A Little Tour in France

“Wishing to see what lay beyond the bounds of the ‘celestial city’, Henry James devoted much of the autumn of 1882 to his ‘little tour’. Beginning at Tours, the birthplace of Balzac, he went on various excursions to the great châteaux of the Loire – including Blois, Chambord and Chenonceaux. Then he made his leisurely way south to the heart of the Midi and to the glorious historic cities of Nantes, Bordeaux, Carcassonne, Nîmes and Avignon.

A sophisticated traveller, wary of his prejudice against the rural, James found rich pleasures as well as disappointments on his journey. Whether meditating on the glory of the French Renaissance, the charm of Provence, the nobility of a Roman aqueduct or the ‘vulgar’ claret he drank in Bordeaux, James always offers colourful and original insights. As Leon Edel says in his illuminating introduction, ‘What we read and see, in our inner vision, is James, in his endless curiosity, looking, searching, and offering a lesson in close observation.'”