Beaumarchais provided Mozart with Figaro. Ferdinand de Lesseps would have added Panama to his canal-building triumph at Suez if the terrain in Central America and corruption in Paris had not interceded. In more relaxed mode, the Club Mditerrane set the model for informal, all-inclusive holiday resorts, and it was a Parisian who commercialised the bikini swimsuit, employing a nude dancer to show it off after the regular models refused to wear it. Frenchmen invented the first non-iron pure cotton shirt, and have developed a year-round oyster that defies months without an `r'. A muddy spring in the south discovered by Hannibal in 218 BC and rediscovered by a crippled Englishman twenty-one centuries later has become synonymous with fizzy water in countries where `eau' means nothing. Nicphore Niepce invented photography in Burgundy, and, if they cannot claim the first motor-car, French manufacturers did make two landmark vehicles. In 1955 Citron unveiled its DS (the initials sound like the French word for `goddess') with front-wheel drive, disc brakes, spaceship looks and self-levelling suspension. Seven years earlier, the same firm had turned out one of the world's most practical conveyances, the Deux Chevaux, on the specification of being able to transport 2 people and 50 kilos of potatoes at 60 kilometres an hour on no more than 3 litres of petrol per 100 kilometres the ability to carry eggs over a ploughed field without cracking them and to leave enough room for hats to be worn inside were added later. Despite their flapping canvas roofs and self-motivated folding windows, they were wonderful cars. A friend of ours had a thirty-year-old 2CV which had been driven to Kenya and back; it still sat for a week in the snow at Orlans railway station and started with one turn of the ignition -- or three, at most. But the coming of the motorway and the desire for a car in which you could sit in comfort meant the end of Deux Chevaux production...
