‘_Mais! vous êtes fraîches comme des roses, mesdemoiselles!_’ shouted
Suzanne, as her two guests seated themselves at her kitchen table with
faces of a pale lavender colour.
‘Blue roses,’ said my cousin ungraciously, as she rubbed her cheeks to
free them from the frozen stiffness produced by the contents of the
watering-pot, ‘and the coffee is cold,’ putting her hand round the thick
cup that had just been filled for her. The discontented British croak
was happily overwhelmed in Suzanne’s loud and abundant conversation on
things in general; the sourness of the bread was more or less baffled by
plastered layers of pear jam; and when we remembered that the coffee had
been waiting for us since seven o’clock and that it was now a quarter
to eight, we felt that we were not in a position to complain of its
tepidity. Strange that a week in France should have so altered our point
of view as to make us feel guilty at not having finished our breakfast
at eight o’clock.
As we wound up the meal with several bunches of green and purple grapes,
grey with dewy bloom, M. Blossier, with his cigarette and his
patronising smile, appeared at the doorway, and as he leaned there, with
his hands in his pockets, and his straw hat set crooked on his Astrakhan
curls, he informed us that a gentleman had called upon us at the hotel
the preceding afternoon, and had left word that he would return this
morning, so perhaps it would be well if we gave ourselves the trouble to
hasten. We looked at each other, conscious of an effect of failure in
the morning’s toilet; the tinfoil looking-glass had slurred over defects
that we now saw with a quickened perception. This must be the
first-fruit of those letters of introduction that had been written about
us, and what untold discredit were we now about to heap on our trusting
friends! We flung down the unfinished bunches of grapes, and in less
than five minutes we had got through the delicate matter of paying our
reckoning, and were saying good-bye to Suzanne. It was unexpected under
the circumstances that she should have kissed us, but nevertheless she
did so. ‘_Tiens!_’ she cried, as I held out a hand for her to shake,
‘_il me faut vous donner une bise! Là! et là!_’ She gave us each two
resounding kisses that, as far as garlic was concerned, were not lacking
in that local flavour of which we were amateurs, and for fervour and
sincerity equalled those that the Irish nurse bestows upon the objects
of her affections.
We drove away from Suzanne’s household with real regret. We had found in
it an excellent _cuisine_ and a perfect hostess--so I remarked to my
cousin with the dogmatic solemnity of a tombstone. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and
we found a perfect host too, but he was a noun of multitude, and we
provided the _cuisine_.’ She fingered her mosquito bites as she spoke,
and we fell to reminiscences of our feeble efforts to
[Illustration: M. BLOSSIER, WITH HIS CIGARETTE, APPEARED AT THE
DOORWAY.]
repulse the linked battalions of fleas and mosquitoes the night before.
Very soon, however, we could think of nothing but the extraordinary heat
of the wind that was blowing clouds of red dust over us, setting the
white sun-bonnets of the _vendangeuses_ flapping, as we drove past them
at the best speed to which we could incite M. Blossier, and after an
hour of combat with it, we arrived at the hotel with our eyes full of
sand, and our hair standing aureole-wise round our faces.
Madame herself came forth to meet us, with a note in her fat hand, and a
manner in which some slight admixture of interest, almost of respect,
was discernible. We read the note. It was even worse than we had
expected; it was a request couched in admirable English that we would be
ready to meet the writer at eleven, and he would then give himself the
pleasure of conducting us round the vineyards of the neighbourhood, and
would finally have the honour of escorting us to his own _château_,
where, he hoped, we would dine. The large commercial face of the hall
clock showed that we had just one quarter of an hour before this flight
into French society in which to eliminate the traces of an experience
that would probably have horrified our host beyond recovery, to cast out
the accent that we had acquired with such fatal facility from Suzanne
and M. Blossier, and to scour through the all-sufficing pages of
Bellows’ Dictionary for phrases that should lubricate our efforts at
high-class conversation.
It was not pleasant, either in prospect or accomplishment, but we did
it. We were even sitting in the _salon_ as ladies should, putting on
tight gloves, when a landau and pair drove to the door, and we were told
by the sympathetically excited Louis that a gentleman wished to see us.
In another five minutes we were bowling through Pauillac, with parasols
up, conversing in free, untrammelled English with the excessively kind
and unselfish person who had given a large slice of valuable time to the
toil of taking two ignoramuses to see the innermost secrets and
perfections of wine-making. Our host told us, in his well-chosen
English, that had here and there the pressure and the staccato that an
Anglo-Saxon tongue may weary itself in striving to imitate, that we were
to partake of _déjeuner_ at a rival Pauillac hotel before going any
farther. We did partake.
