This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Reith Lectures. This lecture in the series

Beyond the Tunnel of History, given by Jacques Daris, was originally broadcast in 1989.

My elder daughter teaches Latin and Greek to children in a grammar school at Calais. Living up north there, though I know, of course,

that to an Englishman, Calais means the South, is quite a daunting and forbidding experience for a

young girl who was trained in the intellectual warmth of Paris, in spite of a father's professed

admiration for the North.

One of the redeeming points of the picture, however, is that she lives in a beautiful flat

overlooking the channel, so that on clear nights, with the lights of Dover and Faxton, a tangible reality, almost being within

touching distance, knowing that England is there in front of you, and France at your back,

one has a sense of comfort. There is a constant traffic of ferries, the ships passing in and

out with all their lights on, giving a sense of movement, and as I suggested the other day,

a sense of freedom, as if the fact that sailing aboard each of them in imagination enhanced

one's own sense of mobility.

You will perhaps think that I'm trying to sound like Walt Whitman,

reflecting on crossing Brooklyn Ferry back in the 1850s.

Actually, the poet I have in mind here is rather William Wordsworth.

In 1802, Napoleon and England agreed on a short truce that was called the piece of Amiens.

It was signed in March.

William Wordsworth had fled Jacobine France in 1793, leaving behind the French girl

he had fallen in love with and by whom he had had a child, Annette Valon, the child being called

Caroline. Nine years had passed with the lengths of nine long winters, I suppose, when thanks to that short interlude in the hostilities,

William was actually allowed to cross over to Cali and flanked by sister Dorothy, met the girl he had never seen his daughter.

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