Word: avignon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Bawdy, overcivilized Marseilles, a seaport that must be also won, was already outflanked; Allied troops were less than nine miles away. The naval base at Toulon, with the tragic wreck of the French fleet rusting in its harbor, was under attack. Avignon, home of the Popes for 76 years, would soon feel the hot breath of war. Aix, heart of Provence, oldest Roman town in Gaul, was directly in the path of the pelting Allied army. The fourth front in Europe was proceeding not according to plan, but better...
...month ago the storks passed south over Berlin. Last week the violet skies of Avignon were grey and winter rains shuddered over the cobblestones of Paris. Ice edged out from the banks of canals in Holland, and in the Dolomites snow crunched underfoot. Ukranian peasants used to say: "nash didus ide," meaning that winter, a bundled-up old grandfather, had come to visit. They did not say that this year. All Europe feared the fourth winter of World War II. It would be known as the year of organized hunger...
...Death appeared on the eastern horizon of Europe like a "thick, stinking mist." By 1349 the whole continent was sick and demoralized. At least one-fourth of central Europe's population died in the greatest disaster which ever befell the Continent. Half the population of England died. At Avignon the Pope consecrated the Rhone so that corpses could be dumped into it for Christian burial. In Italy Petrarch wept over "the empty houses, the abandoned towns, the squalid country, the fields crowded with the dead, the vast and dreadful solitude over the whole world...
...year-old son, Louis XIII, whom she used to spank publicly to the delight of the tittering court. But at the very moment Richelieu got power, he lost it. Louis XIII decided to do a little spanking of his own, banished Mother Marie to the country, Richelieu to Avignon. The baffled statesman had to begin conspiring all over again. He also read books, carried on theological disputes, prayed, dreamed of a Europe of national states which he would one day create. At last he could stand the peaceful parochial life no longer, thought he was going to die, wrote...