St. Jean de Luz, in the heart of the Basque region of Southwest France, possesses beauty and vitality in equal measures. Now a major tourist destination, its waterways carry as many personal watercraft as commercial these days. My first linen workshop grew up in a first-floor seaside room (right front corner of the building at the right in the photo) in the sixteenth-century House of the Infante, more famous actually as the temporary home of Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche “Infante d’Espagne” for a few months before she married King Louis XIV. The building is not home to the Musée Grévin, a branch of the famed Paris wax museum.