Provence
As a family, we quickly discovered that different rules applied in Elsewhere. Mum drank too much red wine and told dirty jokes. Dad confessed to me how sexy he found Provençal women. I discovered, decades later, that his taste in this respect exactly replicated Racine’s, who described the local maidens thus to his chum La Fontaine: color verus, corpus solidum et succi plenum: ‘natural color, firm bodies and full of sap’. We also have Racine-en-Provence to thank for an unadorned view of working class France before the 35-hour working week: ‘You will see a huge number of harvesters roasted by the sun who work like demons; and, when they are totally out of breath, they throw themselves on the ground in direct sunlight, sleep for a brief moment, then immediately get up again.’ Racine also offers the first recorded complaint about the cicada noise level. But it was Rousseau who really started tourism in Provence; ironically, his most influential dispatch was not about noble nature, but that most extraordinary feat of Roman technology called the Pont du Gard, a magnificent aqueduct near Avignon, which is now a world heritage site and sees more than a million visitors each year.