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On the fifth of April 1721 two pirate ships appeared off the coast of the Île de Bourbon, a mountainous Indian Ocean island known today as Reunion.

Commanding the two ships was a French corsair, Captain Oliver Levasseur. The Captain was more commonly known as La Buse, the Buzzard, and with good reason: prior to his appearance off Reunion, La Buse had been busy plundering the shipping off the Malabar Coast of India; only when the British East India Company sent out the entire Bombay Fleet to hunt him down, did he beat a retreat towards his base on Madagascar.

As they sailed homewards, the pirates found they were running low on water and La Buse decided to stop in at Bourbon to replenish his tanks. Approaching the harbour of St. Paul he saw moored there a massive 70-gun Portuguese Man-of-War, the Nostra Senhora De Cabo. Without hesitating La Buse sailed straight in, fired a broadside at the galleon, then boarded it, almost without resistance. The ship turned out to contain what was probably the richest prize that ever fell to pirates: over £1 million worth of Indian gems being shipped by the viceroy of Goa back to his masters in Lisbon.

It was nine years before La Buse returned to Reunion, and then in rather different circumstances. For in 1730 Levasseur was captured by a slave trading bounty hunter, brought back to Reunion in fetters and sentenced to death. But as he mounted the scaffold, La Buse made a speech which would assure him a measure of immortality. As the noose was placed over his neck, he scattered a pile of parchment charts among the crowd. The maps, he said, indicated exactly where on Reunion his treasure lay buried. But first the finder would have to crack his code.

To this day the treasure has never been found, although that has not stopped three centuries of adventurers coming to Reunion to search for it. The grave of La Buse is, however, somewhat easier to locate than his treasure. It lies in the old Marin Cemetery overlooking the deep fragmented blue of the ocean, on a flat apron of land lying between the tall black basalt cliffs and the rustling palms on the shore. On my first evening in Reunion, intrigued by what I had read of the exploits of La Buse, I walked barefoot along the coral beach from my hotel to pay my respects to the old pirate.

Today much of the coast around St. Paul is like a miniature St. Tropez, and a little down the coast at Boucan Canot, lines of topless Parisians can be seen splayed out under the palms frying in Ambre Solaire. But inside the footfall-soft silence of the cemetery the atmosphere is very different. Behind the high walls, hidden by a long screen of ilexes, you are suddenly back in the eighteenth century, surrounded by the obelisks and mausolea of sea captains and corsairs, exiled aristocrats and shipwrecked plantation owners.

These low basalt mausolea are classical in inspiration, but naive in execution: pillars rise through Ionic capitals to oddly misshapen pediments; below, rough inscriptions record the often brutal deaths of the early colonists: ‘Ici repose Capt. de Bellegarde tue par les corsaires; Ici repose la famille Chandemerle morte dans une naufrage...’ As the night draws in and the ocean wind gusts through the graves, you suddenly realise how remote this island on the Tropic of Capricorn must have been two hundred years ago: seven months’ voyage from Marseilles, visited by only one supply ship every six months...

It did not take long to find the grave of Levasseur, even though there was no grand mausoleum marking it, like those erected by the colonial gentry who now keep La Buse company. Instead there was just a headstone of black basalt. On it was inscribed a skull and cross bones and the brief epitaph:

Oliver Levasseur dit la Buse- pirate,
Ecumeur des Mers des Sud,
Execute a St.Paul 1730.

Yet while the other graves in the cemetery were forgotten and overgrown, that of La Buse was clearly much visited. Piles of flowers and the wax of innumerable guttered candles covered the graveslab while to one side stood several newly opened rum bottles, apparently left as offerings. Stranger still, alongside the bottles, there had been placed three or four packets of Gauloise and Gitanes; the packets had been torn open at their base, and the cigarettes left to burn out, so now that all that remained were the charred filter-tips. On some of the packets had been scribbled incantations and petitions to La Buse.

Outside the cemetery I approached an old Creole woman. In the gathering darkness she had set up a brazier on an old oil drum and was now roasting corn cobs on the embers. I bought one, and asked in the course of conversation why she thought offerings had been left on the grave of an eighteenth century pirate.

"I don't believe in it," she replied, her tone suddenly becoming sharp.

"Don't believe in what?"

"In... all that business."

"But some people clearly do."

"I don't know them."

