It is a truism, venerable to the verge of dotage, to say that the way
not to enjoy travelling is to do it at a rush, spending the days in
sight-seeing, and the nights in the train; but this disposition of
things has one merit, it keeps the anguish out of farewells. The
heart-tendrils have not time to weave themselves round the _concierge_,
the chambermaid is still your bitterest foe, the waiter has not yet
risen to the position of an unnaturally obliging brother; you are too
hurried to discover the full charms of the _armoire à glace_ in the
bedroom, or the verandah outside the _salon_ windows, and you scurry
from one hotel to another, unregretful and heart-whole.
But a week--and we were the best part of a week at Pauillac--gives ample
time for the forming of those ill-fated foreign friendships which are
destined never, as Rossetti says, ‘to find an earthly close.’ I do not
know from how many hotels in various parts of France we have gone forth
sorrowing, and asseverating our intention of returning there directly
our affairs in Ireland could be wound up so as to permit of our leaving
that country for life. To their melancholy number must now be added the
Grand Hôtel du Commerce, Pauillac. On the last sad day we had to start
early,--a proceeding that is a strain upon the constitution of any
hotel,--but never, on our laziest mornings, had we such lavish cans of
_eau bouillante_, nor such hot coffee, nor such a foaming jug of freshly
boiled milk. Léonie the chambermaid, Louis the _garçon_, Jeanne the
cook, all vied with each other in fond efforts to enhance the poignancy
of parting; even the bill, usually a styptic to the tender pain of
farewell, was affectingly moderate.
‘Black,’ the big dog, paced beside us to the curious little vehicle, not
unlike a county Cork inside car, that was to take us to the station; he
was bestridden
[Illustration: MY COUSIN ENDURED THE CLAMMY TOUCH OF ‘BAMBOO’ UPON HER
FINGER WITH SCARCELY A SHUDDER.]
as usual by the monkey, and in her softened mood my cousin endured the
clammy clutch of ‘Bamboo’ upon her finger with scarcely a shudder.
Jeanne’s little girl had given us a flaming bouquet of scarlet geraniums
and heliotrope; two bunches of grapes had been pressed upon us by
Madame, to sustain us on our journey; and, at the last moment, our
friend who had been the first to introduce us to the secrets of
wine-making darted forward with a card addressed to the proprietor of a
restaurant in Bordeaux, on which that gentleman was prayed to serve to
‘_ces demoiselles_’ a bottle of Grand St. Lambert, ‘85, at the expense
of its original producer. Of course we left vowing to return for the
_vendange_ next year, and trying to believe that we should be as good as
our word. It seemed the only way given to us of marking our sense of
their kindness.
We had to wait at the station, seated on our luggage in default of
benches, before the train--the tallest we had ever seen--came in,
towering over the platformless station after the arrogant fashion of
French trains; and having scaled its precipitous sides, and struggled up
into what we expected to be its lofty saloons, our hats were knocked
over our eyes by the ceiling. We then found that the unusual height of
the train was caused by the third-classes being mounted on top, above
our more honourable heads, and that, in moving about the carriage, it
was safer to go on all-fours.
It was a long hot drive across Bordeaux to the Gare de la Bastide, and
it gave a fine sense of freedom to leave all luggage there, and set
forth again on foot, unhampered by anything except a small cherished
hand-basket. We took the ferry-boat across to the other side of the
river--a little strenuous black steamer that fretted and panted across
the wide stream like a broken-winded pony trying to bolt. We did not
know our way, and asked advice on the subject from as many people as
possible, only taking care to wait till our most recent informant was
round a corner. I once omitted this precaution in Cork, and while I was
blandly putting further inquiries to a postman, an awful voice cried
after me--
‘I suppose you think I’m a liar!’
A thing that has made me circumspect in such matters ever since.
