Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Yeah, it was. I was being stubborn about reading it in the "original" (or as least as close as I could get without reading French). My Kindle was hugely helpful, though: I found myself using its wikipedia look-up constantly to get some context for the historical or geographical mentions, and that made a big difference in my enjoyment and understanding of the text. The automatic translation helped too, for the few words that remained untranslated.