"But what exactly is going on?" I persevered. "Why do people..."

"It's their business!" snapped the old lady, turning away. "Why don't you ask them? They come here every night pour gratter le bois ['scratching the wood'- i.e. sorcery]. But I tell you this," she continued, "whatever they say in St. Paul, it's no secret that half the wickedness in Reunion comes from that grave..."

Oddly enough, the first thing that strikes you when you arrive in Reunion is the sheer- almost ridiculous- Frenchness of the place.

The island may lie at the heart of the Indian Ocean, half way between Madagascar and Sri Lanka, but it was uninhabited until the French began colonising it in 1646, initially by dumping convicts on its beach, and later turning it into an important naval base and refuelling point for French East Indiamen on their way to and from the Compagnie des Indes headquarters at Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu. Legally, it is as if the French East India Company still ruled the waves. For Reunion is still part of France; indeed at first sight it appears to be every bit as Gallic, as developed and as prosperous as its distant mother country. The people all have French passports, and school leavers are all obliged to emigrate to France to perform their National Service. The language is French, the television is French, the cars are French, the croissants and baguettes at breakfast are French, and the wines in the restaurants are defiantly and exclusively French. Nine-tenths of the island's trade is with France. It is as if Reunion lay just off the coast of Cannes, not ten thousand miles to the South.

It is only later that you notice the degree to which this Frenchness is modulated by the island's tropical geography and what the Reunionnais call the metissage: the racial intermixture that has made the island a model of melting-pot multi-culturalism. "If anyone born on this island tries to tell you he has 'pure' French blood," I was told by one Reunionnais friend, "don't believe him. It's simply not true. In the metissage lies the very essence of this island"

By the mid-nineteenth century, Reunion had a population of several thousand French exiles: a mixture of down-at-heel aristocrats turned plantation owners and a leaven of pauvres blancs- usually impoverished, landless Breton farmers who had emigrated to Reunion in the hope of opening hill farms in the mountains. These colonials were outnumbered roughly two to one by ex-slaves, most of whom were of Madagascan origin. This mixture was spiced up in the years that followed by an infusion of Tamils, North Indian Muslims, Canton Chinese and Yemeni Arabs, all of whom were brought in to work the plantations as indentured labourers after slavery was abolished in the 1840's.

Today, these very different communities are intermixed in the most astonishing manner: there can be few other places on earth - and few other moments in history- where so many radically different peoples, religions, cultures, languages and cuisines have become so spectacularly inter-mingled.

This metissage- combined with the island's extreme isolation- affects every aspect of life on Reunion. The process of intermingling and cross-fertilisation has, for example, moulded much of the island's folklore and religious practice- as the bizarre offerings at the grave of La Buse had so intriguingly indicated. Grandmere Kale, who is said to live in the island's volcano, emerging to eat up Reunionnais children who don't eat up their greens or who refuse to do their homework, is a cross between the witches of European and African folklore and Kali, the Hindu Goddess of Destruction. This mixture of different faiths- often within a single family- has had a profound influence on the Reunionnais attitude to the world. It has made the islanders unusually tolerant and open-minded; but it has also made them deeply heterodox:

"Beliefs and ways of living are forever mingling on this island," I was told by Fr. Samy Anarche, a Tamil Catholic priest who ministers to a parish in the island's capital, St. Denis. "In the same family you can find a Chinese Taoist, an Indian Muslim, a Metropolitan Catholic, an African witch doctor and a Tamil Hindu. Inevitably ideas percolate from one religion to another. I have many Chinese Catholics in my parish who are involved in ancestor worship, as well as Indian ones who believe in reincarnation. It all makes a lot of work for the priesthood: we are continually having to explain to our parishioners what is and is not Christianity. Bien sur, it is the same with other religions: the Hindus here all eat meat and perform blood sacrifices. That's something you'll rarely see in India these days, and it probably derives from the influence of African gris gris [voodoo]."

The metissage has also formed the islander's language: they speak both conventional modern French and an impenetrable Créole patios which mixes Malagasy, Tamil and Arabic on a base of eighteenth century nautical French.

