CLARET AND OLIVES,
FROM
THE GARONNE TO THE RHONE;
OR,
NOTES, SOCIAL, PICTURESQUE, AND LEGENDARY,
BY THE WAY.
BY ANGUS B. REACH,
AUTHOR OF "THE STORY OF A BUCCANEER," ETC.
[Illustration]
LONDON: DAVID BOGUE, FLEET STREET.
MDCCCLII.
LONDON:
HENRY VIZETELLY, PRINTER AND ENGRAVER,
GOUGH SQUARE, FLEET STREET.
TO
CHARLES MACKAY, ESQ., LL. D.,
MY EARLIEST AND KINDEST LITERARY FRIEND,
These Pages
ARE AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
The Diligence--French Country Places--The English in
Guienne--Bordeaux--Old Bordeaux--A Bordeaux
Landlord--A Suburban Vintaging--The Vintage
Dinner 1-20
CHAPTER II.
Claret _v._ Port--The Claret Soil--The Claret Vine--Popular
Appetite for Grapes--Variable qualities of the
Claret Soil--French Veterans--The "Authorities" in
France 21-38
CHAPTER III.
The Claret Vintage--The Treading of the Grape--The Last
Drops of the Grape--Wanderings amongst the
Vineyards--Wandering Vintagers--The Vintage Dinner--The
Vintagers' Bedroom--The Claret Chateaux--The Chateau
Margaux 39-57
CHAPTER IV.
The Landes--The Bordeaux and Teste Railway--M. Tetard
and his Imitator--Start for the Landes--The Language
of the Landes--A Railway Station in the Landes--The
Scenery of the Landes--The Stilt-walkers of the
Landes--A Glimpse of Green 58-76
CHAPTER V.
The Clear Water of Arcachon--Legend of the Baron of
Chatel-morant--The Resin Harvest--The Witches of
the Landes--The Surf of the Bay of Biscay--French
Priests--Do the Landes Cows give Milk?--The _Amour
Patriæ_ of the Landes 77-101
CHAPTER VI.
Dawn on the Garonne--The Landscape of the Garonne--The
Freaks of the Old Wars in Guienne--Agen--Jasmin,
the Last of the Troubadours--Southern Cookery
and Garlic--The Black Prince in a New
Light--Cross-country Travelling in France 102-126
CHAPTER VII.
Pau--The English in Pau--English and Russians--The
View of the Pyrenees--The Castle--The Statue of
Henri Quatre--His Birth--A Vision of his
Life--Rochelle--St. Bartholomew--Ivry--Henri and
Sully--Henri and Gabrielle--Henri and Henriette
d'Entragues--Ravaillac 127-136
CHAPTER VIII.
The Val d'Ossau--The Vin de Jurancon--Pyrenean Cottages--The
Bernais Peasants--The Devil learning
Basque--The Wolves of the Pyrenees--The Bears of
the Pyrenees--The Dogs of the Pyrenees--An Auberge
in the Pyrenees--Omens and Superstitions in
the Pyrenees--The Songs of the Pyrenees 137-155
CHAPTER IX.
Wet Weather in the Pyrenees--Eaux Chaudes out of
Season, and in the Rain--Plucking the Indian Corn
at the Auberge at Laruns--The Legend of the Wehrwolf,
and the Baron who was changed into a Bear 156-166
CHAPTER X.
The Solitary Big Hotel--The Knitters of the Pyrenees--The
Weavers of the Pyrenees--Pigeon-catching in
the Pyrenees--The Giant of the Pyrenean Dogs--Murray
and _Commis Voyageurs_--The Eastern Pyrenees--The
Legend of Orthon 167-186
CHAPTER XI.
Languedoc--The "Austere South"--Beziers and the
Albigenses--The Fountain of the Greve--The Bishop
and his Flock--The Canal du Midi--The
Mistral--Rural Billiard-playing 187-199
CHAPTER XII.
