion could suggest concealment or support of a paralysed leg. I don't know enough about how often cushions peeped out from below skirts in photographic portraits of the time. Do others know? 4/13.

Here is a close-up of her face, for proof. 4/13