THE CURATED LIFE
THE SUCCESSION of forest-clad crags disappearing into the distance marks the beginning of the Jura Mountains, the rocky spine that divides France and Switzerland. It is the sort of landscape that inspired the artists and poets of the Romantic era, and it is all too easy to see oneself as the small figure in the foreground of a Caspar David Friedrich painting gazing in wonder at these forbidding peaks.
As well as foreboding, the Jura Mountains are cold. As you’re driving up the snaking succession of bends carved into the mountainside, it becomes colder with every hairpin turn of the road; the precipitation no longer falls as drops of water but in big fat flakes of snow. More than half a mile above sea level, we enter a village, a small cluster of steeply pitched, red-tiled roofs clinging to a sheltering shoulder of rock. The streets of the village are empty, unsurprising given the temperature and the now thickly falling snow.