Travelling by the Canal du Midi--Travelling French
People--The Salt Harvest--Equestrian Thrashing
Machines--Cette--The Mediterranean--The "Made"
Wines--The Priest on Wines--_La Cuisine Française_ 200-218
CHAPTER XIII.
The Olive-gathering--A Night with the
Mosquitoes--Aigues-Mortes--The Fever in
Aigues-Mortes--My _Cicerone_ in Aigues-Mortes--The
Pickled Burgundians--Reboul's Poetry--The Lighthouse
of Aigues-Mortes 219-235
CHAPTER XIV.
Fen Landscape--Tavern Allegories--Roman Remains--Roman
Architecture--Roman Theatricals--The Maison
Carrée--Greek Architecture--Catholic and Protestant--The
Weaver's _Cabane_--Protestant and Catholic 236-255
CHAPTER THE LAST.
Backward French Agriculture--French Rural Society--The
Small Property System--French "Encumbered
Estates" 256-264
[Illustration]
CLARET AND OLIVES.
CHAPTER I.
THE DILIGENCE--OLD GUIENNE AND THE ENGLISH IN FRANCE--BORDEAUX AND A
SUBURBAN VINTAGING.
"_Voila la voila! La ville de Bordeaux!_"
The conductor's voice roused me from the dreamy state of dose in which I
lay, luxuriously stretched back amid cloaks and old English
railway-wrappers, in the roomy banquette of one of the biggest
diligences which ever rumbled out of Caillard and Lafitte's yard.
"_Voila! la Voila!_" The bloused peasant who drove the six stout nags
therewith stirred in his place; his long whip whistled and cracked; the
horses flung up their heads as they broke into a canter, and their bells
rang like a joy peal; while Niniche, the conductor's white poodle,
which maintained a perilous footing in the leathern hood of the
banquette, pattered and scratched above our heads, and barked in
recognition of his master's voice.
I rubbed my eyes and looked. We were on the ridge of a wooded hill.
Below us lay a flat green plain, carpetted with vines. Right across it
ran the broad, white, chalky highway, powdering with dust the double
avenue of chestnuts which lined it. Beyond the plain glittered a great
river, crowded with shipping, and beyond the river rose stretching,
apparently for miles, a magnificent façade of high white buildings,
broken here and there by the foliage of public gardens, and the dark
embouchures of streets; while, behind the range of quays, and golden in
the sunrise, rose high into the clear morning air, a goodly array of
towering Gothic steeples, fretted and pinnacled up to the glancing
weather-cocks. It was, indeed, Bordeaux.
The long journey from Paris was all but over, yet though I had been
tired enough of the way, I felt as if I could brave it again, rather
than make the exertion of encountering octroi officers, and plunging
into strange hotels. For after all, comfortable Diligence travelling
makes a man lazy. It is slow, but you get accustomed to the slowness; in
the banquette, too, you are never cramped; there is luxurious roominess
behind, and you plunge your legs in straw up to the knees. Then leaning
supinely back, you indulge a serene passiveness, rolling lazily on with
the rumbling mountain of a vehicle. The thunder of the heavy wheels, and
the low monotonous clash, clash, clash, of the hundred grelots, form a
soothing atmosphere of sound about you, and musingly, and dreamingly you
watch the action of the team--these half dozen little but stout tough
work-a-day horses, trotting manfully in their rough harness, while the
driver--oh, how different from our old coaching dandies!--a clumsy
peasant, in sabots, and a stable-smelling blouse, sits slouched, and
round-shouldered like a sack before you, incessantly flourishing that
whistling whip, and shouting in the uncouth jargon of his province, to
the jingling team below. And next you watch the country or the road. A
French road, like a mathematical line, on, and on, and on, straight,
straight, mournfully, dismally, straight, running like a tape laid
across the bleak bare country, till it fades, and fades, and seems to
tip over the horizon; or if you are in an undulating wooded district,
you catch sections of it as it climbs each successive ridge; and you
know that in the valleys it is just the same as on the hill tops. You
see your dinner before you, as Englishmen say over roast mutton. You see
your journey before you, as Frenchmen may say, over the slow trotting
team. And how drear and deserted the country looks--open, desolate, and
bare. Here and there a distant mite of a peasant or two bending over the
sun-burnt clods. No cottages, but ever and anon a congregation of
barns--the _bourgs_ in which the small land-owners collect; now a witch
of an old woman herding a cow; anon a solitary shepherd all in rags,
knitting coarse stockings, and followed by a handful of sheep, long in
the legs, low in the flesh, with thin dirty fleeces as ragged as their
guardian's coat. Upon the road travellers are scanty. The bronzed
Cantonier stares as you pass, his brass-lettered hat glittering in the
glare. There go a couple of soldiers on furlough, tramping the dreary
way to their native village, footsore, weary and slow, their hairy
knapsacks galling their shoulders, and their tin canteens evidently
empty. Another diligence, white with dust, meeting us. The conductors
shout to each other, and the passengers crane their heads out of window.
