François de Dardel
Favourite links
Liens favoris

There are many sites. I will give you a few.

• The remarkable Web Gallery of Art is a Hungarian site (in English) with European painting and sculpture of the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque periods (1100-1850), currently containing over 27'000 reproductions. Good comments, excellent quality of the pictures. Plus music files as a bonus, from many composers of the same period.
• The Mark Harden's Artchive offers works from about 300 artists, with very good pictures. Best site of this kind so far.
• A huge site: The Art Renewal Center with mostly realistic, classic works (style pompier) with 2600 artists and 25'000 first quality pictures, from Aagard to Zurbarán, including Michelangelo, Dürer and of course Ingres. An absolute must, but slow-loading... And don't read their "Philosophy" pages.
• From the Web Museum in Paris, you can access lots of museum sites around the world. I suggest you start with the Très riches heures du duc de Berry, which is an absolute master work of the French Middle Ages.
• The Web Museum also has an artist index with some 200 painters listed, from Pieter Aertsen to Francisco de Zurbarán.
• The Vincent van Gogh Gallery is well presented, in 15 languages...
• See also my own virtual museums.

• La première BD de l'histoire ! C'est la célèbre tapisserie de la reine Mathilde.
  This 70 m (230 ft) long tapestry is the ancestor of comic strips. More seriously, it is a most delightful and moving chronicle of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. This site gives a description in English (and French) of this masterwork and provides a striking panoramic view. Interestingly, a small section of the tapestry shows the comet of Halley.
• Scène par scène (FR & EN)
• La Tapisserie de Bayeux sur YouTube vec une description complète de l'œuvre (subtitles in English).
• Toute la tapisserie défile. Cliquer sur «Explorer la tapisserie».
• See also my own virtual museum.

• French only: Littérature française. La littérature ne permet pas de marcher, mais elle permet de respirer (Roland Barthes).
• Un site entier dédié à Jean de La Fontaine, l'œuvre complète en ligne.

• I have a dedicated page of music links, listing sites with classical MIDI files and particular focus on JSB.

• See my language page. At the bottom of said page, you will find several "linkguistics" in French, and in a second page links in English or German, and one in Spanish.
• Do you want to translate a text from or to Afrikaans, Esperanto, Frisian, Latin, Turkish ? Just connect to TravLang. Of course, more usual languages are also covered. Useful to get a quick tranlation of a not too abstruse word. I made a test with the French-German dictionary. Out of 10 not very current words in my mother tongue, the dictionary supplied only 2 answers...
• For fun, visit the official Europanto site. If you know a little of French, English and a few words of German, you can probably be fluent in Europanto.
• Une mine d'informations les plus diverses sur le français, par Desiderio.
• The LEO dictionaries (German-English, German-French and German-Spanish) with corresponding discussion groups are a fantastic source of enjoyment for all those mastering German as well as one of the three other languages.

• See the DeutschAktiv pages of Caroline Burnand, who offers unusual tools to teach German. Examples of free games can be downloaded. The site has been contains also a Français actif section.
  L'apprentissage de l'allemand et du français comme langue étrangère (FLE) par des jeux et des exercices de groupe : efficace et novateur.

