ABSTRACT
This chapter is based upon the Bordeaux–Dublin letters that were discovered by the author himself in 2011. Truxes sets the stage by describing the beginning of the Seven Years’ War and how it impacted Bordeaux. He then uses the Ireland-bound letters, seized from the Two Sisters in 1757, to take a close look at the daily lives, and especially the concerns, of the Irish community in Bordeaux at the outset of the war. While most of the chapter focuses on the vicissitudes of wartime trade and problems faced by the Irish merchants, Truxes also uses the letters to examine how the war impacted the lives of the clerks whose work was vital to the success (or failure) of the merchant houses, the servants who came from Ireland to work in merchant households and whose lives were now doubly precarious, and the clerics whose easy travel between Ireland and France was now upended.
