Culture July 21, 2014

In the era before cheap air travel, those in the English-speaking world who wanted to taste authentic French village life read Gabriel Chevallier’s gently satirical novels, published between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s. “Clochemerle” and “Clochemerle-Babylon” were deft, wise and celebratory in what people thought of as the French style. On the town of Cloche­merle, in the Beaujolais region, the issues of French politics, class difference and coming or past collaboration with fascism lay more lightly than did eccentricity, pride in local wine, cooking and love.