The Land of the Dispossessed

There is something about the Languedoc. The land of the people who spoke the language of the West, a strange fusion of Basque, Catalan and almost anything not French. It is the land of the dispossessed, of the Cathars hounded by the Inquisition. The writer Patrick O’Brian lived in Collioure, a port perched on the Franco-Spanish border: home to the anchovy and a robust red, of which he made a minute quantity himself. He paid homage to the region through the character of Maturin, an Irish Catalan of a courageous but saturnine disposition, whose loathing of the French and of Napoleon kept him in the British Navy.