Then we overtake a whole caravan of _roulage_, or carriers, the
well-loaded carts poised upon one pair of huge wheels, the horses, with
their clumsy harness and high peaked collars, making a scant two miles
an hour. Not an equipage of any pretension to be seen. No graceful
phaeton, no slangy dog-cart, no cosey family carriage--only now and then
a crawling local diligence, or M. le Curé on a shocking bad horse, or an
indescribably dilapidated anomalous jingling appearance of a vague
shandry-dan. And so on from dawn till sunset, through narrow streeted
towns, with lanterns swinging above our heads, and open squares with
scrubby lime trees, and white-washed cafés all around; and by a shabby
municipality with gilded heads to the front railings, a dilapidated
tricolor, and a short-legged, red-legged sentinel, not so tall as his
firelock, keeping watch over it; and then, out into the open, fenceless,
hedgeless country, and on upon the straight unflinching road, and
through the long, long tunnels of eternal poplar trees, and by the
cantonnier, and the melancholy _bourgs_, and the wandering soldiers, and
the dusty carriers' carts as before.
One thing strikes you forcibly in these little country towns--the
marvellously small degree of distinction of rank amid the people. No
neighbouring magnate rattles through the lonely streets in the
well-known carriage of the Hall or the Grange, graciously receiving the
ready homage of the townspeople. No retired man of business, or bustling
land-agent, trots his smart gig and cob--no half-pay officer goes
gossipping from house to house, or from shop to shop. There is no
banker's lady to lead the local fashions--no doctor, setting off upon
his well-worked nag for long country rounds--no assemblage, if it be
market day, of stout full-fed farmers, lounging, booted and spurred,
round the Red Lion or the Plough. Working men in blouses, women of the
same rank in the peasant head-dress of the country, and here and there a
nondescript personage in a cap and shooting jacket, who generally turns
up at the scantily-attended table d'hôte at dinner time--such are the
items which make up the mass of the visible population. You hardly see
an individual who does not appear to have been born and bred upon the
spot, and to have no ideas and no desires beyond it. Left entirely to
themselves, the people have vegetated in these dull streets from
generation to generation, and, though clustered together in a quasi
town--perhaps with octroi and mairie, a withered tree of liberty, and
billiard tables by the half-dozen--the population is as essentially
rural as though scattered in lone farms, unvisited, except on rent-day,
by either landlord or agent. It often happens that a large landed
proprietor has not even a house upon his ground. He lets the land,
receives his rent, and spends it in Paris or one of the large towns,
leaving his tenants to go on cultivating the ground in the jog-trot
style of their fathers and their grandfathers before them. The French,
in fact, have no notion of what we understand by the life of a country
gentleman. A proprietor may pay a sporting visit to his land when
partridge and quail are to be shot; but as to taking up his abode _au
fond de ses terres_, mingling in what we would call county business,
looking after the proceedings of his tenants, becoming learned, in an
amateur way, in things bucolic, in all the varieties of stock and all
the qualities of scientific manures--a life, a character, and a social
position of this sort, would be in vain sought for in the rural
districts of France. There are not, in fact, two more differing meanings
in the world than those attached to our "Country Life," and the French
_Vie de Chateau_. The French proprietor is a Parisian out of Paris. He
takes the rents, shoots the quails, and the clowns do the rest.
