In France, tracking the giraffe:

The car took me back in time. I got out and walked remote gravel roads, crunching along in the country quiet, pondering, trying to get a sense of that long-ago trek [in the spring of 1827] - back when France had 30,000 miles of these lanes of rocky dust, and they were the best roads in Europe; when the first train in France was still a decade away, and ordeals of distance had not yet accelerated into passing scenery; when steam had not yet democratized speed, and velocity had not yet blurred the landscape into Impressionism; when even pollution was still distinct and local, limited to what you could step in or smell - until my 19th-century spell would be broken by some anomaly, such as a family of ostriches staring at me over a fence, or the woman on a bicycle wearing only a straw hat and a bikini.

I carried a sack for collecting wildflowers, to be identified with the help of locals at the next café or outdoor market or little out-of-the-way museum. Finding someone sympathetic I would open my sack and, flower by flower, my questions usually attracted bystanders and developed into a botanical seminar. Afterwards my specimens became souvenirs of each encounter and aids to memory, impossible to throw away. My collection grew daily, strewn wilted and drying and blowing around inside the car, eliciting the amused interest of more than one gas station attendant.

The 18-century Enlightenment lives on in the French love of collection and display, turning the variety of any and everything into a cabinet de curiosités. A single item may well be trash or meaningless junk; but with plurality, even a car full of dead flowers attracts attention. More than one of something, no matter how useless or eccentric, accrues possible value, if only conversational, perhaps worthy of the ubiquitous weekend flea market.

In the daily village food markets, each stall presents its plentiful variation on a theme of apples or grapes or lettuce, squash, melons, peppers nuts, spices...whatever, in as many versions of it as can be had. Under the plane trees shading the market square in Aix-en-Provence, I counted more than two dozen kinds of olives, which, according to their purveyor, were not even half of all the distinct cultivars grown locally. Not to mention, he went on happily and well rehearsed, imports of others from among a total of at least 700 varieties, all produced by the single species of olive tree, Olea europea, whose indigenous range defines the Mediterranean region.

Then, progressing with the French gift for abstraction from the fact to the idea of olives, the man held one up between his thumb and forefinger and said, "This is the center of the Mediterranean universe, the key to our life-loving sensibility, the basis of our cultural heritage. For olive trees live and bear for centuries, valuable in their longevity, and requiring care that has created and stabilized, more or less, the world's happiest and most beautiful civilization. Olive trees survived the Flood and provided the wood of the Cross. Fire can't kill them. Their roots live on and the trees grow back, a glory to all five human senses. And the oil of their fruit," he popped the olive into his mouth, "is without equal as a laxative."