The steamer that plies between Bordeaux and Royan, calling _en route_ at
several dozen places on the Garonne and Gironde, is of an unfortunate
popularity. From reasons hereafter to be explained, we arrived early at
the landing-stage, and we found the forepart of the vessel already
crammed with blue-clad peasants, from whom, as they screamed,
gesticulated, and even danced in the ardour of conversation, the
well-known odour of garlic was slowly winnowed forth, and floated aft to
where the first-class passengers sat on rows of cane chairs under an
awning, looking daggers at all newcomers. We took two seats in the
background, conscious that our English costume was the subject of a
scarcely concealed surprise, and feeling that neither we nor it were
able to bear up against criticism.
We had been much weakened by our last half-hour at the hotel. It is not
so much the bill, ‘though that,’ as Mrs. Browning remarks, ‘may be
owed,’ that whittles the traveller down; it was not in our case even the
_bougie_ at a franc,--we had hidden away that _bougie_ in our
portmanteau, and felt better for it,--it was the hall of the hotel with
its feudal band of retainers that had slowly and agonisingly taken from
us our presence of mind, our dignity, and lastly our truthfulness. We
had tipped our own special waiter, the chambermaid, the boots, and the
luggage porter, and seeing dizzily that there were still before us the
lusciously smiling and relentless faces of an assistant chambermaid, a
deputy-assistant porter, and the head waiter, we said we were going
round for a moment to the Bureau of Change, and slid from the hotel with
something of the modest self-consciousness of a dog leaving the kitchen
with a leg of mutton in its mouth.
[Illustration: WE SAID WE WERE GOING ROUND FOR A MOMENT TO THE BUREAU OF
CHANGE.]
It gave us a great deal of trouble to make our way down to the quays
without passing the hotel again; but we did it, and enjoyed the slums
and the smells as we realised something of what might be the expessions,
facial and otherwise, of the waiter, the porter, and the chambermaid,
whom we had left hopefully waiting at the door. Our luggage had been
sent on to the boat some time before; that was the fact that had added
swiftness and perfectness to our escape, and when, in walking down the
long gangway, we saw a boy in _sabots_ cutting ungainly capers all the
way in front of us, out of the gaiety of his heart, we were grateful to
him; he expressed our feelings in a manner denied to us by circumstance.
There was something Irish and homelike about the conduct of our Pauillac
steamer in the matter of starting. It was ten minutes after the
appointed time when we moved out into the river amongst the big ships
that were coming up on the tide, and the little black ferry-boats that
flew to and fro like incensed water-spiders, but this was only what
might have been expected. What did seem a little hard to bear was, that
when we were well out into mid-stream we should put back again to the
quay, and embark a fresh cargo of passengers, who had been there from
the beginning, apparently trying to make up their minds about whether
they would go or not. It was merely a coquettish ruse on the part of the
captain to make a pretended start; but it had the desired effect, and
when we did get off, every man of the malingerers was safely stacked on
the forward deck.
The tide was running up hard, fighting every inch of the way with the
strong current of the river, and getting the best of it. It was a
singularly dirty strife, involving, like an Irish election, much
stirring up of the mud: a conflict in _café au lait_, with a sprinkling
of cinders strewed on the top, is not romantic either in colour or
suggestion; but by dint of sunshine and strong blue sky, and the seeing
it for the first time, there was a kind of furious beauty in the great
stretch of river ahead of us, with its yellow waves leaping and
wrestling out to the horizon. Bordeaux began to lessen down to a
photographic view of itself; the immense bridge and its arches dwindled
to a long caterpillar, crawling many-legged across the stream; the
thousand delicate details of masts and yards melted into a cobwebby
mist, and, behind all, the _clocher_ of St. Michel towered above the
blur of houses, a monument altogether too magnificent for the
deplorable little tribe of mummies that we had that morning viewed in
its foundations.
[Illustration: AN INTERMITTENT PROCESSION OF MEN.]
