Bordeaux serves as a recurring wartime port where the novel’s travelers meet France through sharply different experiences: a slow, attentive arrival among elegant streets, a sailor’s rowdy celebration of American entry into the war, and the improvised pleasures of men passing through with little money. The city offers beauty, food, wine, and fleeting companionship, but it does not hold its visitors for long. Ships, trains, and wartime restrictions continually turn Bordeaux into a threshold between destinations rather than a settled home.

The city and its first arrival

Eveline Hutchins and Miss Eliza Felton stayed in Bordeaux for more than a day instead of joining the other Red Cross and relief workers on the immediate journey to Paris. Their pause lets the city emerge through closely observed details: rows of gray eighteenth-century houses, flowers for sale, polite shopkeepers, delicate ironwork, and the fine dinner they ate at the Chapon Fin. The endless rosy summer twilight gives the streets a calm, almost suspended quality, a marked contrast with the war that has brought the travelers to France.

For Eveline, Bordeaux is also the beginning of a renewed encounter with the country. When the two women travel onward by day train, she watches the houses, vines, and tall ranks of poplars, with pale-blue soldiers at each station. By the time the train passes through the tunnel into the Orleans station in Paris, the beauty of the journey has left her nearly unable to speak; arriving feels like seeing Paris for the first time. Bordeaux is therefore not merely a stop before the capital: the decision to linger there makes the passage through France an experience in its own right.

Eliza Felton and the travelers’ pause

Miss Eliza Felton, an illustrator of children’s books traveling to France to drive a truck, initially strikes Eveline as tiresome. During the warm, quiet crossing, however, Eveline grows fond of her. Eliza’s crush makes her an intrusive companion, and she has the practical effect of keeping men away from Eveline, but she is also fond of wine and knows France well. She had lived there for many years and studied painting at Fontainebleau in the days of the Impressionists. After the women land in Bordeaux, she proves a great help to Eveline, making their stay a partnership as well as a sightseeing interlude.

Eliza’s opinions complicate the ease of the visit. Bitter over the destruction at Rheims and Louvain and reports of atrocities against Belgian children, she is hostile to Germany, yet distrustful of male political leaders more broadly. She regards Woodrow Wilson as cowardly, Georges Clemenceau as a bully, and David Lloyd George as a sneak. She also laughs at the precautions against submarine attack and claims that the French line is safe because German spies use it. Her irreverence sits beside her familiarity with French art and daily life: Bordeaux is seen both as a beautiful city and through the sharply skeptical judgments of a visitor who knows the country beyond the immediate wartime journey.

Sailors, celebration, and restricted liberty

A separate visit presents Bordeaux as a port of welcome for American sailors. When Joe Williams arrives with Captain Perry, the first port official aboard tries to kiss the captain on both cheeks. Woodrow Wilson has just declared war on Germany, and the town treats the Americans generously. During evenings off duty, Joe and Glen Hardwick explore together. In a public garden they meet two well-dressed young women whom Joe does not take for prostitutes. Though he thinks briefly of his marriage, he justifies giving in to the evening by telling himself that Del has disappointed him. He and Marceline go to a small hotel, eat supper, drink wine and champagne, and spend the night together. At breakfast, sitting up in bed, Joe practices French; Marceline tells him she will be his sweetie whenever he is in Bordeaux and calls him petit lapin.

The ship remains in port only for the four days needed to wait its turn at the dock and unload. For Joe, those days become an unusually generous interval of good food, wine, cognac, and attention from the townspeople, made possible by the welcome accorded to Americans newly at war. On a later passage aboard the Appalachian, the same port offers no such freedom. Joe would like to look up Marceline, but none of the crew is allowed ashore. The difference turns Bordeaux from a site of personal pleasure into a reminder of how abruptly wartime authority can close off even a recently formed attachment.

That later voyage also places the city within a larger pattern of maritime danger and labor. After a storm scatters the convoy and water pours through an improperly caulked deck into the forecastle, Joe is taken from paint-scrubbing duties because he is the only sailor the mate trusts at the wheel. In Bordeaux, the bosun returns drunk with a bottle of cognac and stories from American soldiers about the supposed helplessness of the French and British. Joe, the bosun, and an old cook drink together in the galley while the officers are ashore. Their talk of civilization’s end and their indifference to it make the port’s festive welcome look less like a resolution of the war than a brief pause inside its rough, contradictory routines.

A way station for men in transit

Bordeaux offers Richard Ellsworth Savage and Ned another kind of temporary shelter. Having spent their money in Paris, they sell their bedrolls and equipment to newly arrived American lieutenants whom they meet at the Café de Bordeaux. The transaction allows them to spend the afternoon moving between diners and bars, recalling their old habits in Boston of searching for drinks after closing time. Their night continues in an elegant maison publique upholstered in pink satin. Instead of concentrating on the women, the two men talk with the madam, an elderly, sharply dressed woman who recalls having run a well-ordered establishment in the Transvaal during the Boer War. Her comparison between the English and Boer officers of that earlier conflict and the drunken, noisy Americans she encounters now makes their visit an episode in a longer history of soldiers passing through the city.

The contrast between Bordeaux’s polished streets and its improvised male company is characteristic of the novel’s use of the port. The women’s dinner at the Chapon Fin and Joe’s hotel breakfast sit alongside drinking in a galley and a night in a brothel; pleasure can be refined, rowdy, or simply a way to pass time. None of these experiences settles the travelers’ larger difficulties. After leaving Bordeaux, Richard Ellsworth Savage finds the small compass he had bought to help him cross the Spanish border and drops it overboard. The gesture belongs to the onward voyage, but it sharpens the sense that the travelers’ plans and destinations remain unstable. Bordeaux gathers them briefly—through its streets, docks, cafés, and rooms—then gives way to the next leg of the journey.