An Englishman ought to feel at home in the south-west of France. That
fair town, rising beyond the yellow Garonne, was for three hundred years
and more an English capital. Who built these gloriously fretted Gothic
towers, rising high into the air, and sentinelled by so many minor
steeples? Why Englishmen! These towers rise above the Cathedral of St.
Andrew, and in the Abbey of St. Andrew the Black Prince held high court,
and there, after Poitiers, the captive King of France revelled with his
conqueror, with the best face he might. There our Richard the Second was
born. There the doughty Earl of Derby, long the English seneschal of
Bordeaux, with his retinue, "amused themselves," as gloriously
gossipping old Froissart tells, "with the citizens and their wives;" and
from thence Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, went forth, being eighty-six
years of age, mounted upon a little palfrey, to encounter the Duke of
Anjou, in those latter days when our continental dominions were
shrinking, as we deserved that they should shrink, after the brutal
murder of the glorious Maid of Domrémy. It is true that we are at this
moment in the department of the Dordogne, and that when we cross the
river we shall be in that of the Gironde. But we Englishmen love the
ancient provinces better than the modern departments, which we are
generally as bad at recognising, as we are in finding out dates by
Thermidors and Brumaires. No, no, departments may do for Frenchmen, but
to an Englishman the rich land we are crossing will ever be Guienne, the
"Fair Dutchy," and part and parcel of old Aquitane, the dowry of
Eleanor, when she wedded our second Henry.
Is it not strange to think of those old times, in which the English were
loved in the Bourdelois--fine old name--and the French were hated, in
which the Gascon feudal chiefs around protested that they were the
"natural born subjects of England, which was so kind to them?" Let us
turn to Froissart:--The Duke of Anjou having captured four Gascon
knights, forced them, _nolens volens_, to take the oath of allegiance to
the King of France, and then turned them about their business. The
knights went straight to Bordeaux, and presented themselves before the
seneschal of the Landes, and the mayor of the city, saying, "Gentlemen,
we will truly tell you that before we took the oath, we reserved in our
hearts our faith to our natural lord, the king of England, and for
anything we have said or done, we never will become Frenchmen." Our
gallant forefathers appear on the whole, to have led a joyous life in
Guienne. In truth, their days and nights were devoted very much to
feasting themselves, and plundering their neighbours: two pursuits into
which their Gascon friends entered with heart and soul. It is quite
delightful to read in Froissart, or Enguerrand de Monstrelet, how
"twelve knights went forth in search of adventures," an announcement
which may be fairly translated, into how a dozen of gentlemen with
indistinct notions of _meum_ and _tuum_, went forth to lay their
chivalrous hands upon anything they could come across. Of course these
trips were made into the French territory, and really they appear to
have been conducted with no small degree of politeness on either side,
when the English "harried" Limousin, or the French rode a foray into
Guienne. The chivalrous feeling was strong on both sides, and we often
read how such-and-such a French and English knight or squire did
courteous battle with each other; the fight being held in honour of the
fair ladies of the respective champions. Thus, not in Guienne, but in
Touraine, when the English and the Gascons beleaguered a French town,
heralds came forth upon the walls and made this proclamation:--"Is there
any among you gentlemen, who for love of his lady is willing to try some
feat of arms? If there be any such, here is Gauvin Micaille, a squire
of the Beauce, quite ready to sally forth, completely armed and
mounted, to tilt three courses with the lance, give three blows with the
battle-axe, and three strokes with the dagger. Now look you, English, if
there be none among you in love." The challenge was duly accepted. Each
combatant wounded the other, and the Earl of Shrewsbury sent to the
squire of Beauce his compliments, and a hundred francs. This last
present takes somewhat away from the Amadis de Gaul, and Palmerin of
England vein; but the student of the old chroniclers, particularly of
the English in France, will be astonished to find how long the chivalric
feeling and ceremonials co-existed with constant habits of plundering
and unprovoked forays.
