The Atlantic was the colour of pewter, and Henri had been awake for an hour already — sorting nets the way his grandfather had, in a language no guidebook has thought to translate.

By the Dispatch Desk/Reported on the ground, and read against published reporting by Johny Pitts, David Coggins and Monica Mendal.

We arrived on a Tuesday, which is when the village exhales. The summer charter set had returned to Paris; the oyster beds at L'Herbe were left to the people who work them. Our specialist had arranged a house — eighteenth century, three bedrooms, shutters the colour of a Bordeaux sky — but the first morning we spent on the water, because that is what the season asked of us.

"The Bassin d'Arcachon is not a destination. It is a calendar — and to stay here for a week is to begin to read it."

This is the thing the catalogues miss. The oysters spawn in July, the dune at Pyla shifts a metre each autumn, the wooden cabins at L'Herbe were condemned in 1986 and saved by the women who lived in them. None of this fits in a filter. None of it is on a comparison site. It is the difference between knowing where to go and knowing when.

By the second day we had stopped checking the weather. The fog at dawn was its own kind of clock; the tide, another. Henri sent oysters to the kitchen at half past eleven and we ate them on the terrace at noon, with a bottle of Entre-Deux-Mers that the housekeeper had chosen without asking. Nothing was performed for us. That, in the end, is the only luxury that has not been counterfeited.