These are details that can construct a partial background of a writer’s life. She knows that everything here in Europe has touched history or a literature. Besançon became prominent because Julien Sorel attended its seminary in Le Rouge et le Noir. The rough stone structure still exists, the dusk around it thick with the smell of limes from a nearby arbor. And there are all the other towns and villages etched by Balzac, page by page. Angoulême. Saint-Lange. Sceaux. ‘I was born in Balzac—he was my cradle, my forest, my travels . . . he invented everything,’ Colette wrote, glancing back to her youth. Just as she herself later created her landscape at Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye. And here in Gascony, where the fictional D’Artagnan was born, the writer Lucien Segura lived, composed his strange poems and novels, and disappeared.