Nearby was something impressive, the La Coste wine estate where Irish entrepreneur Paddy âClaridgeâsâ McKillen has created a hugely ambitious sculpture park. By the time it is finished, with the golf course and hotel, it will be a World of Adventures with vines.

   So we went on to Marseille, the 2013 European Capital of Culture, to see the new MuCEM (the politically correct and wearyingly inclusive Museum of the Civilisation of Europe and the Mediterranean), perhaps Franceâs very last grand projet. Local architect Rudy Ricciotti says he wants to âdemuseumify museumsâ. Not, if you ask me, a felicitous expression that promises calm and clarity. Still, if you want to find an architectural demonstration of what France has become, visit the Fort Saint-Jean complex on the Vieux-Port.

   I kept on trying to translate âmink coat and no knickersâ as we sweated and jostled through vapid exhibits at MuCEM, trivialised by big swinging architectural rhetoric. And if âcultureâ means vast queues of listless tourists gazing at plasma screens, personally I want none of it. At least there were no troubadours.
--
   We stayed in Le Corbusierâs Cité Radieuse which has a number of apartments available for brief stays. I am no doctrinaire opponent of strict-observance Modernism, far from it, but here was another test of French dream vs French reality.

   The cheerful âvertical garden cityâ of the propaganda has a haunted and sinister quality. Not sinister in the sense that a demandeur dâemploi troubadour might knife you in a dark corridor, but more that it is solid with a sense of failure. It strikes me as significant that the Toulouse riots of 2005 began in a banlieue designed by pupils of Le Corbusier. Fact: they donât have riots in Le Panier, the crumbly dense old quarter of Marseille.

   I reflected on this as we left the city to meet friends for lunch in Peter Mayle country near Ménerbes. Marseille is a difficult place not, I think, at ease with itself. Sweaty and desolate in turns, sullen and grumbly, despite the City of Culture wash ânâ brush-up.

   Then we hit the D99 between Saint-Rémy and Cavaillon with its lovely arbres and the dream came rushing back.
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