Lola and I Will Sail from Marseilles – Meximieux, France (1932)

Mrs. Slager lived in New Providence, an unincorporated village in Lancaster County of southeast Pennsylvania.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Providence,_Pennsylvania

In June of 1932, she received a postcard from a E. Cooke who was traveling in France.

The face of the postcard is a very evocative photograph of a winding street of a French village.

The postcard was printed and published in Meximieux, an ancient “commune” in eastern France.

This community, on the Ain River, appears in documents of the Roman Empire.

A grape that was widely-grown in the area until the great fungal epidemics of the mid-19th century (Mondeuse noire) is still cultivated there in carefully-tended plots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meximieux

On the reverse, Mr. Cooke shares a breezy travelogue; he and Lola are “taking the long way home through the south of France”.

The travelers are now in Meximieux, “a 13th century hill town, the most picturesque I have ever seen”.

“Reluctantly”, the couple are soon leaving for Lyon, and then proceeding to Carcassone – the formidable walled citadel city.

On the first of July, they will sail home from Marseilles.

It appears that Lola is returning to school, as Mr. Cooke reports that “Lola has made so many French friends…it is hard for her to leave…the prospect of a mid-western University.”

One hopes that Mr. Cooke and Lola enjoyed the remaining days of their travels in France, and that the journey home was safely accomplished.

NOTE:   Only a little more than ten years later, Meximieux was a center of the French Resistance (to German occupation) and many local residents fought along side American troops in the area.

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