More enjoyably for the traveller, the island's brand of Créole cooking is also wonderfully multi-cultural and quite unique to the island. It mixes French and Indian culinary enthusiasms, with a dash of Arab, Chinese and Malagasy influence. The result is a culinary fusion startlingly unlike any of its parent traditions: a typical Réunion meal might consist, for example, of cari z'ourite et cari poulpe (a creamy sea urchin and octopus curry) with a scattering of side dishes of Puy lentils, choux choux (crystophene), rougaille (a spicy tomato chutney) and bredes (a spinach-like digestive); pudding might consist of a gateaux patate- a sweet, heavy potato cake. To add to the complexity of the fusion, in some areas of Réunion, Arab influence results in the use of cloves, and nutmeg, Chinese influence is shown by a taste for ginger, while Malagasy influences shows themselves in a variety of delicious dishes with a coconut cream base and several fairly disgusting ones involving roast wasp grubs.

With an island of Réunion's size and racial complexity and degree of isolation, none of this should be a surprise. But it is, if only because the strong initial impression of French modernity that greets you on your arrival along the island's western coastal strip- the glossy Renault garages, the wide motorways, the suburban villas and the neon-flashing nightclubs. All this lulls you into thinking that you are somewhere settled and unsurprising, when in reality Réunion is a crucible positively fizzing with bizarre practices, strange ideas and unexpected juxtapositions.

As I soon discovered, the offerings at the grave of La Buse were barely the tip of the iceberg.

Although the métissage is everywhere in Réunion, it is not evenly distributed throughout the island. You only have to look at a map to see that while the coastline of Réunion is full of straightforwardly French place names- St. Denis, St. Paul, St. Pierre- the hinterland contains names of more complicated derivation: thus Cilaos, Salazie and Mafate, the three volcanic craters that dominate the mountainous interior, all have names derived from the languages of Madagascar.

The reason for this lies in the island's history. For while the coast has always been dominated by French colonists, the mountains were traditionally the hideaways of escaped Malagasy slaves: Cilaos, for example, is a corruption of the Malagache tsy laosana- the place from which you never return.

Certainly, it is easy to see how Cilaos came by its name. For while parts of the coast are to this day dominated by Parisian immigrants (they pour in and buy up the beachfronts, opening hotels and surfing clubs), the mountainous interior has escaped this fate and remains firmly in the hands of the native Réunionnais.

Here, up beyond the high passes, can be found the real essence of the island's Créole identity. For in the cirques (volcanic craters) cut off from the rest of the island by mountains of terrifying verticality, live isolated communities of herders and mountain pasturalists, whose way of life has not changed for a hundred years. One crater, the Cirque de Mafate, still cannot be reached by road. Here, just ten miles as the crow flies from the bars and nightclubs of St. Denis, is a deeply inward-looking society some of whose members have never left the crater or seen a car. Anyone who wishes to see the heart of Réunion, must brave the treacherous roads and head up into the mountains.

At the fine old colonial town of St.Louis- all 18th century churches, ruined sugar mills and grand Compagnie des Indes townhouses- you turn inland, leaving the hot white glare of the palmed and coraled coastline behind. Less than a mile from the coast, the scenery changes beyond recognition.

Nothing you have seen on the island prepares for you for what lies ahead. For from the coast, the first range of the hills look green and rolling, like the gentle contours on other Indian Ocean islands. But cross these foothills and you see for the first time the massive volcanic peaks that lie further inland: successive ranges of mountains and craters rising and receding into inky cloud-banks of thunderous cumulus. You expect geological acrobatics like these on great landmasses where continents collide, not on an island the size of Réunion- little more than forty miles across- and represented on most maps by the smallest of dots. Yet the scenery is of Andean or even Himalayan grandeur.

These are jagged, angular, peremptory ranges with ridges that jut out like fractured bones- as sharp and angular as fragments of broken glass, but on such a scale that they rise up to form whole ranges of pyramid peaks- great lines of aspiring Matterhorns and Sugar Loaf Mountains- all with names like the Rhino's Horn and the Priest's Bonnet.

There is in fact something profoundly violent and even frightening about the geological processes at work, made more terrible still by the impenetrable blackness of the basalt: it neither refracts nor reflects light, but rather seems to absorb it, to draw it in. There is not even a glint of mica to break the rocks terrible black monotony, and only on the gentler slopes can ferns or moss find purchase on this hard, brittle, volcanic geomorphology.

