Following his critically acclaimed Footnotes: A Journey Round Britain in the Company of Great Writers (2020), Peter Fiennes had the excellent idea of setting off round France with a similar objective. Moving anticlockwise, he starts in Le Havre, the vital port that was heavily bombed by the Allies in September 1944. Earlier, the city had played host to the young existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, who reluctantly taught philosophy in a lycée there from 1931 to 1936. It was the setting for his first novel, Nausea (La Nausée, 1938), which Fiennes reads in the Brasserie de Normandie – ‘the most Sartrean bar I could find in the old city centre’. He also visits the site of the ‘shabby hotel’ where Sartre lived (near the station for easy getaways to Paris).

Along the coast Fiennes finds Guy de Maupassant, the ‘Norman squire, oarsman and swordsman’. Visiting Maupassant’s ‘gloomy, half-timbered’ villa in the seaside village of Etretat, he is shown round by a Peter Ustinov lookalike. Flaubert called Maupassant’s early short story ‘Boule de Suif’ a ‘masterpiece’ but also admonished the athletic younger man: ‘You are doing too much exercise! … too many whores! Too much rowing!’ Maupassant died horribly of syphilis in 1893 at the age of forty-two in an asylum in Paris.

The most vivid chapters of this engaging and well-researched book are dedicated to Colette, who spent summers on the north Brittany coast near Saint-Malo between 1910 and 1923. Fiennes reckons that ‘no other French author has written with such intensity and such an exquisitely sharp eye for the natural world,