Tulle? A frou-frou fabric beloved of ballerinas and brides, isn't it? A sort of fancy netting for ballroom dancers? Yes, but it's also a small town in the deep recesses of France, once famed for its fine-point lace, which has suddenly been thrust into the global limelight.
When Francois Hollande won the French presidential election on May 6, he was in Tulle. Standing on a stage beneath the towering walls of its medieval cathedral, captured by the cameras of the world's media, he bathed in the acclaim of thousands of joyous supporters for whom he had been an MP for more than two decades and the town's mayor from 2001 to 2008.
Everybody in Tulle knows Francois, they say, because he made a point of getting among his constituents, going to the Saturday market to buy fresh local produce, chatting in the time-honoured streets, walking the riverside as the narrow River Correze gurgled its way through town, overlooked by steep hillsides.
At La Caleche brasserie, near his office, Hollande has long been a popular regular, always sitting at the same leather banquette. Once a portly figure, partly due to local specialities such as potato pie and cherry tarts, his slimming regime was aided by forays up the steep steps leading from the cathedral square into the crooked alleys of the hillside medieval quarter.
Tulle is 'la France profonde', the archetypal France of small towns and villages nurtured by agriculture - cattle, geese and duck-rearing in the case of the Correze department, of which Tulle is the capital. Never mind that only 4 per cent of the French are farmers of any sort these days, 'deep France' still retains the far-from-the-city-and-glad-to-be feel that has always marked most of the country.
Yet Tulle, despite its splendid isolation in the western folds of the Massif Central, is much more than it seems. Its history is riddled with remarkable incidents, some of which have resonated throughout France. And the list of powerful personalities it has produced or propelled to prominence is astounding: this town provided three popes for the Avignon Papacy and has been the hothouse for two presidents of France's Fifth Republic, Jacques Chirac being the other.