The first-class passengers maintained their attitude of suspicion as far
as we were concerned; and when, after a period of discreet
inoffensiveness, a sketch-book was called into requisition, they began
to be quite sure that we were as objectionable as our clothing, and
discussed us in groups, with such lightning side-glances as only French
eyes can give. For a little time an intermittent procession of men
strolled in an elaborately casual manner round behind the sketch-book;
but, finding themselves rewarded only by Arcadian glimpses of cattle,
trees, and churches, they gradually settled down on their chairs again,
and smoked the mysterious compound known to the French middle-classes as
tobacco, while the cattle and the churches retired into the desert
places of the sketch-book, and the page with the fat _curé_, his still
fatter friend, and the insatiably curious little boy, came to light
again.
For the first half of the journey the steamer made her way down the
river on the principle of Billy Malowny’s exit from the wake, when ‘it
wasn’t so much the length of the road come agin him as the breadth.’
Every house on each bank seemed to have a landing-place of its own, and
a passenger to be landed at it; we crossed and recrossed, as if we were
beating to windward, and the Bordeaux merchants and bank clerks returned
by scores to the bosoms of their families, and were no doubt
epigrammatic at dinner on the subject of the two absurdly emancipated
_Anglaises_, with their sailor hats and brown shoes. At all events, we
were getting our first impressions of the Médoc slowly and thoroughly.
We were in the thick of the Vine Country by this time; everywhere, as
far as we could see, the low slopes were seamed and striped with vines
till they looked like green corduroy, and every large house among them
was a _château_, with a name more or less familiar even to the ignorant
and unlearned. We had a map of the Médoc with us--a map that gave all
the _châteaux_ in heavy capitals, and added the towns as trivial
necessities in diamond type; it sometimes even gave a little picture of
a particularly pet _château_ so that there might be no mistake about it.
From this we identified the Château Margaux, the home of one of the four
kings of the classified Médoc wines, sharing its select first-class with
Lafite, Latour, and Haut-Brion, behind whom trails the sacred list of
the classified, down to the fifth estate and after that the deluge of
the _bourgeois_ wines, most of which are good enough for any one, but
are not quite of the blood royal.
It is difficult to realise in the Médoc that the best wine in the world
is made in places where there is no tall chimney or hideous range of
manufactories. All that one sees is a two-storey country-house, with
pointed towers at each end, standing in green vineyard slopes, with
somewhere in the background a group of inoffensive and often picturesque
houses, painted pink, or some other frivolous colour, and not taking up
as much room as the stables and yards at big houses in England. It is
the extraordinary independence of grapes that gives this simplicity in
wine-making. They do the whole thing themselves, only demanding to be
let alone; and not all the tall chimneys in England could coerce them
into fermenting a day faster than they choose, or could give them any
better flavour than their own laws decree.
We had only one specimen of what is commonly felt to be landscape, and
is spoken of as scenery, as opposed to mere contour, on our way to
Pauillac. It was at a place on the right bank of the river, where the
shore suddenly reared itself into cliffs of a sunny fawn colour, and
apparently of a texture that was eminently suited for house building; so
supremely, in fact, that the people of the place had not troubled
themselves to cart it away, but had come, like Mohammed, to the
mountain, and had blasted themselves out houses in it, and apparently
finished them off with their penknives, or teaspoons, or any other
implement that was convenient. Some people decorated the front of their
cliff very handsomely with carved balustrades and porches; others merely
tidied down the rock a little round the windows, and helped out the
angles here and there, and put chimneys on handy protuberances. It must
have its points as a system of living; when, for instance, the house is
crowded for a wedding or a dance, they can dig out a few more spare
rooms towards the front, and throw the stuff out of the windows. The
rock cuts as easily as wood, and becomes perfectly hard in the air; it
is absolutely ideal in all useful respects, and in colour is beautiful,
so cheerful and so tempered. We saw these tawny cliffs behind us for a
long time, while the boat made her way into the broader flood of the
Gironde. The sun made much of them as it sank, and their warm, friendly
faces looked still after us in the twilight, when the west was glowing
darkly, and the cold wind was forcing us to tramp to and fro in the
short span of the deck till we were giddy.