The road through this landscape moves with serpentine indecision: it rises, curves and double backs, hesitates, sinks, then curves back on itself once more. On either side, cliffs tower upwards with dark cloud banks masking their peaks; small waterfalls cascade down the abyss and onto the windscreen. The effects of the towering peaks, mist and cloud combine to give the landscape an oddly primaeval feel: it is as if you are rising up to some lost world, so much so that you feel you would not be surprised if a pterodactyl were suddenly to appear and glide gently down the mountain thermals.


Cilaos, the bleak mist-shrouded spa-town that dominates the topmost cirque, is an isolated end-of the world sort of place. It grew to fame in the mid-nineteenth century as a hill station and sanatorium for European soldiers and colonial officials whose health had been damaged by too long in the jungles of Bengal or the swamps of Vietnam. Its climate was deemed 'European'- the ultimate accolade in the eyes of homesick colonials- its mildly radioactive mineral waters were credited with healing powers, while its baths were said to instantly cure rheumatism and a whole anthology of muscular complaints.

For a century Cilaos filled every summer with bed-ridden Brigadiers and crippled colonels- until a landslide soon after the Second World War suddenly blocked the source and killed the town dead. The unexpected return of the waters in 1971 has done little to renew the town's prosperity and it remains oddly time-warped. Its clapboard, candy-floss houses with their corrugated-iron roofs and nasturtium-filled gardens still seem to be locked somehow in the 1930's, as if all the towns clocks had stopped the moment the source was blocked.

Every day, as late afternoon gives way to evening, the clouds descend on Cilaos, shrouding it in a thick, misty gloaming. Yet overnight the clouds pull back so that each morning the town awakes miraculously refreshed to crisp, chilly sunrises that briefly turn the great basalt amphitheatre of rock surrounding the town as pink as smoked salmon. Discovering at breakfast that the bleak vision I had seen on arrival had given way to a scene of Alpine freshness, I pulled on my walking boots and headed straight off into the hills.

Three hours later I was passing up a wooded mountain path with wild strawberries and meadow campion underfoot; in the valley below you could hear the bells of the convents of Cilaos. In contrast to the geological pyrotechnics of the passes on the way up to Cilaos, the mountainsides above the town were surprisingly gentle: conifer forests gave way on the steeper slopes to bamboo and flowering bromeliads. Unseen birds were singing in the forest canopy; the ground was soft and springy, and the sun shone brightly overhead.

Then, turning a corner, I found myself in a meadow, and at the top of the meadow was a thatched hut. It was like coming across a scene from Hansel and Gretel, so that one half-expected the hut to be made of gingerbread. A tall Créole farmer was standing beside the hut, feeding his two donkeys. He was lean and wiry and on his head he wore a Homburg hat; but he had no shoes, and his feet were large and dusty. He introduced himself as Loulou and invited me inside his shack. There he offered me a glass of orange juice, squeezed before my eyes from his own oranges. I was hot and thirsty after the walk, and as we sat and savoured the cold liquid I asked Loulou about himself.

He had been brought up in this meadow, the Ilet des Trois Salazes, he said, and since finishing his national service he had rarely left it: it was over thirty years since his last visit to the capital, St. Denis, even though the bus from Cilaos could get him there in a morning.

"Why should I go?" he said. "I have everything I need here. And the people down on the coast..."

"What about them?" I asked.

"They're all z'oreilles."

I had not heard the island's French immigrants called this before. I later learned that z'oreilles- literally 'ears'- was supposedly a reference to the immigrant's habit of cupping their ears to catch the Réunionnais' Créole patois, though one Réunionnais friend I talked to believed it actually derived from a more sinister source: the old French predilection for cutting off the ears of slaves, leaving the plantation owners as the only people with their z'oreilles intact.

"To us it seems the z'oreilles have a totally different mentality," continued Loulou. "They're always rushing about here and there. They've got no manners. Down bottom if you ask directions, they'll not answer- or they'll send you the wrong way. And they call anyone with a Cilaos accent a choux choux-eater. So why go and risk trouble? Better stay here with my family. Us Yabs [Highlanders] shouldn't mix with the z'oreilles.. It never does any good."

As Loulou talked, I looked around the hut. It was a classic mountaineers den, low and cosy, with a fire licking at the logs on the hearth. A coffee pot, a kettle and a couple of pans containing rice and cari poule rested on a steel grill suspended over the embers. From the roof beams hung Loulou's worldly goods: an axe, two rain-proof capes, a box of candles, a torch and a guitar.

