Bordeaux City Quotes

The only traveler with real soul I've ever met was an office boy who worked in a company where I was at one time employed. This young lad collected brochures on different cities, countries and travel companies; he had maps, some torn out of newspapers, others begged from one place or another; he cut out pictures of landscapes, engravings of exotic costumes, paintings of boats and ships from various journals and magazines. He would visit travel agencies on behalf of some real or hypothetical company, possibly the actual one in which he worked, and ask for brochures on Italy or India, brochures giving details of sailings between Portugal and Australia. He was not only the greatest traveler I've ever known (because he was truest), he was also one of the happiest people I have had the good fortune to meet. I'm sorry not to know what has become of him, though, to be honest, I'm not really sorry, I only feel that I should be. I'm not really sorry because today, ten or more years on from that brief period in which i knew him, he must be a grown man, stolidly, reliably fulfilling his duties, married perhaps, someone's breadwinner - in other words, one of the living dead. By now he may even have traveled in his body, he who knew so well how to travel in his soul. A sudden memory assails me: he knew exactly which trains one had to catch to ho from Paris to Bucharest; which trains one took to cross England; and in his garbled pronunciation of the strange names hung the bright certainty of the greatness of his soul. Now he probably lives like a dead man, but perhaps one day, when he's old, he'll remember that to dream of Bordeaux is not only better, but truer, than actually to arrive in Bordeaux

dacă vreţi să aflaţi tot. - Dacă crezi că e necesar... - Este. Mai ales dacă vreţi să ştiţi ce trebuie să căutaţi în acele interceptări, replică Burckhardt, şi dacă vreţi să vă faceţi o idee a necazurilor pe care povestea asta le poate aduce Elveţiei. - Dă-i înainte. - Bine. Pe 26 iunie 1940, la patru săptămâni după capitularea forţelor armate belgiene, regele lor, ajuns prizonier al Wermachtului german, i-a trimis un mesaj personal lui Hitler prin care îl informa că, anterior izbucnirii războiului, a fost efectuat un transport masiv de aur aparţinând regatului belgian către Banque de France din Paris, pentru siguranţă. După informaţiile sale, aurul fusese depus într-o ascunzătoare din vecinătatea oraşului Bordeaux. Scrisoarea continua prin a-l în cunoştinţa pe Hitler că el, Leopold al IlI-lea, ar fi foarte recunoscător dacă Hitler ar putea face ceva în sensul returnării aurului către proprietarul de drept. Până aici, toate bune. Mai întâi, cât de mare era acea cantitate de aur belgian? Şi cine îl controla? Conform armistiţiului din 22 iunie 1940 dintre Franţa şi Germania, s-a convenit ca guvernul mareşalului Petain s.l exercite de la Vichy toate prerogativele administrării civile asupra îiu regii Franţe, inclusiv asupra teritoriilor de peste mări, deci şi asupra Acest ordin a fost dat de Roosevelt în Ordonanţa Executivă nr. 8785 (vezi Paul Erdman, ţtviss-American Economic Relations, Basel, Tubingen, 1959, p. Băncii Franţei. In consecinţă, în urma ordinelor lui Hitler, Berlinul a trimis celor din Vichy un mesaj urgent prin care solicitau detalii asupra aurului belgian. Răspunsul a venit imediat şi a depăşit evaluările nemţilor. După cei din Vichy, cantitatea de aur în discuţie se ridica la... Burckhardt se opri, scoase din geantă un dosar, îl deschise şi citi: - 4 944 de lăzi conţinând, în total, 221 730 kilograme de aur pur. În plus, Franţa mai deţinea 57 000 kilograme ale Băncii Naţionale a Poloniei şi 10 000 kilograme ale băncilor naţionale ale Luxemburgului, Lituaniei, Letoniei, Norvegiei şi Cehoslovaciei. Burckhardt închise dosarul. - Problema era că nici un gram din toată această masă enormă de aur nu se mai afla în Franţa. Cu patru zile înainte ca Franţa să capituleze, toată cantitatea de aur - plus cel aparţinând Franţei - fusese încărcată în portul Brest la bordul a două crucişătoare care, ulterior, au dispărut în Atlantic. Planul iniţial, încheiat în urma unei înţelegeri

Soon after, the Germans attacked and conquered Denmark and Norway and by May 1940 Hitler's troops crushed Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg and invaded France. The English fled at Dunkirk, France was defeated. Paris was formally declared an "open city" and surrendered on June 16, 1940. Paul Reynaud, the premier of France, fled to Bordeaux and requested an armistice on the following day.

