Viewing page 22 of 124

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[handwritten]] 8 [[/handwritten]]

April 5, 1973.

Dear Wanda, Jessica and Ted:

The cave dwellers of whom I wrote in my last letter inhabited a long ridge that ends at Saumur. There its tip juts out into the city. From downtown a steep, winding road, or rather street, runs to the summit of the ridge. About halfway up it passes along the base of the outer wall of the castle of Saumur. The first castle on that site was built in the eleventh century by Foulques Nerra, grandfather of Henry Plantagenet who became king of England. Three centuries later Foulques' castle was replaced by the one that stands there now. Perhaps the older one had been badly damaged, or maybe it was just regarded as obsolete. Anyhow xuring the Hundred Years' War a new facility (to use a modern expression) was erected on the site. It is better preserved than most medieval castles, and it has everything that they were supposed to have. For example there is a dungeon ([[underlined]] oubliette [[/underlined]]) which prisoners entered by being lowered with ropes through a hole in the stone floor of the room above. There was no other opening. The castle also houses a museum of cavalry uniforms and equipment. Yet few American tourists go there. For them the beaten path is the "chateau country" in the immediate neighbourhood of Tours. I suppose thr average tourist is more interested in Renaissance palaces, such as Chenonceaux or Azay-le-Rideau, then in plain fortresses.

If you continue uphill past the castle to the summit, you will come to the Rue des Moulins, the Street of the Windmills. Before you get there the main highway turns off to the right, so the Rue des Moulins is a quiet byway. On the map of Saumur in my Michelin guidebook of 1957 the street still bears taht name. But even when I went there in 1938, with Helen, the windmills were gone. In 1917 there had been five of them, standing along a two-block stretch of narrow street. There was a cozy wineshop, where you could sit and look out the window at some of the windmills. I have never known a more pleasant place for relaxing.

Our bicycle trips for field exercises in the country were always enjoyable. De Salinelles, our instructor, had an eye for scenery and liked to take us to places with a good view. We used surveying