France feels stretched out sometimes. The entire country appears to just go on forever. Even in these days of immediate connection, you can feel the France that Annie Ernaux wrote about in The Years: "The gateway to the exotic was the nearest big town, the rest of the world unreal."
Nowhere is this more true than the Corrèze, through which stage nine of the Tour de France marched on Sunday, one of the least populated départments in France, a keystone in the diagonale du vide, the empty corridor that strikes through the country. It's a region that most would only know about because of the Tour, even the French.