Montaigne’s circumscribed sense of where his duty lay became most apparent in June 1585, when Bordeaux suffered a heat wave rapidly followed by an outbreak of plague: a particularly destructive combination. The epidemic lasted until December, and during those few months more than 14,000 people died in the city, almost a third of its population. More people were killed than in the St. Bartholomew’s massacres across the whole country, yet, as often happens with epidemics occurring in time of war, it left little trace on historical memory. In any case, plague was common. So frequent were outbreaks in the sixteenth century that it is easy to forget how catastrophic they were, each time, for those unfortunate enough to be caught up in them.

France was the next country to be overrun. The plague arrived at Marseilles a month or two after it reached the mainland of Italy. Through 1348, it moved across the country, advancing on two main lines, toward Bordeaux in the west and Paris in the north. The fate of Perpignan, just north of the Spanish border, illustrates vividly what happened in many of the smaller cities. The disruption of everyday commercial life is shown by statistics of loans made by the Jews of Perpignan to their Christian co-citizens. In January 1348, there were sixteen such loans, in February, twenty-five, in March, thirty-two. There were eight in the first eleven days of April, three in the rest of the month, and then no more until August 12.

One man I unfortunately did not get to mention in my book, but I feel also deserves to be noted here, is Sousa Mendes, a Portuguese consul in Bordeaux, France. In June 1940, when Germany took France, people were being attacked and cities were falling under Nazi control, and people were desperate to flee, he defied strict orders to not authorize visas. As the Portuguese consulate filled with desperate people, Mendes went with his heart and conscience and vowed to sign as many visas as he could regardless of nationality or religion, and he did so without taking payment. For three days, he signed and signed and signed, his name reduced to only “Mendes,” but the consulate stamp on those visas was enough to let refugees flow through the borders. Before he was forced to stop, he managed to sign at least 3,800—this number has been confirmed with certainty by the Sousa Mendes Foundation (survivors and descendants of the families he saved with those visas), though estimates of the number range between 10,000–30,000. For his defiance, he was stripped permanently of his title, shunned by António de Oliveira Salazar, the prime minister of Portugal, and never again able to secure employment. Sousa Mendes is noted to have said: “I could not have acted otherwise, and I therefore accept all that has befallen me with love.

the very lucrative “industry” that was the slave trade, which had practically built great cities, including Bordeaux and Nantes, just as in England it had practically built Bristol and Liverpool.

Other Romans pledged their allegiance not to the longstanding ideal of Romanitas but to the individual cities in which they resided. “I am a citizen of Bordeaux,” one fiercely insisted—conveniently ignoring the Roman roads he traveled, the Roman money he used to buy his writing equipment, and the Roman courts that protected his property. Bordeaux’s local government provided none of those protections or amenities. It was the treasury of Rome that made them possible. But for a resident of Roman Gaul, waving the flag of hometown pride had likely become an effective strategy for keeping unwanted strangers out.

She kneeled down, opened the wine fridge, and scanned the shelves, filled with a variety of white wines. Sam began to pull each bottle out and read the labels; all of the wines were products of the dozens of vineyards that dotted northern Michigan, including the two peninsulas that ran north from Traverse City into Grand Traverse Bay. There was a wealth of whites- chardonnays, sauvignon blancs, Rieslings, rosés, and dessert wines. All of these were produced within a few miles of here, Sam thought, a feeling of pride filling her soul. Sam pulled out a pinot gris and stood. A few bottles of red gleamed in the fading day's light: a cab franc, a pinot noir, a merlot. Robust reds were a bit harder to come by in northern Michigan because of the weather and growing season, but Sam was happy to see such a selection. Sam had had the pleasure of meeting famed Italian chef Mario Batali at culinary school, and the two had bonded over Michigan. Batali owned a summer home in Northport, not far from Suttons Bay, and he had been influential early on in touting Michigan's summer produce and fruit, fresh fish, and local farms and wineries. When someone in class had mocked Michigan wines, saying they believed it was too cold to grow grapes, Batali had pointedly reminded them that Michigan was on the forty-fifth parallel, just like Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Alsace. Sam had then added that Lake Michigan acted like a big blanket or air conditioner along the state's coastline, and the effect created perfect temperatures and growing conditions for grapes and, of course, apples, cherries, asparagus, and so much more. Batali had winked at her, and Sam had purchased a pair of orange Crocs not long after in his honor.