Hughes de Payns, the first Grand Master and official founder of the Knights Templar, was born near Troyes in the Champagne region of France, but if the Templars were real, the story of Lancelot, King Arthur’s knight, and the pursuit of the Holy “Grail” are pure fiction.

The pop music coming out of France in the early 1960’s may not have seemed terribly important on the surface. Essentially, it was a bunch of sticky sweet teenagers singing French translations of American songs and a new girl rose to her 15 minutes of fame every week.

On a beautiful spring day, driving through the backwoods of northern Burgundy I found myself, about a mile and a half from home, in a small village called l’Hôpital.

France has always been populated with great artists and philosophers, and two of the most loved and controversial of France's thinkers were Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Separately they helped influence the way the world views the concept of the Self and its relation to personal freedom. Together they challenged the way we view commitments and relationships.

In early February 2013 in Papua New Guinea, a 20-year-old woman, Kepara Leniata, was doused in gasoline and burned at the stake after being accused of the death of a child. “Fables of witchcraft have taken… fast hold and deep root in the heart of man,” lamented Reginald Scot in 1584, and 500 years later, it’s still true in some countries.

After the Dominique Strauss-Kahn event last year, I got my ears rinsed more than once by friends in the US scolding French women for their passivity toward their male counterparts.   Walking on shaky ground, I pretty much chose to avoid the subject until the newspaper Le Monde recently made it known that, as of January 31 of this year, it was officially legal for French women to wear trousers!

It may seem a stretch to imagine that a small, unfinished landscape, painted on the lid of a cigar box during summer vacation, would end up in the Musée d’Orsay. And yet that’s just what happened.

It was Plato who suggested that ‘necessity is the mother of invention.’ Parisians trapped by the Siege of 1870 certainly took this epithet to their hearts.

Since Roman times the area known as the Beauce Plain, a flat, fertile, treeless expanse of open country southwest of Paris served as the granary for this burgeoning metropolis.  The life and longevity of the city of lights owes everything to the wheat and cereal grains grown there. The stained glass windows of Notre Dame were paid for by donations of the baker's guild.