2015-09-08-Richelieu, FR

Our journey to Bordeaux, and our ship, continued today. We left Amboise on the bus at 9 AM and at 10:30 AM we stopped for a couple of hours in the town of Richelieu, a quaint 17th century town re-made in a grid pattern by Cardinal Richelieu, a prince of the church and King Louis XIII's Chief Minister in the first half of the 1600s. The town is enclosed by a wall with four handsome gates, a fine church, a covered market, a beautiful park and a wonderful little bakery where we bought "chuquettes", a light, airy pastery introduced to us by Guillaume, our tour director. In the Catholic church in the main square was a marble memorial with the names of 58 French soldiers from the parish who perished during WW I. For a town with a population of only 2,000 the loss of so many young men had to be a stunning catastrophe. By contrast, an adjacent marble plaque memorialized only three WW II KIA from the parish, the lower count no doubt attributable to the speed of France's capitulation under the shock of the German blitzkrieg.