A Little Tour in France
1884
In 1882, Henry James left London for a six-week journey through provincial France, and what began as a simple tour became something closer to an act of love. "France may be Paris, but Paris is not France" , with this manifesto, James set out to capture the towns and villages that Parisians themselves overlooked: the ochre streets of Tours, the cathedral at Bourges, the sun-baked squares of Arles, the ancient universities of Toulouse. The result is a book that breathes the very air of a France that would be shattered by the First World War just three decades later. James writes as he does novels: with an eye for the telling detail, the precise shadow, the way light falls across a market square at midday. He muses on architecture and history, on the quality of a room in a provincial inn, on the wine and the bread and the particular silence of a French Sunday. This is travel writing as a form of attention , patient, curious, and utterly devoted to the surface of things. It is also a subtle argument: that to know a country, you must wander far from its capital, into the provinces where the national character settles and grows quiet. For readers who have ever wanted to step inside a vanished world, A Little Tour in France offers exactly that: a chance to wander through 1880s France in the company of one of the most discriminating minds in English-language literature.
