Shortly after the 1939 commencement of World War II and the largely unexpected, rapid fall of France in 1940, Hilaire Belloc received another shock, an announcement which much more deeply pierced, and indeed almost broke, his heart: the loss of another son, Peter, on 2 April 1941. It was, moreover, his youngest son, and Peter was then under arms on active duty with the Royal Marines. (Hilaire Belloc’s eldest son, Louis, who was a combatant aviator, had also been lost in war some thirty-two years earlier: killed in 1918, near the end of World War I and his body, moreover, was never found.) Our Belloc was so shaken by the sudden additional death of Peter that he was even referring to him in conversation, confusedly, as “Louis,” his eldest son. He could not easily assimilate the reality of another loss. And soon thereafter, Belloc had the first of a series of strokes, and was not to write much more ever again before his own death on 16 July 1953, the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
Yet, in 1942, before his graver stroke came upon him, Belloc was enabled to publish his last collection of varied and sometimes retrospective essays, entitled Places.1 The book was much more than a set of historically informed Travel Essays, and he was often to contrast and clarify how he first saw a place (with his still-remembered vivid perceptions); and then to go on to consider what had happened in that place, or nearby, during the ensuing years between 1895 and 1939. But, characteristically, the last (and often rumbustious, as well as nourishing) essay in the book is called “About Wine” (276-285).
Click here to VIEW full size, DOWNLOAD as PDF file, and/or PRINT.
