Towards the end of his journey in Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, Robert Louis Stevenson spends a night in a chestnut grove. The ledge he has chosen is too narrow for his sleeping bag, his sleep is disturbed by ceaseless rustling noises – later revealed to be rats – and his morning departure is interrupted by two inquiring peasants who have arrived early to prune the trees. None of this detracts from his admiration for the magnificent trees. When he wrote that ‘their individuality, although compounded of so many elements, is but the richer and the more original’, he could have been speaking of the dishes of France.