Another curious trait of our forefathers in Guienne is the early
development of the English _brusquerie_, and haughtiness of manner to
the Continentals. The Gascons put up, however, with many a slight,
inasmuch as their over sea friends were such valiant plunderers, and
they, of course, shared the spoils. Listen to the frank declaration of a
Gascon gentleman who had deserted from the English to the French side.
Some one asking him how he did, he answers: "Thank God, my health is
very good; but I had more money at command when I made war for the king
of England, for then we seldom failed to meet some rich merchants of
Toulouse, Condom, La Reole, or Bergerac, whom we squeezed, which made us
gay and _debonnair_; but that is at an end." The questioner replies: "Of
a truth, that is the life Gascons love. They willingly hurt their
neighbour." Not even all the plunder they got, however, could silence
the grumblings of the native knights at the haughty reserve of the
English warriors. "I," says the canon of Chimay, "was at Bordeaux when
the Prince of Wales marched to Spain, and witnessed the great
haughtiness of the English, who are affable to no other nation than
their own. Neither could any of the gentlemen of Gascogny or Acquitaine
obtain office or appointment in their own country, for the English said
they were neither on a level with them, nor worthy of their society." So
early and so strongly did the proud island blood boil up; while many an
Englishman, to this good day, by his reserved and saturnine bearing
among an outspoken and merry-hearted people, perpetuates the old
reproach, and keeps up the old grievance.
All sensible readers will be gratified when I state that I have not the
remotest intention of describing the archæology of Bordeaux, or any
other town whatever. Whoever wants to know the height of a steeple, the
length of an aisle, or the number of arches in a bridge, must betake
themselves to Murray and his compeers. I will neither be picturesquely
profound upon ogives, triforia, clerestorys, screens, or mouldings; nor
magniloquently great upon the arched, the early pointed, the florid, or
the flamboyant schools. I will go into raptures neither about Virgins
nor Holy Families, nor Oriel windows, in the fine old cut-and-dry school
of the traveller of taste, which means, of course, every traveller who
ever packed a shirt into a carpet bag; but, leaving the mere archæology
and carved stones alone in their glory, I will try to sketch living,
and now and then historical, France--to move gossippingly along in the
by-ways rather than the highways--always more prone to give a good
legend of a grey old castle, than a correct measurement of the height of
the towers; and always seeking to bring up, as well as I can, a varying,
shifting picture, well thronged with humanity, before the reader's eye.
[Illustration: BORDEAUX.]
