connected by a direct train: Eurostar's new year-round link from London
   St Pancras to Marseille St-Charles. So, you can breakfast in the
   capital, then whizz along High Speed One (opened 2007) through Kent to
   the Channel Tunnel (opened 1994) before slotting into France's
   ever-expanding high-speed network (opened 1981).

   Relax as almost the entire length of France blurs past at 186mph, and
--
   Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany and Switzerland; Basel station even
   has a special terminus for French trains. From Basel, you could be back
   in Paris in three hours aboard a Train à Grande Vitesse, the high-speed
   backbone of French long-distance travel, or board a "classic" EuroCity
   train, the Vauban, beside the Rhine through Alsace and Lorraine to the
--

   Yet this is a nation devoted to the railway. Recently a "rail Ryanair"
   was introduced, in the shape of the Ouigo proposition: high-speed,
   high-density trains that link cities such as Lyon and Marseille with
   Marne-la-Vallée, east of Paris, with fares from as little as €10 if you
--
   between Paris and Bordeaux can yield one-way fares as low as €29 in
   first class, a quarter of the normal fare. And the trains are
   impressively swift: on the newest high-speed line, from Paris to
   Strasbourg, services touch 200mph, covering the 300 miles in 2 hours 17
   minutes.

   The real joy of French rail travel, though, is to be found away from
   high-speed lines. Even on the outskirts of Paris, the line curling
   around from the modestly impressive St-Lazare terminus to Versailles
   presents a fascinating fresh vision of the capital. In the Ardennes,