• See my own page on Tintin's cars, also available as Les autos de Tintin in French (little text, many pictures...).
• tintin.com, a graphic-intensive (Flash), beautiful site (in French), with essential information. This is the official Tintin site, owned by "Les Editions Moulinsart" and the "Fondation Hergé".
  Among other information, you will find most of the characters present in the albums (also in French).
• Cars of TIntin in The Transport Journal. The author, Rahesh Sinha, has taken my study and developed in great detail the technical and historical aspects of the cars. He also used most of the pictures I have posted on my own Tintin site.
• Tintin et l'aviation: Tintin's aeroplanes, in French, same concept as my Tintin's cars pages. Hautement recommandé !
• Le monde de Tintin [site non officiel], also in French. A "non-official" site with excellent layout, good navigation, and tons of information and details. For instance: all the "secondary characters" of Tintin albums are listed and described with a small picture.
• Tintin links platform (in Dutch) maintained by Etienne Chevalier. Although not everybody understands this language, it contains a wealth of links to other Tintin pages.
• Hergé genootschap also in Dutch, another links platform wirh hundreds of interessant examples.
• If you want to learn the Syldavian language and grammar, visit this instructive page, now available in English as well as in French.
• Histoire de l'automobile, toujours en français, des origines à 1900, extraite de "Tintin raconte". Instructif et divertissant, illustré de "chromos" d'Hergé (ou plus probablement des studios Hergé), publiés à l'époque sous le titre générique "Voir et savoir". De là, liens sur l'histoire de l'aviation etc. le tout sous la direction de Jacques Martin.
• Une Chronologie de Tintin, par Daniel Bellier, au sein d'un site très développé. Ce site est une mine extraordinaire d'informations sur Hergé, mais sa présentation et sa mise en page sont malheureusement un vrai désastre, que l'auteur, mort en décembre 2012, ne pourra plus corriger.
• Tintina' bulles, simple et rafraîchissant, par l'excellent Yves de B.
• Tintin et l'héraldique, par Herald Dick, avec un armorial de la Syldavie comprenant beaucoup d'illustrations et de commentaires passionnants.
• See a long list of errors and inconsistencies discovered by many enthusiasts in Tintin's albums and collected by Jim Bella.
• Tintin est vivant by Prad and Luc Van Dong. The texts are in French. Many resources, pastiches, parodies.
• Hergé 100 anys (en catalán).
• A blog in Arabic! I do not understand the language, but it looks quite interesting with all basic information on Hergé and many of his his inspirations.
• Comicwiki: Tintin in Danish. An excellent summary.

• J'ai réalisé moi-même cette page : Les automobiles Martini, construites à Saint-Blaise en Suisse par un inventeur faisant — presque — partie de ma famille, qui furent au début du XX^e siècle l'un des fleurons de l'industrie helvétique.
• I also created my small museum from Hergé's albums : Tintin's cars, and I added cars drawn by Ted Benoit and Jacques Martin.
• Stubs Auto : La culture automobile. Un site extrêmement bien réalisé et documenté par Philippe Baron avec l'histoire détaillée de centaines d'autos anciennes et récentes et de très belles photos.
• Le Carcatalog d'André Le Roux est à voir, avec d'excellentes images et des dessins publicitaires d'un grand nombre de voitures, surtout d'après-guerre, et des photos d'époque. Un grand soin est apporté à la qualité iconographique de ces pages, qui contiennent un nombre incroyable de documents, agrémentées de commentaires fort bien rédigés. Tout est dans le style, et le site fournit de nombreux exemples des meilleurs dessinateurs d'automobiles, tel que Geo Ham (ci-contre).
• Un site très bien documenté et d'une présentation excellente sur la Citroën Traction Avant, par Jérôme Collignon. Toute l'histoire de la Traction, tous les modèles, avec des détails inédits, de nombreuses photos.
• Citroën Traction Avant, on Wikipedia, that I have partially corrected.
• Phil Seed's virtual car museum with scans of brochures of various makes and models of cars (1950 - 1970), photographs and a variety of automobilaria. Good quality pictures. Mostly European cars. Well written, concise legends or explanations.
• Nationale 7 in French. This is the road that linked Paris with the French Riviera before the motorway (autoroute du sud, aka A6) was built.
• I like especially Thierry Dubois. Ckick on the yellow car as an example.
• Automobiles de collection: annuaire européen (surtout français) des sites. Très complet.
• Les voitures européennes d'autrefois, pages from Québec in English and French, although there is hardly any text, but many reasonably good pictures..
• Hundreds of mostly American cars, but many of them "customised", i.e. altered, chopped, painted with flames, fitted with stainless steel modern wheels etc. With some patience, also a few originals. A few European automobiles as well, usually not well characterised, all pictures taken in America. The site is useful if you want to check a particular model. Goto index of pics.
• L'automobile ancienne : de nombreuses pages d'un intérêt incontestable sur une multitude de voitures et de constructeurs malgré une orthographe déficiente...

