This page is available to subscribers. Click here to signin or get access. The cloak of madness was approaching, and he left only three months later, walking back to Germany and eventual internment at a psychiatric clinic.
I arrived to Bordeaux in darkness, the rain slapping the windows of the train. The Garonne split the city in two, a creaseless ribbon of brown under the fuzzy lights of the Pont de Pierre. I walked through the downpour to my hotel, where the halls smelled like a vet clinic, and fell asleep to the sound of water rushing through a drainpipe.
Between meals, we walked along the wide river camber upon which Bordeaux is built. This curve gave the city the alias the Port of the Moon. Evening fell. The brass-covered lights strung over the streets pulsed dimly. Above us were the narrow balconies of urban homes, thin rectangles of warmth, framed by wooden shutters.
One cannot help but feel there is good life there, although one can only see perhaps the leaves of a plant or the top shelf of a bookcase. But it is not about what one can see as much as what one can sense. We supped at Le Vieux Chaudron, a fissure of untreated stone just up from the Grosse Cloche, with an inauspicious facsimile of The Last Supper hung above the bar.
French restaurants have a tumbling quality, with the energy of both a grand opening and closing day. The cuisine may be known for its refinement, but the meals in Bordeaux had a heaped, everything-must-go form. I was beaming over my duck gizzard salad and beef tartare with raw egg yolk. Leaving the restaurant, the rain had eased.
