Henri Rousseau is famous for lush, vibrant jungle scenes filled with tigers and oversized flora, yet he never once left France. This episode tells the story of the middle-aged Paris toll collector with no formal training who became the laughing stock of the Salon des Indépendants and was later crowned a genius by Picasso, Matisse and the avant-garde. We begin with a childhood in Laval marked by a father's debt and a seized family home, a small perjury that ended his legal career, and an army stint used as an escape hatch.

From his 1871 appointment as a collector of the octroi, the source of his nickname Le Douanier, to his retirement at 49 on a tiny pension, we explore how he built his jungles from the greenhouses of the Jardin des Plantes, taxidermy at the natural history museum, and children's book illustrations. We examine his flat, meth ...