For decades, perhaps centuries, before the woman called Marie Harel was born, farmers and their wives in the green, rolling valley near the Norman town of Vimoutiers were making a rich, creamy cheese known as Camembert. Like the rest of them, Marie, whose years spanned the latter half of the 18th century, probably made and relished the cheese herself, but beyond that, no one in Vimoutiers recalled that she had any special connection with it. There was, true, a local legend that one of Marie's relatives had once been received by Napoleon III and had given him a box...
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