Did you know how many tiles (tuiles, carreaux, malons, pottery…) my village produced in a year? Give a wild guess. A wilder guess! It is so shocking, that my exaggerating storytelling habits do not need to be expressed.
I still can’t believe it myself. If you walk around our village, you can still see the huge 4 old kilns. They stop producing many years ago, but they stand as massive evidence of how much tile was actually made here.
They say—and I absolutely love to tell this story—that these curved tuiles (tuiles are also the name of a cookie sold in French bakeries- they are shaped as a roof tile.., The myth stems from the sensual French nickname for the cookies, cuisses de nymphe), were originally shaped by molding clay over women’s thighs. But when you find out the real numbers, well you know that couldn’t be true. But it adds a charming twist go history.
(Though I always say that if any tiles were made on my thighs, they’d be incredibly valuable because I have such a chunky little thigh €€€€🤣🤭!)
The actual truth is that our village was turning out a mind-blowing 15 million tiles every single year!
Imagine trying to make 15 million tiles on human thighs—they wouldn’t have had any skin left. Instead, these millions of tiles were packed up, sent to the port of Marseille, where they were loaded onto ships as ballast, helping keep the vessels stable on long sea voyages before ending up on rooftops as far away as Mexico
The kilns are cold now but there was a time when my village was a rooftop of the world.
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