Our way led through the market--a great iron tent, filled with the most
variegated colours, voices, and smells. We roamed through damp,
brilliant aisles, with vivid splendours of fruit and flowers mounting
high over our heads on either hand; we explored the remarkable
collections of birds, beasts, and herbs that were being confidently
purchased by the housewives of Bordeaux for family consumption; and,
with a bow of recognition to a poisonous barrowload of fungi, we pursued
our way into the sunny street wherein was the restaurant which had been
indicated to us by our late host. We presented the card entitling us to
the bottle of Grand St. Lambert without delay, and it was presently
borne in in state by the proprietor himself--a civility obviously owing
to the curiosity that was displayed on his red and round-eyed
countenance. It was a large bottle, with a beautiful white-and-gold
label, and after we had scientifically smelt its bouquet, and slowly
absorbed as much as we thought becoming, morally and physically, there
was still two-thirds of the bottle left, far too much either to
squander upon the waiter or to finish ourselves. The waiter had left a
mound of grapes in front of us, and had decorously retired; on a buffet
behind us were a number of old newspapers; the hand-basket was on the
floor at our feet; all was as perfect as if it had occurred in a romance
of detective life. My second cousin stealthily abstracted an
_Intransigéant_ of a responsible age from the buffet, wrapped up the
bottle in its woolly folds, and forced it diagonally into the basket,
while the various matters it dispossessed were forced, diagonally or
otherwise, into our pockets, so that when I came to pay the bill, the
expeditionary purse lay as deep as the coins at the base of a public
building.
Libourne is only half an hour by train from Bordeaux,--a chequered
half-hour of bursts in and out of tunnels, and of consequently
intermittent amenities on the part of a resplendently-dressed
newly-married pair, who faced us all the way there,--and the bridge that
spans a placid curve of the Dordogne, under the town of Libourne, came
into view so unexpectedly that we had hardly time to gather our things
together before the train stopped in the station. We had been fortunate
enough to have been given an introduction to a gentleman and his wife
who spend each vintage season in their charming little old-fashioned
country-house near Libourne, and we found that their kindness had even
gone to the length of waiting for us outside the barrier that in France
so relentlessly separates the travelling public from the rest of
mankind. It was humiliating to discover that Monsieur and Madame A. (I
suppose the time-honoured formula must again be employed) both spoke
English so many thousand times better than we could speak French, that
our acquaintance with that language became wholly superfluous; but it
was also refreshing. It was a wonderful thing to feel that we need no
more take thought to our luggage, or to the reproving or instruction of
porters in a foreign tongue. Monsieur A. had a wholesome belief in
female incapacity, and in an instant we found that we were no longer
mere literary tramps, but had been raised to the serene and almost
forgotten position of ladies of quality.
In a very short time we found ourselves being whirled off in a carriage
to Quinault, the country-house aforesaid, and were being told all manner
of strange things. We had not looked at a newspaper since we left Paris,
and it was hard to believe that the most notable figure in Irish
politics should have left them for ever, and no echo of such a thing
come to us, even in the quiet, far-away vineyards of the Médoc. We were
now in the St. Emilion district, and without wishing to insult the
Médoc, it must be said that it cannot compare in beauty with the
opposite side of the Gironde. There was an air of generous luxuriance
about the vines themselves that began to realise for us the vineyards of
our more poetical visions. The stunted little shrubs on which we had
been forming our eye were no more to be seen. Tall bushes, trained to
spread like fans on espaliers, had taken their place, and pictorially,
at any rate, there can be no comparison between the two systems. There
was a sunset that evening that made the first sight of the St. Emilion
vines a thing greatly to be remembered. Quinault is a scientific
vineyard, and the charm of colour conferred by the blue-green sulphate
of copper that stains all the leaves, is a fine confirmation of the
theory that the useful is necessarily the beautiful. These blue-green
leaves had turned to a mysterious metallic grey in the evening light; up
the middle aisle came a cart drawn by a big white horse, a
scarlet-capped man was standing up in it between the barrels of grapes,
his figure showing ‘dark against day’s golden death;’ after it followed
a procession of vintagers, women and boys mostly, the yellow light
behind them giving to the long row of figures the effect of being a
company of saints on an early Italian background; and, last of all, came
a little, incredibly bowed woman, who had been vintaging here at
Quinault for the last eighty years--La Mère Mémé, the oldest and the
most conscientious _vendangeuse_ of the district.
‘She is always the first at the end of the row,’ we were told, ‘and she
never leaves a bunch behind her, and she has eighty-seven years;
_n’est-ce pas, ma Mère_?’
