"There are in this world only two earthly Paradises ...

" ... . . . Provence . . . and the Reading Room of the British Museum."

The world according to Ford Maddox Ford:

Provence was not only itself, but also the absence of the north, where most human vices accumulated. The north meant aggression, the gothic, the "sadically mad cruelties of the Northern Middle Ages" and the "Northern tortures of ennui and indigestion".