It was past seven o’clock when the lights of Pauillac sparkled ahead of
us on the river bank, and we thankfully gathered together our baggage,
suborned our sailor, and desired him to lead us to the Grand Hôtel, the
one to which we had been recommended. It was a good deal of a shock when
he told us that the Grand Hôtel had been closed for a year on account of
the death of the proprietor. It was not the kind of intelligence to
encourage strangers, arriving in darkness, believing there was but one
hotel in the town, and having desired all letters to be addressed to
them there. However, the sailor rose to the occasion. He was a wizened
little man, with the tentacles of a cuttle fish and the administrative
powers of a Cook.
‘But there are many other hotels, mesdames,’ he said, while he attached
some ten or twelve _articles de voyage_ to his person. ‘Come, I will
conduct you to the best of them.’
My second cousin’s portmanteau, ballasted by the Kodak and the medicine
chest, was hanging round his neck, and gave deadly impetus to his charge
through the dense throng of jabbering peasants that was slowly squeezing
itself up the gangway. But in spite of the confidence inspired by the
sailor, it was in some anxiety of spirit that we hurried along after
him, in darkness that was only streaked here and there by the rays of
indifferent oil-lamps across a high-backed wooden bridge, and out on to
a long and pathless tract of grass. Everything had for the moment a
painful resemblance to the landing of Martin Chuzzlewit and Mark Tapley
on the swampy
[Illustration: A PLUNGE INTO THE UNKNOWN--ARRIVAL AT PAUILLAC.]
bank of the Mississippi in search of the city of Eden. How did we know
what sort of stifling den above a restaurant it would be that the sailor
called a hotel? How did we know what _compôtes_ of grease and garlic we
might have to eat there? We breathed more freely when we were deposited
in the narrow hall of a house that had something of the air of a real
hotel, and were met by an obsequious _garçon_ and a highly-respectable
smell of beefsteak. We were shown our room, a palatially large one, with
a light paper that would be an excellent background for
mosquito-hunting, and we were told that _table d’hôte_ was nearly over,
but that we could have whatever we wished.
We said, ‘_Œufs sur le plat_,’ as we always feebly do when in doubt, and
descended to a very warm and dinnerish little _salle-à-manger_, full of
black-haired fat men, and black bottles of _vin ordinaire_, and pervaded
by the satisfaction of those who have dined largely and well.
Much strange talk buzzed round us in the thick Bordelais accent, while
we waited for our eggs on the
[Illustration: THE DOG APPROACHED WITH A SLOW POLITENESS.]
plate: excited harangues about vintages and grapes, that bristled with
facts so esoteric and so solid that my cousin said she would fetch the
note-book at once, and slipped away with the graceful bow to the company
that we had observed society at Pauillac demanded. I had embarked on the
eggs before she came back, and was thinking how I could best express
the curious flavour of the grease in which they were cooked, when I
heard a slight scuffle at the door, and saw my cousin dart in with
inflated eyes of terror, followed by a black boar-hound of about four
feet high, on whose back was clinging a monkey of more than usually
human and terrifying aspect. The dog approached with a slow politeness,
and, as he came, the monkey leaped to and fro from his back to the
tables, the chairs, the handle of the door, anything in fact within
reach of his chain that presented a surface of a quarter of an inch,
with the swinging bound and rebound of a toy on a piece of indiarubber.
We cowered behind our table, and the danger was for the time averted by
the intervention of some personal friend of the monkey, who, to our
unspeakable thankfulness, took him out of the room.
But that night, when we had forgotten the incident and were going up the
dark staircase to our room, my cousin, who was in the rear, uttered
suddenly the most vulgar, kitchenmaid’s shriek I have ever heard, and
fled past me in a state bordering on convulsions, with a dark object
swinging from the skirt of her dress.
It was the monkey.