Rochefort

They rebuilt a warship. Plank by plank, over seventeen years, with the techniques of the eighteenth-century shipwrights, in the same dock on the Charente where the first one was built. The Hermione — the frigate that carried Lafayette to the American war — was reborn at Rochefort, a town on France's Atlantic coast that Louis XIV chose for his arsenal and which has been shaped by it ever since.

Rochefort was chosen in the seventeenth century by the king himself and laid out by Colbert as a naval arsenal on the Charente, a planned town of straight streets around what was called the most exceptional dockyard of the French navy; the Corderie Royale, the rope-works that stretches nearly four hundred metres along the river, was the longest building in Europe when it was raised and now houses the story of the yard. The Hermione was built here in the 1770s and rebuilt here from 1997 to 2014 on the same site beside the Corderie — the ship crossed the Atlantic again in 2015 and is the town's pride, her story told at the Arsenal des Mers beside the dock that built her. Pierre Loti, the naval officer and novelist, was born in Rochefort, and his house is a fantasy of Turkish rooms, a Gothic hall and a mosque behind an ordinary façade, restored over more than a decade and open again. The transporter bridge, among the last in the world, still carries you across the river.