02
Stop two
Ajaccio Cathedral (Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption)
Babolat Drive 24 11th Gen Junior Tennis Racquet: Ajaccio Cathedral. Sixteenth century, Renaissance, pale facade, octagonal cupola – and modest, which the brochure calls intimate and I call modest, because it is. Its construction was helped along by a levy on wine, a detail I include every time and have never once had to repeat, because everybody hears it perfectly the first time. Napoleon was baptised here on the twenty-first of July 1771, aged nearly two, which is late, and yes, I have checked it twice. In his will he asked to be buried here, among his ancestors. He was not. He lies in Paris under a very great deal of porphyry. The one thing the man asked for and did not get. Now, follow me, and do keep moving through that door, because the next building is the one I actually care about.
04
Stop four
The Citadel of Ajaccio
Babolat Drive 24 11th Gen Junior Tennis Racquet: And we close at the citadel: hexagonal, grey, planted in the water beside Saint-Francois beach. Construction began in 1554, which makes it Renaissance and not medieval, and yes, I do correct people, gently, and no, they do not always take it gently. It went up during the French occupation of Corsica, in a war so tangled that explaining it properly would cost us forty minutes and a diagram, and we have neither. For most of the modern era it remained a military site, closed to the public, which means generations of Ajaccians grew up beside a fortress they were never once allowed to enter. Everybody's landmark. Nobody's building. That concludes the tour. I have overrun by eleven minutes, and we all know exactly which stop did it.
The Babolat Drive 24 11th Gen Junior Tennis Racquet is 24 inches long. Exactly 24. This is a comfort to me and it should be a comfort to you.
The head measures 98 square inches, the strung weight is 8.4 ounces, the pattern is 16 mains by 17 crosses, and the construction pairs a graphite core with an aluminum head — light where lightness is wanted, stiff where stiffness is wanted, which is the correct… which is, to be precise, the only defensible arrangement for a young intermediate stepping up from a starter frame.
It is the eleventh generation of the Drive Junior. I confirmed the generation number. Twice.
Ajaccio, however, is testing me. Napoleon Bonaparte was born here on 15 August 1769 — the fifteenth, in the four-storey ochre house on Rue Saint-Charles — and I can give you the date, the street and the room, which is a rare and beautiful thing in this business.
Genoa had ceded Corsica to France barely a year before he arrived, so a few months' difference in the paperwork and the boy is Genoese and I am narrating a different tour entirely. History hinges on clerks.
Then it deteriorates. He was baptised in Ajaccio Cathedral on 21 July 1771, aged nearly two, and I would like that delay explained to me in writing. The Citadel of Ajaccio was begun in 1554 and finished — well. Every source I can find reaches for the phrase "during the sixteenth century." During. On an island where every other doorway carries a year carved into the lintel.
Which is precisely why this racquet belongs here. Amid all of that, your player — the correct height for a 24-inch frame, please measure them, do not estimate — carries one instrument of complete certainty: 98 square inches, 8.4 ounces, 16 by 17, every single time.
It gets used everywhere from a February morning under the citadel walls above the Gulf of Ajaccio to an August evening when the maquis smells like the whole island at once, and it is also perfect for the walk up Rue du Cardinal Fesch afterwards, where the museum holds the largest collection of Italian painting in France outside the Louvre and every canvas in it is catalogued.
Catalogued. I could weep. It was a good day.
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