Provence is a land of lavender: it seems to grow there as grass grows in Meath and stone flourishes in Connemara. Everywhere you travel across Provence in summertime the fragrance of lavender assails you, and every restaurant sprouts sheaths of its aluminium-grey stalks from vases and picture-frames.
Lavender is the constant of Provence, from the beaches of St Tropez to the windswept slopes of Mont Ventoux.
Even aside from the ubiquitous caress of lavender upon the nostrils, Provence is enough to break your heart. For here lies the great rural civilisation that France is so rightly proud of, its continuity reaching through the imperium of ancient Rome - Provence is densely populated with magnificent Roman ruins - into the Gallic-Mediterranean civilisations which preceded it. And a common reverence for the bull unites Crete, Iberia and southern France today.
In Arles, there are jousts in the still-intact, 20,000-capacity Roman amphitheatre, in which bulls are symbolically killed by having a red rosette plucked from between their horns. In the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Major, gardiens - cowboys - from the Camargue celebrate the feast day of their patron saint, St George. In all the neighbouring towns at this time of year, locals gather to watch the cowboys drive herds of black bulls through the narrow, medieval streets.
It is dangerous work, requiring meticulous co-ordination between the gardiens and their white, hot-blooded Camargue horses so that the bulls do not rampage into the watching crowds. The horses themselves are miracles of nature's adaptive ways. The Camargue is a vast marshland of 350,000 acres, where hoof-rot and mosquitoes are endemic; the horses thus regularly shed their hooves and are immune to the malaria parasite.
Vincent van Gogh, of course, famously spent the penultimate year - 1889 - of his life here, and was treated in Arles mental hospital. Maybe if he had stayed in Provence painting sunflowers he wouldn't have shot himself, which he did the following year just outside Paris - and with a lamentable and rather typical inefficacy, dying from his unseen and untreated wound two days later. For only the mad freely leave Provence, or those obliged to return to work on a cold damp island to the north and the west.
Some things about Provence are easy to explain. Its climate is perfect: it has overall about as much rain as the east coast of Ireland, but the rainfall is concentrated on far fewer days, and at this time of year the weather is hot and dry. Provence is therefore a vast market garden, its supermarkets bursting with the produce of its fields and orchards, its olive groves and its vineyards.
In other words, it is tragic. It is not just in the raw materials that Provence is so superior to what we get in Ireland, but in the vast amount of local produce, to be found alike in hypermarché and market stall, with hundreds of kinds of pâté, pie, sausage, and farmhouse cheese. Even 50 miles inland, the seafood selection in a supermarket might just be matched by Caviston's in Dun Laoghaire, but almost nowhere else in Ireland.
French people would never tolerate what Tesco supermarkets have been doing to us this summer, importing new potatoes from the Mediterranean, while not selling our own magnificent new potatoes from Wexford. For in France, regionality is all, with all its glories and its many local ways. We have no equivalent in Ireland, and we never will have; and that is our culinary tragedy. Which doesn't explain some features of Irish life.
For example, why do we continue to have to eat tasteless red ovoids misnamed tomatoes, when we could import the sumptuous great misshapen scarlet trollops from Provence, vulgar with flavour, luscious by themselves, and better still when drizzled with oil? But this is only part of the mystery. Why do we simply never eat the product of our own countryside, as the people of Provence do? Why do Irish shops not routinely stock rabbit, pigeon, pheasant and grouse, as Provençal shops do?
Heartbreaks accumulate the longer one stays in in Provence. Each village and town still has its weekly fair-day, now a virtually extinct social phenomenon in Ireland. Each community regularly indulges its peculiar little festivals - which might be no more than a moules-et-frites night, though it could be a spectacular bull-run through the streets. People drink sparingly, but enjoyably, and there is much laughter here. Because contrary to an absurd myth, concocted, I suspect, by English visitors who refuse to speak French, the people of Provence - indeed, like the people of France generally - are extremely cheerful, friendly and invariably welcoming.
Provence is a world apparently without fast food: we did not see a single McDonald's or KFC outlet anywhere. The young people are slim and lithe as the young people of Ireland once were, because they eat well and wisely in quite superb restaurants.
Our final meal on our final day was a truly magnificent five-course lunch for four, with a bottle of rosé. Total cost, service compris, only €30 a head.
But here's the question. It is not, why is everything so cheap in France, especially since taxation is so high? Nor is it, how have so many French local customs survived the tidal wave of modernisation which has turned so much in Ireland into a virtual clone of Britain or the US? It is this. Why on earth do French tourists bother coming to Ireland when they have Provence, a perfect little continent, with all its many splendours, on their own doorstep? You can get to Provence by flying Ryanair to Nimes via Stanstead. Go.