Loulou's father, so he told me, had been a palanquin bearer. His job had been to carry invalids up the mountains from St. Louis to Cilaos for until the building of the road in 1935 it had been impossible for carriages or cars to make it up, so impassable were the mountain tracks. In his childhood, said Loulou, there had been seven families living in the Ilet; now it was just him and his sons:

"The young are all leaving this area," said Loulou. "Things are changing so fast. In the old days we would say that Réunion was like a book: every now and again the page would turn. Now it's like a wind is blowing and all the pages are changing at once. Even up here, things are changing like you can't imagine: they say that we'll soon have electricity. And after that who knows? Maybe even the telephone."

When Loulou came back from his National Service, he found the Ilet virtually deserted; only his widower father was left; everyone else had given up and gone to seek work on the coast. Moreover, in his absence the French forestry agency had removed the Ilet's right of pasture over the mountain; they had planted trees in the grazing land and fenced the area off. There was no compensation.

"We lived off our sheep," said Loulou. "But after our pasture was taken away we had no option but to shoot them. After that everyone moved away. I came home to find that everything had broken up. I had to start again from scratch."

Since then Loulou had devoted his waking hours to trying to coax a living from the Ilet, to turn the thin soil of the mountainside into productive land. As he took me around, he proudly showed me where he had built terraces, where he had planted fruit trees, and where he established herb and vegetable gardens. He now had two patches of grain and maize while apricots, cherries, plums and quince hung heavily from boughs covered in thick, grey lichen. There was watercress in the stream and sweet-smelling passionflowers hanging from a trellis in front of his hut. In addition Loulou had two milkcows, a bull and his donkeys. In summer his sons joined him in the Ilet; life was hard, he said, but he managed to make ends meet.


It was as we said goodbye that he showed me the ruined hut where the village sorcerer had lived when he was a child. It was then that Loulou told me one of the most extraordinary stories that I came across on Réunion:


Sometime in 1931 a box of sacred relics arrived in Réunion from the Vatican.

It seems that somewhere in transit the label detailing the saint's name had been removed from the box, and the only indication as to the contents was a stamp on the side reading in Italian, ESPEDITO [Expedited]. So began the cult of St. Expedit, a saint whose popularity grew year by year until what had started as a clerical error ended with St. Expedit becoming Réunion's unofficial patron saint, a saint whose unwritten biography has come to crystallise the most profound hopes and fears of Réunion's multiple ethnicities. There are now around 350 shrines in Réunion dedicated to St. Expedit. They sit beside every road junction, crown every hilltop, lie deep in the bottom of the island's wildest ravines. They act both as oratories for the faithful and as sacred sentry boxes, guarding against the terrors of the night.

For it is not just Réunion's Catholics who look to St. Expedit for help: all the communities of the island pray to him, and each has brought something to his cult. Probably due to a confusion with the popular French cult of St. Elpiduce, the Catholic church has given the saint the trappings of an early Christian martyr, and his image has stabilised as that of a young Roman legionary, with a silver breastplate and a red tunic: in one hand he holds a spear and in the other the martyr's palm; under his right feet he crushes a raven, a symbol of his victory over the demons of temptation.

But to this conventional image of Catholic piety, have been added a number of more exotic trappings. Hindus have adopted into their pantheon this image clothed in the Hindus' sacred colour, saffron, and now treat St. Expedit as an unofficial incarnation of Vishnu; those wanting children come to the shrine of St. Expedit and tie saffron cloths to the grilles. In the same way Indian-Réunionnais Muslims tie small cotton threads to his shrine just as they would at Sufi shrines in the subcontinent.

The cult also proved unexpectedly popular with the descendants of those slaves who clung to the old spirit-worshipping beliefs of their Malagasy ancestors. For in Madagascar the palm is associated with death, while St. Expedit's spear and raven is taken to be a symbol of sacrifice, as if he were a white witch doctor. More exotic still, some of the island's sorcerers have given the cult a slightly sinister aspect by decapitating the saint's image and taking away the head either to neutralise his power or to use in their own incantations. According to Loulou, the sorcerer at Ilet Trois Salazes had had a small oratory in which he kept several heads of St. Expedit.

"He used them to cast spells," said Loulou. "He thought that by cutting the saint's head off he was taking his power and stealing it for himself."

