Lacoste, Vaucluse still. The oldest building in the town, the Maison Forte, dates back to the 9th century while the nearby Pont Julien remains one of the oldest standing examples of a working 1st century B.C. Roman bridge. Finnbar Mac Eoin, author of "Two Suitcases And A Dog" lives in Lacoste. He was the last person to drive across The Pont Julien before it closed to traffic in 2005. A plaque states, "We do not know who was the first person to cross, but an Irishman was the last". Lacoste is best known for its most notorious resident, Donatien Alphonse Francois comte
Alphonse Pinart Alphonse Pinart Alphonse Pinart (1852–1911) was a French explorer, philologist, and ethnographer. He was an early champion of the theory that the Americas were first populated by migration across the Bering Strait. To support his research, he made extensive travel in the Pacific, from Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to Easter Island. He also pilfered numerous historical documents from the Spanish archives in Santa Fe, New Mexico: Large numbers of documents of this period [from 1743 to 1749] were . . . stolen and are now in the so-called “Pinart” collection. Pinart (Alphonse) was a Frenchman and visited New Mexico