I had no plan, no exact destination, just a very vague sense that I ought to head southwest—that if a civil war should break out in France, it would take a while to reach the southwest. I knew next to nothing about the southwest, really, only that it was a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war. Though, of course, I could be wrong. I didn’t actually know much about France. After spending my childhood and adolescence in Maisons-Lafitte, a bourgeois suburb par excellence, I moved to Paris and never left. I had never really visited this country
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