Alphonse Daudet’s Fontvielle, France

Fontvielle invites visitors to travel in the footsteps of Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) by following a trail route available online or at the Tourist Information office in the village. Stops include Chateau de Montauban, where Daudet stayed when he made his frequent visits to Fontvielle; and the famous windmill, immortalized in Daudet’s Les Lettres de mon Moulin (Letters from My Windmill). The mill ground wheat from 1814 until it closed in 1915. In 1935, Les Amis d’Alphonse Daudet restored the mill, dedicated it to the famous author, and created a small museum highlighting his life and work. To make this a true “bookpath”, read the stories in Daudet’s Letters from My Windmill before your journey. His descriptions of Fontvielle and the surrounding Provençal landscape will surely enrich your travels.

For additional information, visit the Fontvielle en Provence website.

There are strange affinities that bind us to certain things. From the very first this outcast had been dear to me; I loved it for its sufferings, for the pah that led up to it, all hidden as it was by the weeds, those little, greyish, sweet-scented mountain weeds that old Father Gaucher picked to make his elixir, for its weather-worn platform where it was so good to idle out of reach of the wind and to watch a scampering rabbit or a long grass snake pursuing its aloof, crafty, and tortuous way, as it stalked the fieldmice that swarmed in the tumbledown structure. With its ancient walls creaking in the tramontane, the mountain wind, the noise made by the rigging of its tattered sails, the mill awoke in my poor, anxious, and wandering mind memories of sea-voyages, of sojournings in lighthouses, or of far-away islands; and the quivering swell of the encircling pines completed the illusion. -- from "Concerning My Mill," in Letters from My Windmill, by Alphonse Daudet