The Discovery of France With and Without Language

The Discovery of France is a wonderful book that reveals the France I began to discover during a two-year stint as American Vice Consul in Lyon back in the '70s. A bicycle is the best way to allow the real beauty of the paysage impress itself upon you. And the excitement of biking around a corner and coming to the ancestral homestead of Berlioz near Grenoble is one example of the thrills one can experience just pedaling in the rolling hills of the Alpine Piedmont.

French "Culture Minister" Christine Albanel displays the underside of France in its obsessive preoccupation with preserving the glories of its linguistic purity.

Here is where to experience the full grandeur of the grandiosity of la langue francaise.