Didier Raoult has touted many dubious treatments but is a hero in France’s second city, which has long railed against Paris

The people of Provence in the south of France have a word for a particularly comic or bizarrely dramatic situation: pagnolesque.

It is a tribute to one of the region’s most famous sons, the author Marcel Pagnol, who declared in his play Les Marchands de Gloire (The Glory Merchants): “In politics everything is a comedy.”