When I got to Bordeaux, the vintage time had just commenced, and having
ever had a special notion that vintages were very beautiful and poetic
affairs, and a still more confirmed taste and reverence for claret, it
was my object to see as much of the vintage as I could--to see the juice
rush from the grape, which makes so good a figure in the bottle. Letters
of introduction I had none. But there is a knack of making one's own
way--of making one's own friends as you go--in which I have tolerable
confidence, and which did not fail me in the present conjuncture. First,
to settle and make up my notions, I strolled vaguely about the city,
buying local maps and little local guide-books. Bordeaux is emphatically
what the French call a _riant_ town, with plenty of air, and such pure,
soft, bright, sunny air. In the centre of a broad grand _Place_,--dotted
with very respectable trees for French specimens, emblazoned with gay
parterres, sprinkled with orange shrubs in bloom, and holed with no end
of round stone basins, in which dolphins and Neptunes spout from their
bronze mouths the live-long day, and urns, and pillars, and Dianas, and
Apollos stand all around--there rises upon his massive pedestal the
graven image of a fat comfortable gentleman in the ample cloak and
doublet of Louis Quatorze, knots of carven ribbons decorating his
shoulders, and flowing locks descending from under his broad-brimmed,
looped-up hat. This is the statue of a M. de Tournay, an ancient
intendant of the province, who was almost the creator of modern
Bordeaux. Under his auspices the whole tribe of dolphins and heathen
gods and goddesses were invoked to decorate the city. He reared great
sweeps of pillared and porticoed buildings, and laid out broad streets
and squares, on that enormous scale so characteristic of the _grand
monarque_. He made Bordeaux, indeed, at once vast, prim, and massively
magnificent. The mercantile town got quite a courtly air; and when the
tricolor no longer floated in St. Domingo, and the commerce of the
Gironde declined, so that not much was left over and above the wine
trade, which, as all the world knows, is the genteelest of all the
traffics, Bordeaux became what it is--a sort of retired city, having
declined business--quiet, and clean, and prim, and aristocratic. Such,
at least, is the new town. With old Bordeaux, M. de Tournay meddled not;
and when you plunge into its streets you leap at once from eighteenth
century terraces into fourteenth century lanes and tortuous by-ways.
Below you, rough, ill-paved, unclean, narrow thoroughfares; above, the
hanging old houses of five ages ago, peaked gables, and long projecting
eaves, and hanging balconies; quaint carvings in blackened wood and
mouldering stone;--the true middle-age tenements, dreadfully ricketty,
but gloriously picturesque--charming to look at, but woful to live in;
deep black ravines of courts plunging down into the masses of piled up,
jammed together dwellings; squalid, slatternly people buzzing about like
bees; bad smells permeating every street, lane, and alley; and now and
then the agglomeration of darksome dwellings clustering round a great
old church, with its vast Gothic portals, and, high up, its carven
pinnacles and grinning _goutieres_, catching the sunshine far above the
highest of these high-peaked roofs. This is the Bordeaux of the English
and the Gascons--the Bordeaux which has rung to the clash of armour--the
Bordeaux which was governed by a seneschal--the Bordeaux through whose
streets defiled,
"With many a cross-bearer before,
And many a spear behind,"
the christening procession of King Richard the Second.
We shall step into one church, and only one, that of the Feuillans.
There, upon a dark and massive pedestal, lies stretched the effigy of an
armed man. His hands are clasped, his vizor up shows his peaked beard,
and he is clad _cap-à-pied_ in steel. Who was the doughty warrior, thus
resting in his mail? Strange to say, no warrior at all; but the quietest
and most peaceable of God's beings. He had an odd, pedantic father, who
brought him up in strange Paganwise. The boy was never addressed but in
Latin. He never had a mother-tongue. He was surrounded with a blockade
of Latin speakers to keep afar off the profanation of French; he was
mentally fed upon the philosophers and the poets of old Rome, and taught
to weep for Seneca in the tub, as the nearest catastrophe which could
touch his sympathies. Furthermore, his father, out of respect for his
nerves, had him awakened every morning by the sound of soft music.
Happily, even this sublimity of pedantry and pedagoguism was
insufficient to ruin the native genius of Michael, Seigneur of
Montaigne, whose "essays ought to lie in every cottage window."
