Viewing page 20 of 124

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

-3-

grain, potatoes, casks of wine and other provisions.  Two of the compartments were pens, holding chickens and Belgian hares.

About 20 years ago I read in the Atlantic a rhapsodic piece about the Saumur area entitled "Where the Wild Boars Drank".  It suggested that the name Saumur had originally meant something like that.  The author was Anne Green, sister of Julian Green who was then (and maybe still is) professor of French literature at the University of Virginia.  He is a bilingual author.  His first novel was published in French and French critics were kind to it.  The Greens, though American, grew up somehow in France.  They had French friends living near Saumur whom they visited frequently.  Anne seemed to like the place as much as I did.  According to her, those cave dwellings along the Loire were originally quarries, frok which building stone was taken and shipped by water to London.  Later it occurred to the thrifty French that each quarry could be made into a dwelling at half the expense of building a regular house.

When Helen and I were there in 1938 the caves were empty but there were very few new houses in the area.  The villages had simply been deserted.  During that same 20-year interval our log houses in Cheatham county had mostly been abandoned, and for a similar reason.  Country people were moving to the big cities.  In France there was [[strikethrough]] anoth [/strikethrough]] another contributing factor.  The population of the country as a whole was falling.  We did a lot of driving through France that summer.  In the rural areas we saw several villages in which all the houses were empty.

The biggest caves around Saumur belonged to two local wineries.  They were located in two villages, St. Hilaire and St. Florent, at the southern edge of the town.  Our charwoman had a brother who worked in one of them.  He gave Herbert Jones and me a guided tour one Sunday afternoon.  There were tunnels cut for long distances into the solid rock.  Down the middle of each tunnel ran a miniature railroad track, over which small cars were pushed by hand.  Along the sides of the tunnels were racks in which literally millions of bottles of wine were stored.  It was a sparkling white wine which my barbarian taste has