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^[[10]]
April 24, 1973.
^[[10]]

Dear Alice:

Before I leave Saumur let me record a few more scattered memories of it.

1. Le Havre and Saumur were the first places I had ever seen where the bicycle was anything more than a toy. In this country I had sometimes seen boys delivering newspapers on bikes, but I had not seen them used for any other practical purpose. At Saumur it was the major means of local transportation. Later I found that to be true elsewhere in France and in other European countries. As late as 1955 I remember seeing hundreds of bicycles parked densely on a quiet side street adjoining the business district of Stockholm. They belonged to people who rode them to and from work. It was much the same at that time in Denmark, Finland, Switzerland and Italy. Nowadays the automobile has more and more displaced the bike. 

It amused me at Samur to see well-dressed old ladies and often priests riding sedately along on a bike. I failed then to notice, and I still wonder, whether the priests in those black robes managed to straddle a man's-style bicycle or had to use the girls' model.

2. Milk was delivered house-to-house in two-wheeled, horse-drawn carts. The drivers were women, their men being in the army. Each cart carried several metal milk cans, much like those you see around dairy farms in this country. The cart also carried a graduated pitcher, for measuring out the milk in liters. Each customer had to meet the cart, bringing his own container. I never saw a milk bottle, and no one on either side of the Atlantic had yet heard of milk in cartons. That may seem to you awkward, but think of the saving to the customer. I don't know whether those delivery women came directly from the dairy farms or not. If they were middlemen they were the only ones involved in the milk trade. Along one street near the school I used to see milk delivered in a smaller cart. It was drawn not by a horse, but by a big dog. He was harnessed much like a buggy horse.

3. Saumur had two big cafes and any number of smaller ones. The Cafe de la Paix in Paris is by no means the only one of that name. Nearly every French town of any size, including Saumur, had one. The other cafe was named, predictably, the Cafe du Commerce. Then there