Jean-Paul Sartre described a rugby match thus: "I saw adults in short trousers who were fighting with one another and throwing themselves to the ground so as to make a leather ball pass between two wooden stumps…" Then, on a more serious note: "I summed up what I saw, but I deliberately chose not to understand it". For our part, we should try to "understand" the meaning, by going back to the origins, because the "game for 15" cannot be understood and loved without referring to its history, the geography it infers and the climatic conditions which first shaped it… That does not mean that rugby is prey to ill-advised determinism & we see, in the peaceful sun of vineyards and olive groves, an exercise invented in the rain in preparation for the military conquest of an empire.