From oysters, served with hot sausages, to black coffee and fruit, we
went hand in hand with the _menu_, and when we rose to go we felt serene
and equal to the occasion.
[Illustration: ONLOOKERS OF THE TRIUMPHAL DEPARTURE FROM PAUILLAC.]
Again we bowled smoothly along the Promenade de la Marine--a spectacle
much enjoyed by the Pauillac _monde_, and, let us hope, imposing in the
eyes of Madame and of her _salle-à-manger_, now crowded for _déjeuner_.
We were driven into the country, in a direction opposite, we were
thankful to observe, to that taken the day before by M. Blossier.
Heavens! what would be the consternation of our present host if we were
to chance upon one of the _cuviers_ or vintage kitchens of yesterday,
and a troop of acquaintances was to burst therefrom, demanding copies of
their photographs with a terrible intimacy--they might even slap us on
the back!--the contingency did not bear thinking of.
But a fate very different from wayside _cuviers_ and ragged peasant
proprietors was in store for us. A couple of undulating miles brought us
in sight of a comfortable-looking white stone villa, flanked by long
outhouses, and surrounded by a small and phenomenally brilliant flower
garden. The vineyards ran like a smoothly swelling sea round the
borders of this island that had been preserved from their inroads; the
blinds of the villa were drawn down, and it seemed to look with ‘a stony
British stare’ upon the vintage operations going forward all day under
its eyes. Monsieur Z. told us that it had been built in imitation of an
English villa by the Baroness de Rothschild, but we did not dare to ask
why she should have chosen the square modern type, dear to the heart of
the retired solicitor. We asked instead why it should be called Mouton
Rothschild, and found that once in the dark ages the whole of this part
of the wine country had been given over to sheep, and that consequently
the word _mouton_ had survived here and there; but why it should be
tacked on to the name of a family could not be explained. It would be
neither kind or clever to call a newly-built house in the neighbourhood
of Limerick, Pig Robinson or Pork Murphy; but in France, Sheep
Rothschild is a very different affair, and a name held in uninquiring
reverence by the _négociant en vins_.
We left the carriage, and proceeded with all dignity to the _cuviers_
at the rear of the villa, while the hot and tawny _vent d’Afrique_ blew
suffocatingly in our faces, and covered our white veils with yellow
grit, and turned the most inviting shade to mockery. It was doubtless of
such heat as this that the lady’s-maid remarked to her mistress that it
quite ‘reminded ‘er of ‘ell!’ But, for all that, we had a kind of glory
in it; it made us feel that we were really abroad, and that we should be
able to bore our friends about the _vent d’Afrique_, when we got home,
in a manner that would surprise them. At this juncture we were halted in
front of a palatial building of two storeys, and following our guide
into it, we found ourselves in the twilight aisles of one of the great
fermenting houses of the Médoc. Right and left stood the huge barrels on
their white stone pedestals, belted monsters, spick and span in their
varnished oak and shining black hoops, with a snowy background of
white-washed wall to define their generous contour, and a neat little
numbered plate on each to heighten their resemblance to police
constables. This was an _édition de luxe_ of wine-making--at least, so
it seemed to us after what we had seen of dingy sheds, wine-stained
barrels, and promiscuous rubbish, with magenta legs splashing about in
juice, and spilt dregs as a foreground.
We were taken up a corner staircase to the upper floor, and were there
received by the superhumanly well-bred and intelligent official who is
invariably found in such places; we were also received and closely
examined by the swarm of fat wasps that, in the _cuviers_, is fully as
invariable, and rather more intelligent. No one seems to object to these
wasps and their pertinacity; Monsieur Z. and the manager merely gave a
pitying glance in the direction of my cousin, when, in the middle of a
most creditable question about the phylloxera, her voice broke into a
shriek, and after a few seconds of dervish-like insanity, she brought up
from the back of her neck the fragments of a wasp, and hurled them to
the floor with a dramatic force that was quite unstudied. The wasps
congregated most thickly about an arched
[Illustration: HER VOICE BROKE INTO A SHRIEK.]
opening in the wall, through which a crane poked its long lean arm into
the open air, and dangled its chain for the tubs full of grapes that
were brought underneath it by the oxen. Up came each purple load,
already battered and robbed of its bloom by the crushing and packing,
with the bloated yellow wasps hanging on to it, and the long arm of the
crane swung it round to the _pressoir_, which here was a broad truck on
wheels. The method then became of the usual repulsive kind. The grapes
were churned from their stalks in a machine, the juice ran in a turgid
river round the _pressoir_, and, paddling in this, the bare-legged
workmen shovelled the grapes into the _cuves_, whose open maws gaped
through trap-doors in the floor. Other men packed the stalks into a
machine like a pair of stays; when it was full, the tight-lacing began
by means of a handle and cogged wheels, and when it was over, the stalks
were taken out dry and attenuated, and flung from a window, with the
cheerless prospect of being utilised at some future time as top-dressing
for their yet unborn brethren.
