When I got Slate's Henry Garbar on the line on Wednesday, he sounded extremely relieved.

I am in Paris, and it is a very seasonal and reasonable 75 degrees.

Just a few days ago, Henry was in the middle of Europe's devastating heat wave.

He was in Normandy and the French countryside, staying in his great-grandfather's house.

Monday and Tuesday were the hottest days.

It was well above 100 degrees on both of those days.

And it was so hot that you felt like you could not be outside for more than 20 or 30 minutes without starting to feel very unpleasant.

And I'm talking outside in the shade.

Going into the sun, he says, was just intolerable.

And all around him, it felt like the countryside was roasting. There was this kind of smell, like all the sort of like the scent of the grass and the

trees and the crops and the fields. It all seemed to be some like more pronounced somehow as if like

everything was like slowly cooking at some level,

like there was some kind of molecular reaction that was happening.

When he did venture out of the house into the village, it was empty and surreal.

It was like being in an apocalypse movie.

So on the last day, on Tuesday, when it was 105 degrees, we were riding our bikes back

from my great-grandfather's house to the train station.

And it was about 7 p.m.

And about 30 miles north of us, there were these wheat fields that had caught on fire.

And so the air was full of,

kind of like haze.

It was a combination of like haze and heat and rain.

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