• Fair Trade (UK)
• Trans Fair (USA)
• Max Havelaar France, in French. From now on, look for this coffee in your supermarket.
• Association Commerce Équitable (France)
• Ingénieurs sans Frontières, in French
• Artisans du Monde, in French
• ATTAC, in French (Association pour une Taxation des Transactions financières pour l'Aide aux Citoyens),

• Want to know the weather forecast? Go to Météo-France, look at the map and read the last news.
• How about traffic conditions in and around Paris, in real time? Sytadin gives you maps that are permanently updated, and the time you need to reach the airports.
• Les pages de Paris will give you very comprehensive information about what's happening in the French capital. English text available. You'll find temporary exhibitions, and all expected info on museums, public transportation and much more. A good site indeed.
• And if you want to have a look at Mediaeval Paris (in French: Paris sous Philippe-Auguste), pay a visit to the site of Marie-Christine & François Benveniste: they reconstructed Paris as it was in the XIIth century. A very elegant and tasteful site, highly recommended!

• You can make virtual images using geometric modelling. The best — free of charge! program is Persistence of Vision. It requires a little understanding of three-dimensional constructive geometry, and a fast Macintosh, or Unix machine, or even Intel-based PC. You can produce photo-realistic scenes of completely irrealistic situations. Unfold your creative power!
• A master: Gilles Tran. His pages in English or French are full of poetry and imagination, and have a very strong technical basis at the same time. Incredible results.
• Another master: Friedrich Lohmüller (German, English, French and Italian). Many examples, with some focus on architecture. Also, excellent tutorial pages on POV.
• Les pages en français de Louis Bel, élégantes malgré une orthographe désastreuse, offrent de bons exemples et des explications pour les débutants.
• See my own Raytracing page (viel bescheidener).

• Ma page sur les bases de l'héraldique avec un glossaire en cinq langues des termes spécifiques à cet art.
• L'armorial de Riedstap, avec le blasonnement d'environ 400'000 écus.
• Les meubles (projet Wikipedia) avec en annexe la liste des meubles héraldiques.
• Voir aussi le portail héraldique de Wikipedia.
• Les blasons de manière distrayante, par Herald Dick.

• My definition and examples.
• La fraîche, by Félix Burnand. Combining a fish tank and plants in your office or apartment.
• Hydroponie, by Victor Didelot. How to make a simple and cheap, yet effective, hydroponic system.

• If you know anybody who cannot read, I warmly recommend a method developed in South Africa: Teach any child or adult to read. You will find their address and order form on their site. I purchased the method to teach a young Indian who had not had the chance to go to school.

• See the site of Sylvain Lhuillier (mostly in French, with some pages in English). A huge collection of language curiosities, enigmas, pictures, jokes, maxims. Serious stuff as well, all worth a visit.
• Murphy's law: here a page in French. Si vous ignorez la loi de Murphy, allez donc y faire un tour...
• For good American satirical news, see The Onion. You should visit their site once a week, to have a look at US news from a different perspective.
• The Computer Stupidities offers a vast collection of mishaps discovered by computer support people — today (2016) seriously outdated.

• His web site shows a few of his productions. No comments, but good pictures, some inspired by surrealism:
  • Painting
  • Sculpture
  • Models
  • Scenography

• Vous trouverez sur ce site différents types de quizzs, réalisés principalement sous Excel, qui vous permettront de tester votre culture audiovisuelle et générale.
  Les quizzs de ce site incorporent un contrôleur de syntaxe qui vous permet de savoir si vous êtes proche ou non de la solution. Vous n'avez donc plus à craindre les erreurs d'orthographe.
  En 2019, ne fonctionnent malheureusement que sous Windows.

• Amazing: you think of an object, and the 20Q AI programme starts asking questions. In usually less than 20 questions, the programme finds your object. You can play in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Chinese and in 14 more languages...

• Mac OS X software.
• One of the very best pieces of shareware for the Mac is Thorsten Lemke's Graphic Converter. If you don't have it (I can't imagine you don't), or if you have not paid the modest shareware fee, visit Thorsten's site.
• And of course, here is the direct access to Apple itself.