[Illustration: LA MÈRE MÉMÉ--ALWAYS FIRST AT THE END OF HER ROW.]
Mère Mémé admitted the eighty-seven years with an almost bored
acquiescence. She had been very old for so long that she was less proud
of it than she had
[Illustration: A SKETCH WAS MADE OF HER AS SPEEDILY AS MIGHT BE.]
probably been when she was eighty. She sat down on a barrel, and a
sketch of her was made as speedily as might be, while the sky faded from
gold to red, and the rest of the vintagers slowly tore themselves from
the charms of looking over the sketcher’s shoulder to go to the
excellent dinner that was waiting for them in a long vine-covered barn.
Once more we tasted the vintage soup, and smacked our lips, and said,
with facetious under-statement of the case, that it was _pas mal_, and
once more we prodded at the cauldron of _ragoût_, and felt the hunger of
gluttony rise within us as we smelt its rich and composite fragrance. We
were connoisseurs in vintage cookery by this time, and had been shown
the mysteries of many vintage kitchens, but as the exhibition always
took place a long time after tea and a short time before dinner, it
never failed to make us regret that we also were not vintagers.
We wandered back to the house through the rose-garden, and though we
pretend to no horticultural knowledge, by dint of recognising ‘La
France’s’ timid flush, and the orange glow of that poetically-named
flower, ‘William Allan Richardson,’ we took a higher place in the
estimation of their proprietor, and were encouraged to adventurous
remarks on their culture as practised in Ireland, which, we fear, must
have hopelessly degraded the gardeners of that country in the eyes of
Monsieur A. It was hard to talk of anything else but roses and fruit at
dinner, when the centre of the table was a masterpiece of both one and
the other; but we were beginning to feel less restricted now in our
choice of subjects. During our last flight into polite society our ideas
were to us much as the creatures in the Ark must have been to Noah. Our
brains were full of interesting things which we wished to plant out on
the world, but when we thrust them forth, they could find no rest for
the soles of their feet in the strange sea of French conversation, and
they returned to sit lamentably upon the shelf, with all the other
agreeable but untranslatable notions.
Now, however, we had not only enlarged our vocabulary, but we had also
lost a good deal of the decent diffidence that had at first prompted us
to hold our tongues, and we found ourselves conversing gaily, with a
hideous disregard of the trammels of verbs and the pitfalls of gender. I
had nearly finished my dinner before I realised that in asking my
neighbour to pass _la selle_, I was unreasonably demanding a saddle, and
it was almost dreadful that that neighbour gave no sign of what he felt,
and merely told me that to eat _du sel_ in such quantities as is my wont
was an _habitude Anglaise_. It would have been consolatory to have been
laughed at openly on such occasions, but I suppose such altruistic
politeness would be beyond the power of most people; certainly no one we
ever met soared to such heights, and I am sure we are not capable of it
ourselves.
We had an expedition before us the next day, and the evening had to be
short. However, after dinner we strolled out into the darkness, mellowed
by the scent of many roses, and went to have a look at the
_vendangeuses_. The ladies had a dining-room apart from the gentlemen,
and when we looked in at them, were still sitting over their wine with a
fine indifference to the charms of general society in the barn. Mère
Mémé, at the end of the long table, with the lamplight deepening her
wrinkles into trenches, and sinking her eyes into wells of ink, might
have been an over-printed engraving of Rembrandt’s mother. Gathered
round her were three or four hardly less ancient ladies, equally
suggestive of Rembrandt’s relations, and a long array of dark-haired,
white-coifed women and girls were to be seen, more or less dimly in the
indifferent light, finishing their jugs of _vin ordinaire_, all talking
at the tops of their voices, and all, after the first stare, comporting
themselves as if no curious foreign eyes were observing them from the
doorway.
The evening closed with one dramatic episode. A long low dark room; at
one end a bare table; on one side of it an excited group of women; on
the wall behind, a smoky lamp, throwing a lurid light on two
resolute-looking men, who stood behind the table on which a swarthy
victim lay trembling, held tightly by one, while the other hurriedly
divested him of all clothing save a fur boa and two pair of boots.
Madame A. was having her black poodle clipped.