For close to three decades, Patricia and Walter Wells have been fixtures of the American expat scene in Paris, Patricia as an acclaimed expert in French cooking and restaurant reviewer for the International Herald Tribune, Walter as a senior editor at this newspaper, finally retiring as its executive editor in 2005.

Since 1984, though, they have also had another - less visible, more bucolic - life in Provence, where they transformed a run-down stone farmhouse into a dream hideaway with its own vineyard. It is there that Patricia, who first made her name with "The Food Lover's Guide to Paris," gives weeklong cooking classes from May to September (she also gives three or four each winter in Paris).

Here in southern France, I hear birds chirping though it's 9:30 at night. I hear TV voices in the apartment next door, one dog barking and another yapping.

There's a single car downshifting as it negotiates the U-turn off the road from Montady and continues toward Capestang.

A slight breeze pushes through the leaves of the plane tree in front of the restaurant, as if the leaves, the size of large hands, were in its way.

...The Melbourne couple's dream of running culinary tours and cooking classes in France was looking increasingly unlikely. Their friends had already branded the idea as crazy.

Now the Websters were starting to believe them. Then they saw the chateau. "As you come up the driveway, you get just a glimpse to begin with," Jane says. "Everyone in the car got goosebumps."

PARIS (Reuters) - French Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire, founding father of the "negritude" movement that celebrated black consciousness, died in his native Martinique, the France's Ministry of Culture said on Thursday.

Cesaire, 94, who was mayor of the island's main city Fort-de-France for more than half a century, was admitted to hospital last week suffering from heart and other problems. His writings offered insight into how France imposed its culture on its citizens of different origins in the early part of the 20th Century.

Despite France's jealously protective stance toward the nation's artistic reputation, contemporary French art has been streaming out of the country and into the hands of foreign buyers at an alarming rate in recent years.

The government of President Nicolas Sarkozy was already on the case — even before nude photos of First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy were auctioned in London last week to a Chinese investor for $91,000.

France's Culture Ministry has announced measures aimed at reversing the general lack of interest among the French in buying art — a deficiency some fear is slowly bleeding an enormous vein of national culture dry.

We hit the road last Sunday from Burgundy en route to Carcassonne in the south of France. We took a little detour to check out the Le Viaduc de Millau / Millau Viaduct, which was open to the public in 2005. I thought I’d share some photos.

To cross the viaduct you must pay a toll, which is higher during the summer! The summer rate is: 7.40 euros ($11.62) - and the non-summer rate is 5.60 euros ($8.79).