Look at the twin round towers and the huge old clock face with its dial featuring the moon's phases. This is the Grosse Cloche, meaning the Great Bell, and it is one of only two medieval city gates Bordeaux has left. For centuries, this was the beating heart of civic Bordeaux. The bell up there rang the city awake, alerted people to fires, and rang in the start of the grape harvest each year. But then the bell was taken away. Let me tell you what happened. While salt seems ordinary today, those were the days when it was one of the most essential commodities. Before refrigeration, it was the only reliable way to preserve meat and fish, making it indispensable to every household. And that's precisely why the French crown turned it into a source of revenue through the gabelle, the royal salt tax, which gave the crown the power to control the sale of salt, forcing people to buy it from royal storehouses at inflated prices. In many parts of France, families were even required to purchase a minimum amount each year whether they needed it or not. Here in southwestern France, where salt had long been plentiful and freely traded, these new rules felt like an attack on local traditions. Overnight, ordinary merchants and fishermen found themselves branded as smugglers simply for buying or selling salt the way they always had. And the frustration boiled over into the Revolt of the Pitauds. Thousands of peasants, townspeople, priests, and even local nobles rose against the tax. When the uprising reached Bordeaux, an angry mob attacked the officials responsible for collecting it, killing around twenty tax collectors, including the king's lieutenant-governor. The response from King Henry the Second was swift and ruthless. He took away the bell of this tower. To a medieval town, the bell was its voice and its independence, and to have it ripped down was to be publicly silenced. It was, eventually, given back. And while we are here, at what was once the civic centre of Bordeaux, let me tell you one of the darkest tales of this city. Just over four hundred years ago, out in the countryside, a shepherd boy of thirteen or fourteen began telling other children that he was a wolf, that a dark lord of the forest had given him a wolfskin and an ointment, and that he had hunted and eaten children in the fields. A girl he had attacked came forward and named him. When the court of Bordeaux tried him, they decided the boy was not a monster but a sick and broken child, that this was madness and not witchcraft, and rather than execute him, they shut him away in a monastery, where he lived out his short life more like a wild animal than a boy. Years later, a magistrate came to see him near the end. The boy told him, without any shame at all, that he had most liked the flesh of little girls, because it was tender. Now, as we walk to the next stop, I would like to tell you about something that Bordeaux is known for. I have added two pins on the map to avoid any confusion, but you really don’t need to pause there. You can keep following the map as you listen to it.