the first week of September.

Bordeaux, Monday.

Bordeaux is a day's railroad ride from Paris--twelve hours away from the
German cannon, which even now are only fifty miles north of the
boulevards, twelve hours nearer Spain and Africa. And you feel both
these things.

All about you is the wine country--the names of towns and villages round
about read like a wine-card--and, as you are lunching in some little
side-street restaurant, a table is moved away, a trap-door opens, and
monsieur the proprietor looks on while the big casks of claret are
rolled in from the street and lowered to the cellar and the old casks
hauled up again. You are close to the wine country and close to the
sea--to oysters and crabs and ships--and to the hot sun and more
exuberant spirits of the Midi. The pretty, black-eyed Bordelaise--there
are pretty girls in Bordeaux--often seems closer to Madrid than to
Paris; even the Bordelais accent has a touch of the Mediterranean, and
the crisp words of Paris are broken up and even an extra vowel added now
and then, until they ripple like Spanish or Italian. "Pe-tite-a ma-
dame-a !" rattles some little newsboy, ingratiating himself with an
indifferent lady of uncertain age; and the porter will bring your boots
in no time-in "une-a pe-tite-a mi-nute-a."

The war is in everybody's mind, of course--no one in France thinks of
anything else--but there is none of that silence and tenseness, that
emotional tremor, one feels in Paris. The Germans will never come here,
one feels, no matter what happens, and as you read the communiqués in La
Petite Gironde and La Liberté du Sud-Ouest the war seems farther away, I