"Did you believe he had power?"

"We were all terrified of him: everyone believed he had very strong powers. But in the end the people kicked him out. He was too dangerous- he began to demand bribes not to cast spells on us all. In the end we had enough."

"Weren't you frightened that he would take revenge on you for throwing him out of the Ilet?"

"We took precautions," replied Loulou.

"What sort of precautions?"

"We used stronger magic," said Loulou. "We sent someone to the grave of La Sitarane in St. Pierre. It is the most powerful grave on the island. With La Sitarane on your side, no one can harm you at all."


So it was that on my last evening in Réunion, I drove into St. Pierre to look at the grave of La Sitarane.

Beyond the mosque and just before the Hindu temple of Kali, a group of old Créole men were playing boules on a square of carefully clipped grass; beyond them, through the palms trees, you could see the surf exploding on the coral reef out to sea. After the clear but chilly air of the mountains the coast seemed gloriously hot and humid.

Graves seemed to form a grim symmetry to my journey through Réunion. I had visited the grave of La Buse the night arrived; now here I was, on the eve of my departure, making for another cemetery intent on seeing the grave of an even more reprehensible character than the piratical Buzzard. For La Sitarane, it emerged, was not just a sorcerer, but also a murderer who had been arrested after committing a number of bloody killings at the turn of the century.

"He only killed three people," said a Réunionnais historian I had quizzed on the subject, "but according to legend he first drugged his victims with datura, then afterwards drank their blood. Just before he was guillotined he made a speech vowing that he would return from the dead to punish his captors. It caused such a shock that La Sitarane has never been forgotten. Yet I'll tell you an odd thing."

The historian leant a little closer to me: "When I first visited his grave twenty years ago there were no visitors, no offerings and no burning candles. But now the grave is more visited than even that of La Buse. All these offerings, this sorcery: far from dying away with development and education, it actually seems to be on the increase."

This idea fascinated me for it touched on something that was becoming clearer to me the longer I stayed on Réunion: that the island's ever increasing métissage was leading to a fundamental metamorphosis in its character. Réunion had been born and shaped by the accidents of French colonial history and three hundred years after the first French flag was raised at St. Paul, the island was still supported by an umbilical cord from Paris. Yet with Réunion's customs and traditions evolving every day through the ever increasing intermixture of its different communities, it seemed that the island was visibly becoming less and less French every day. Certainly the facade was still there- the croissants, the baguettes and the burgundy- but at its heart the island seemed to be fast evolving its own quite separate identity, spinning off into its own orbit, as the métissage led to constantly shifting fusion of faiths, ideas and superstitions.

Inside the cemetery, the cross head of La Sitarane's gravestone had been broken off and the remaining shaft was painted bright red. Onto the graveslab, just as the historian had indicated, had been piled a mountain of bizarre offerings: rice, potatoes, oranges, radishes, wine gums, milk, coconuts and incense sticks, as well as the inevitable bottles of rum and packets of Gitanes.

"You see people here think La Sitarane is alive," explained Jean Claude, the gravedigger, who was busy preparing a plot nearby. "That is why they bring these presents: cigarettes for him to smoke, rum for him to drink and so on. They think that if they honour him in this way La Sitarane will help them in their work- or help them punish their enemies."

Jean Claude hauled himself out of his grave and wiped his hands clean on his trousers.

"So who is it who comes here?" I asked

"We get all sorts," replied Jean Claude. "An hour ago there was a woman dancing on the grave. First she cut the head off a chicken then she started dancing. She was Créole I think, but lately it's been mostly Tamils who've been coming. They stand by the grave in groups and their priests read from their bad books. All the Tamils believe in La Sitarane's power. They are great sorcerers."

I walked over to the grave and reached down to pick up a coconut that someone had left on the slab, but Jean Claude restrained my hand:

"Its better not to touch," he said. "There was grave digger here when I was a boy. One day he drank some wine from the grave. The next day his mind was finished. Now he's in the asylum in St. Denis. Or so they say. "

"So you actually believe in La Sitarane's power?" I asked.

"Bien sûr," said Jean Claude. "Of course. Everyone does."

Jean Claude smiled at the question, as if it were something only a z'oreille could possibly ask.

"This is Réunion, not Paris," he explained. "Here things are- how do you say?- a little different from La Métropole.”

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