I have said that I was in search of some one to introduce me to the
vineyards and the vintagers. In a day or two I had pitched upon my
landlord as my protector. His hotel was a very modest one, where never
before, I do believe, had Englishmen come to make everything dear and
disagreeable. The red boards of the aristocratic Murray were unknown in
his _salle à manger_. He hadn't an ounce of tea in his house, and very
probably, if he had, he would have fried it with butter, and served it
_à la_ something or other. When I say he, however, I mean madame, not
monsieur. The latter would have made a capital English innkeeper, but he
was a very bad French one. My gentleman, who was more than six feet
high, and a stately personage, was cut out for a "mine host." He would
have presided in a bar--which means drinking a continued succession of
glasses of ale--with uncommon effect, for his temperament was convivial
and gossippy; but he had no vocation for the kitchen, which is the
common sphere of a French innkeeper not of the first class, and where,
under the proud denomination of the _chef_, and clad in white like a
grimly ghost, he bustles among pipkins and stew-pans and skillets, and
lifts little trap-doors in his smoky range, and peers down them at blue
charcoal furnaces--over which the _plats_ are simmering. Now my good
landlord never troubled himself about these domestic matters; but he was
very clever at standing on the outer steps of his door, smoking cigars;
and, indeed, would stay very willingly there all day--at least, until he
heard his wife's voice, upon which he would make a precipitate retreat
to a neighbouring café, where he would drink _eau sucreé_ and rattle
dominoes on a marble table till dinner-time. With this worthy I formed a
personal acquaintance, by buying from him, at the reasonable rate of six
sous a-piece, a number of quaint brass-set flat stones, very like red
and grey cornelians, and just as pretty, which it was the fashion in the
days of the Directory to mount in watch-keys, and wear two at a time,
one dangling from each fob. These stones are picked up in great
quantities from the light shingly soil, whereon ripens the grape, which
is pressed into claret wine; and handsome and lustrous in themselves,
they thus become a species of mementos of chateau Margaux and chateau
Lafitte. To the landlord, then, I stated that I wished to see some
vine-gathering.
"Could anything be more lucky? His particular friend M. So-and-so was
beginning his harvesting that very day, and was going to give a dinner
that very night on the occasion. I should go--he should go. A friend of
his was M. So-and-so's friend; in fact, we were all friends together."
The truth I suspect to be, that my ally was dreadfully in want of an
excuse to go to the dinner, and he welcomed my application as the
Israelites did manna in the desert. It was meat and drink and amusement
to him, and off we went.
As I shall presently describe the real claret vintage upon a large
scale, I shall pass the more quickly over my first initiation into the
plucking of the grapes. But I passed a merry day, and eke a busy one.
There are no idle spectators at a vintage--all the world must work; and
so I speedily found myself, after being most cordially welcomed by a fat
old gentleman, hoarse with bawling, in a pair of very dirty
shirt-sleeves and a pouring perspiration--with a huge pair of scissors
in my hand cutting off the bunches, in the midst of an uproarious troop
of young men, young women, and children--threading the avenues between
the plants--stripping, with wonderful dexterity, the clustered
branches--their hands, indeed, gliding like dirty yellow serpents among
the broad green leaves--and sometimes shouting out merry badinage,
sometimes singing bits of strongly rhythmed melody in chorus, and all
the time, as far as the feat could be effected, eating the grapes by
handfuls. The whole thing was very jolly; I never heard more laughing
about nothing in particular, more open and unblushing love-making, and
more resolute quizzing of the good man, whose grapes were going partly
into the baskets, tubs, pots, and pans, carried every few moments by the
children and old people out of the green alleys to the pressing-tub, and
partly into the capacious stomachs of the gatherers. At first I was
dainty in my selection of the grapes to be chosen, eschewing the
under-ripe and the over-ripe. A damsel beside me observed this. From her
woolly hair and very dark but merry face, I imagined her to have a touch
of Guadeloupe or Martinique blood. "Cut away," she said; "every grape
makes wine."
"Yes--but the caterpillars--"
"They give it a body."
"Yes--but the snails--"
"O, save the snails, please do, for me!" said a little girl, holding out
her apron, full of painted shells.
"What do you do with them?" I inquired.
"Boil them and eat them," said my juvenile friend.
I looked askance.
"You cant think how nice they are with vinegar!" said the mulatto girl.
I remembered our own appetite for periwinkles, and said nothing; but
added my mite of snail-flesh to the collection.
