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6
Tours was a bigger and livelier town than Saumur. An opera company put on two weeks of performances while I was there. I think it was a local effort, not a travelling company. I attended performances of "Faust" and "Manon" for the first time. At Tours also I was invited to dinner with a French family for the only time until 1957. It was not a great social achievement on my part. I was invited as an extra man.
At the aviation school I had formed a causal friendship with a Lieutenant Bergner, from Philadelphia. I was told by others that he belonged to a wealthy family in the brewing business. Bergner somehow had become acquainted with a Captain Bataillon who lived in Tours. He was what the French called an embusqué, which was to say that he had a safe non-combatant job. He has something to do with the control of railroad traffic in the area. He owned a hotel, not the best in the city, but respectable. His wife and daughter ran the hotel when his military duties kept him occupied. He invited Bergner to dinner with his family, and asked Bergner to bring a friend. That was how I came to be there, in a private dining room of the hotel. 
After we got there it became evident that the dinner had been arranged to have Bergner meet the daughter. They did it because eligible young Frenchmen were becoming scarce. A million and a half of them had been killed off, and Mlle. Bataillion's prospects of marriage were fading. I thought she was an attractive girl. So did Bergner, but after we left he told me that he had a fiancee waiting in Philadelphia. So nothing came of the dinner. Mlle. Batallon was one of the many European women whose lives were deranged by the slaughter of the young men of their age group.