When we got into the carriage again we were crammed with information,
and a silence as of indigestion settled upon us as we whirled along the
hog-backed vineyard road to Château Lafite. It is not only in wine that
Mouton Rothschild is beaten by its nearest neighbour. In the matter of
a _château_, Lafite scores still more decidedly; of that no one could
have any doubt who saw this old country-house, with its pointed towers,
its terraced gardens with their ambushed perfumes that took the hot wind
by surprise, its view over the soft country to other _châteaux_, and its
delightful wood, where grassy walks wound away into the shadows. After
these things, going to see the _cuviers_ and the wine-making was like
beginning again on roast beef after dessert; but the appetite came in
eating. It was Mouton Rothschild over again, only more so; it could not
be more dazzlingly smart than its kinsman, but it was larger; more
outhouses and more imposing, a greater number of _cuves_, a more
ambitious manner of regulating the temperature. We were truly and
genuinely interested, but none the less were we penetrated by a sense of
the gross absurdity of our pose as students of viticulture, while
Monsieur Z. and the manager of Château Lafite imparted fact upon fact
antiphonally and seriously, without a shadow of distrust of our
capabilities. Indeed, in all our vintage experiences we met with this
heartfelt devotion to the subject, and this touching belief in our
intelligence, and it was both a glory and a humiliation to us.
Enfiladed thus by a cross-fire of what might be called grape-shot, we
progressed in fullest importance round the quiet nurseries of the claret
for which such an incredible future of dessert-tables is in store, and
entered at last the doorway of a long low building. A few steps led
downwards to another doorway, where a grave and courteous attendant
presented us each with a candle placed in a socket at the end of a long
handle, and unlocked a door into profound and pitchy blackness. It was
like going to see the mummies at Bordeaux, it was even more like going
into the cellar at home to look for rats, and my cousin’s skirts were
instinctively gathered up and her candle lowered to the ground as the
darkness closed its mouth upon us. It was cool and damp, it smelt of
must and wine-barrels, and in some way one could feel that it was
immense. Our guides turned to the right without hesitation, into a
gallery whose walls, from the sandy floor to the vaulted ceiling, were
made of bottles of wine. We walked on, and still on, trying to take it
in, while on either side the tiers of bottles looked at us out of their
partitions with cold uncountable eyes, eyebrowed sometimes, or bearded,
with a fungus as snowy and delicate as _crêpe lisse_, on which the
specks of dew glittered as the candle-light procession passed by.
‘There are here a hundred and fifty thousand bottles of claret,’ said
the manager, with prosaic calm. ‘Some of them are a century old. This is
the private cellar of Baron de Rothschild.’
‘He will not drink it all,’ said Monsieur Z.; and we laughed a feeble
giggle, whose fatuity told that we had become exhausted receivers.
More and yet more aisles followed, catacombs of silence and black heavy
air, but full of the strange life of the wine that lay, biding its time
[Illustration: ON EITHER SIDE THE TIERS OF BOTTLES LOOKED AT US OUT OF
THEIR PARTITIONS WITH COLD UNCOUNTABLE EYES.]
according to its tribe and family, in a ‘monotony of enchanted pride,’
as Ruskin has said about pine trees.
We saw very little more of wine-making, when we got out again into the
blustry heat, and crawled back to the carriage, feeling cheaper and more
modern than we had done for some time. A new phase of sight-seeing was
in store for us, and one with which we were even less fitted to compete.
The inner life of a French country-house does not come within the scope
of the ordinary tourist; and when, later in the afternoon, we were led
up the curving and creeper-wreathed steps of a _château_, and ushered
into an atmosphere of polished floors, still more polished manners,
afternoon tea, and a billiard-table, there was only one drawback to
perfect enjoyment of the situation. The ladies of the household--there
were several of them--did not speak English, and at once that delusive
glibness that had been nurtured by talking to Suzanne began to wither in
the shadeless glare of drawing-room conversation.
We shall never know what absurdities we said, or what _bêtises_ we
committed; we can only feel satisfied that in a general way we said and
did the wrong thing, and we can but ‘faintly trust the larger hope’ that
our kind hosts made due allowance for insular imbecility. Whatever they
may have thought of the strangers so unexpectedly brought within their
gates, they kept alike their countenances and their counsel; and when
the guests had faltered and smirked through their difficult farewells,
and hidden their hot faces in the shelter of the landau, they were
aware, as they drove away in the clear southern starlight, of two great
fragrant bouquets of roses and heliotrope on the seat opposite, the last
charming expression of the hospitality of the Médoc.