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A few false starts...
Aug. 5th, 2017 10:27 pmThe recently acquired ballon monté cover came with a certificate of authenticity from a well-regarded French company that specializes in "expertising" philatelic items. The handwritten description of the cover indicated "URT" as the city indicated in the arrival postmark. I had never heard of such a place—indeed, I was half expecting the name to actually be some kind of abbreviation (don't ask me why)—so I turned to Google for help.
Unfortunately, in the time between putting the cover away and bringing up Google, "URT" had turned into "URL" in my mind, and let me tell you—no matter how you decorate a query with additional words designed to winnow irrelevant hits, having "URL" in the query is not much of help at all.
I was prepared to give up on my search when I opened brought the cover back out for another look and realized I had wasted a bunch of time looking for a city that wasn't there. (On the other hand, I did uncover a trove of interesting philatelic sources located in Dallas, including one book with the tantalizing title of The Mysterious Disaster of the 'Jacquard' (which left Paris at 11 pm on November 28, 1870).
According to the narrative in my copy of The Balloon Post of the Siege of Paris, 1870-71, the weather was so violent at departure time that the three passengers who were to have accompanied the pilot refused to go, and so, after making up the weight of the passengers with ballast, the pilot took off. The balloon rose slowly, then disappeared suddenly into the weather.
The balloon was observed the next morning off Land's End, the southwesternmost point in England, but no aid could be rendered and the balloon, its pilot, and most of its cargo were lost at sea. A single sack of mail was recovered, which beached as a result of tidal action.
I tell you, nobody mentioned any of this during discussions of French culture and history (civilization) back in high school French class.
Cheers...
P.S. Urt turns out to be a city located wa-a-y in the southwest corner of France, which makes sense, as the letter was addressed to someone who lived in Basses-Pyrénées (now Pyrénées-Atlantique), which is where Urt is located.
Unfortunately, in the time between putting the cover away and bringing up Google, "URT" had turned into "URL" in my mind, and let me tell you—no matter how you decorate a query with additional words designed to winnow irrelevant hits, having "URL" in the query is not much of help at all.
I was prepared to give up on my search when I opened brought the cover back out for another look and realized I had wasted a bunch of time looking for a city that wasn't there. (On the other hand, I did uncover a trove of interesting philatelic sources located in Dallas, including one book with the tantalizing title of The Mysterious Disaster of the 'Jacquard' (which left Paris at 11 pm on November 28, 1870).
According to the narrative in my copy of The Balloon Post of the Siege of Paris, 1870-71, the weather was so violent at departure time that the three passengers who were to have accompanied the pilot refused to go, and so, after making up the weight of the passengers with ballast, the pilot took off. The balloon rose slowly, then disappeared suddenly into the weather.
The balloon was observed the next morning off Land's End, the southwesternmost point in England, but no aid could be rendered and the balloon, its pilot, and most of its cargo were lost at sea. A single sack of mail was recovered, which beached as a result of tidal action.
I tell you, nobody mentioned any of this during discussions of French culture and history (civilization) back in high school French class.
Cheers...
P.S. Urt turns out to be a city located wa-a-y in the southwest corner of France, which makes sense, as the letter was addressed to someone who lived in Basses-Pyrénées (now Pyrénées-Atlantique), which is where Urt is located.
