Portraits of France is part memoir, part journalism, part history, part gastronomic adventure. An intensely personal tour of a France not found in guidebooks. From Heloise and Abelard to Lafayette to DeGaulle, from the guillotine to an 1806 Chateau Lafite, from lungbusting Tour de France climbs to the still pockmarked terrain around Verdun to a World War II concentrtion camp in the Pyrenees.