The French end-of-school exam, « le Bac », started yesterday and the papers are full of anecdotes about this rite of passage. Le Monde asks what happens to those brilliant students who sit the Bac at 15. They’re very talented...surely they go on to do great things? There’s the example of Edwin who is just thirteen years old. Most of his friends are four years behind him in school. He’s the second youngest student in the country to sit the Bac. Many of them will have to wait for years to reach the minimum age to enter university. Often, these brilliant children get frustrated with the education system, especially when they’re so much younger than their classmates. Jean-Christian Guilbert said he went through a lot of pain. He was a top maths student but said there wasn’t anything ‘nourishing’ in this and that he was unhappy. He now is a clown and a street performer and says he gets more satisfaction out of this than any of his previous activities. “I love speaking to the souls of people,” he tells Le Monde. “The clown is at the very bottom of society – he’s an idiot, a failure…He goes against the flow of our society, the direction it follows. Isn’t there a crazy freedom in that?”

From 13 years olds passing the Bac to Denis who is 79. He’s on the front page of le Dauphiné Libéré, a Grenoble-based newspaper. He left school in 1943.

“I killed my children,” reads the headline in today’s Le Parisien. Véronique Courjault was in the box yesterday on the final day of questioning for the murder of her three infant children. The verdict is due today. The ‘Frozen Children Affair’ has been gripping the French media – two of her children had been hidden in the family’s freezer. Courjault told the court yesterday, “I don’t know if I suffered from ‘pregnancy denial’. I do know that I killed my children. This is what I did,” she sobbed. She added, “I must take responsibility for this…I will bear this remorse for the rest of my life.” Her lawyers reminded the court that she has two living children who are waiting for her and who love her and not to heap more pain upon pain.

Also in Le Parisien, an article about the rather strange resemblance between the intact tail fin recovered after the crash of flight AF447 and the tail fin found after the crash of the American Airlines flight in 2001. The pilot in this flight had tried to move the A300’s tail fin in order to offset the turbulence the flight was experiencing after taking off from JFK Airport. In an A330 plane, this is usually not possible. All of that is controlled by a computer. However one of the final messages sent out by the plane showed that the tail’s alarm had been set off. It’s still as yet unsure if the loss of the tail fin was a cause of a consequence of the crash. An advance report is due to be issued at the end of the month with a summary of the possible causes of the Air France crash.

In it’s food section, today’s Libération carries an article entitled, ‘The Rosbifs (Roast Beefs /British), they’re not cakes (bad)!” A more cliché-ridden article about the British and their cooking would be difficult to find! It features a photo of Prince William at a cookery class in Eton College. This food lovers’ column is full of praise for Coronation Mayonnaise which you can buy in Marks and Spencer. It had to be imported from London, says the writer. Ever since the Paris branch of Marks and Spencer on Boulevard Haussmann shut down eight years ago, such British culinary delights are now harder to come by. We still feel like orphans of this British temple where you could get as much as you wanted of baked beans, vinegar for chips, chutney, pickles, lemon curd, brown sauce and shortbreads. The discovery of Coronation mayonnaise led this columnist to the library where he learned more about a dish called Coronation Chicken, a chicken salad recipe conceived for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953. So he proceeds to give the recipe before scoffing, imagine if there had been a special dish for the inauguration of Nicolas Sarkozy!

L’Equipe reports that the President of football club Olympique Marseille, Pape Diouf, was more or less fired yesterday. The owner of the club Robert Louise-Dreyfus gave him the option of staying but under strict supervision, conditions that Diouf couldn’t accept.The paper says that the supporters are furious. In essence, the editorial says, the political wing of the club was opposed to the “sports” wing. This was a bad decision for sports, says l’Equipe.