I was talking to the lord of the vineyard, when some one--there was
petticoats in the case--dashed at him from behind, and instantly a
couple of hands clasped his neck, and one of them squashed a huge bunch
of grapes over his mouth and nose, rubbing in the burst and bleeding
fruit as vigorously as if it were a healing ointment, while streams of
juice squirted from between the fingers of the fair assailant, and
streamed down the patron's equivocal shirt. After being half burked, the
good man shook his fist at the girl as she flew, laughing, down the
alley; and then resuming his talk with me, he said: "We call that,
_Faire des moustaches_. We all do it at vintage time." And ten minutes
thereafter I saw the jolly old boy go chasing an ancient crone of a
pail-bearer, a bunch of very ripe grapes in his hand, amid the delighted
hurrahs of all assembled.
Dinner was late, for it behoves vintagers to make the best of the
daylight. The ordinary hired labourers dined, indeed, soon after noon;
but I am talking of the feast of honour. It was served in a
thinly-furnished, stone-paved, damp and dismal _salle à manger_. A few
additional ladies with their beaux, grand provincial dandies, all of
whom tried to outstrip each other in the magnificence of their
waistcoats, had arrived from Bordeaux. It had been very hot, close
weather for a day or two past, and everybody was imprecating curses on
the heads of the mosquitos. The ladies, to prove the impeachment,
stripped their sleeves, and showed each other the bites on their brown
necks; and the gentlemen swore that the scamps were biting harder and
harder. Then came the host, in a magnificently ill-cut coat--all the
agricultural interest could not have furnished a worse--and his wife,
very red in the face, for she had cooked dinner for the vintagers and
for us; and then our host's father, a reverend old man in a black velvet
scull cap, and long silver hair. The dinner was copious, and, as may be
conceived, by no means served in the style of the _café de Paris_. But
_soupe_, _bouilli_, _roti_, the stewed and the fried, speedily went the
way of all flesh. Everybody _trinque-ed_ with everybody: the jingle of
the meeting glasses rose even over the clatter of the knives and forks;
the jolly host's heart grew warmer at every glass, and he issued
imperious mandates for older and older wine. His comfortable wife, whose
appetite had been affected by the cooking, made up for the catastrophe
at the dessert. The old grandfather garulously narrated tales of
wondrous vintages long ago. The waistcoats had all the scandal of
Bordeaux at their finger ends; and the young ladies with the mosquito
bites took to "making moustaches" on their male friends, with pancakes
instead of grapes--a process by which the worthy host was, as usual, an
especial sufferer.
As may be conceived, my respected landlord was far more in his element
than at home with his wife. He eat more, drank more, talked more, and
laughed more than any two men present. Afterwards he grew tender and
sentimental, and professed himself to be an ardent lover of his kind--a
proposition which I suspect he afterwards narrowed specially in favour
of a most mosquito-ridden lady next him--to the high wrath of a
waistcoat opposite, who said sarcastic and cutting things, which nobody
paid any attention to; and the landlord, being really a good-looking
and plausible fellow, went on conquering and to conquer, and drinking
and being drunk to; until, under a glorious outburst of moonlight which
paled the blinking candles on the table, the merry company broke up; and
mine host of Bordeaux, after certain rather unsteady walking, suddenly
stopped on the centre of the bridge, and refused to go further until he
had told me a secret. This was said with vast solemnity and aplomb, so
we paused together on the granite pavement, and, after looking
mysteriously at the Garonne, the moon, and the dusky heights of Floriac,
my companion informed me in a hoarse whisper that he should leave
France, his native and beloved land, where he felt sure that he was not
appreciated, and pitch his tent, "_la bas, en Angleterre, parceque les
Anglais etaient si bons enfants!_"
"So ho!" thought I; "a strange reminiscence of the old Gascons." But on
the morrow, my respectable entertainer had a bad headache, a yellow
visage, and an entire forgetfulness of how he had got home at all.
[Illustration: MOUSTACHE AT THE VINTAGE]