French schwa, or mute-e, is one of the most studied topics in French phonology, yet its exact phonetic quality remains debated. In particular, whether schwa is acoustically similar to or distinct from its two mid front rounded neighbors has given rise to contradictory results. The main issue is that past studies generally compare schwa and its neighbors without controlling for stress, yet the latter can be stressed while the former can never be, which is bound to impact their respective realizations. In this paper, we present a pilot study to investigate the quality of schwa compared to its neighbors while controlling for stress. Twenty-two French words with schwa or with its neighbors, were embedded in carrier sentences and read aloud among filler sentences. The data from 20 native speakers of Parisian French indicate that, when controlling for stress as well as orthography, schwa and its neighbors are acoustically very similar, in terms of both formants and duration.