Familiar ground, but with what a difference! While the early train from
Libourne neared the Bastide Station at Bordeaux, we sat serene and
languid in our carriage, reading London papers, and talking English
politics to Monsieur A. with an assurance which, we hope, concealed our
ignorance; luggage, cabmen, and porters were remote appendages of
travel, interesting only to Monsieur A’s. servant, a few carriages off.
The dog from whose tail the tin kettle has been newly removed could
hardly feel a more pleasing sense of undress than did we when we drove
out of the yard of the station and saw our portmanteaus squatting
sullenly side by side on the pavement, and knew that we should see their
detested faces no more till our journey’s end.
Bordeaux itself became a different town under this chaperonage. In the
restaurant at which we lunched we were treated as old and distinguished
friends, not merely of Monsieur A., but of the proprietor, and shops
where we should have been ignored became gushing in their attentions. In
the full glow of this borrowed radiance we travelled that afternoon
along the sluggish railway line that traverses the Médoc, and saw at
intervals, with a sense of old acquaintance, the sails of the ships and
the smoke of the steamers on the Gironde appear above the vineyards on
our right. We passed Pauillac with almost a pang of recognition. There
was the church where we had seen acolytes with short cassocks and long
boots with tassels; there was the road along which the inexorable
Blossier had driven us,--Blossier, who now would lick the dust before us
could our _cortége_ but meet him; there--most painful thought of
all--was my largest sponge, that had been blown out of my bedroom window
by the _vent d’Afrique_ and never reappeared.
It was half-past three before, at the station of St. Yzans, we clambered
down the steep side of the carriage, and up the still steeper side of a
smart English omnibus that was waiting for us. Two strong horses took us
fast along the level roads, and the soft breeze cooled us as we sat on
high and admired the perfect propriety with which Madame A.’s poodle sat
erect beside the coachman and looked down with a sovereign severity upon
the cur-dogs at the cottage doors. We had driven for seven miles, and
the Gironde, from which the railway had strayed to meet the village of
St. Yzans, was in sight again, when the horses were pulled up at a neat
new gate-lodge; we drove in over a bridge, and bowled up an avenue with
vines spreading far on each side, then through a wood, and finally under
a high arched gateway up to the door of a long pink _château_ with
pointed towers at either end. We were shown into a large drawing-room,
with windows opening on to an old stone terrace, beyond which were
brilliant flower-beds, and, in the distance, a blue strip of river;
afternoon tea of the English kind stood ready, with a pile of letters
and papers waiting beside it; a billiard-room opened on one side, a
library on the other, all empty, and luxuriously expectant of our
occupation. It was our good fortune to be the guests of Mr. Gilbey at
Château Loudenne, and though by a fortune less kind we had been deprived
of the presence of our host, he had provided for us the pleasantest of
deputies to dispense his hospitalities.
The few days that we spent there with Monsieur and Madame A. were like
no other part of our lives, and retained to the last the ease and
enjoyment and the pervading sense of welcome that came so soothingly to
us that first afternoon. English management and comforts were not made
incongruous by the aromatic flavour of French surroundings and the vivid
pageant of the vintage; each accented the other, and retired into the
background with unfailing fitness. It was near the end of the vintage
when we arrived. The handsome red and white buildings which held the
_cuvier_, the long line of stables and farm-buildings, the immense
storehouses full of wine and wine barrels, were at their busiest, and on
the slopes below the _château_ the vintagers were working at top speed
to finish by the end of the week. As we walked through the long
vineyards by the river, the grapeless rows of vines looked forlorn and
elderly, like mothers who have married off their daughters and have no
occupation left. It was far more inspiriting to move farther on, and
watch the sight that was now so familiar and yet always so fresh, the
women’s figures moving waist-high in the green,--the men carrying the
heavy _hottes_ of fruit on their necks, the overseer with his eight-foot
pole pointing fatefully to the bunch of grapes left behind by the
careless _vendangeuses_, the hurry and bustle of everything, and the
creamy oxen stepping slowly and imperturbably through it all, with their
seventeen hands of height shrouded in grey draperies to preserve them
from the flies, sentient apparently of nothing except the driver’s voice
and the guiding
[Illustration: FIN DE VENDANGE.]
touch of his stick. There is a stable full of great English cart-horses
at Loudenne, such as had not been seen in France since the days of
Agincourt, but these descendants of the mediæval warhorse are used only
for the rougher farm-work; it is said that the oxen, from their
clockwork slowness and placidity, do not break and injure the vines as a
horse might, and though this is contradicted, and the days of oxen are
said to be numbered in the Médoc, they still pace in couples from
vineyard to _cuvier_, setting their hoofs down together with the grave
accuracy of a minuet, neither slackening nor straining, whether the two
tall tubs on the cart behind them are full or empty.
The clack of conversation died down a little while we stood with
Monsieur A. and looked on at the work, but one could feel that it was a
seething repression, as of soda-water behind its cork. We felt bound,
however, to combat the justice of giving the women less wages than the
men on the grounds that they talked more; it seemed to us that no
created being could talk in such volumes as the male Médoc peasant,
unless it be a Galway beggar, or a Skibbereen fishwoman before the
Bench. The next piece of information seemed, from previous observation,
more likely. It is calculated that the vintagers on this estate eat
during the vintage an amount of grapes equal to a hogshead of claret--a
creditable performance for people who are forbidden to eat any, and are
under constant strict surveillance. ‘We cannot enforce the rule,’ said
Monsieur A., beckoning to us two girls from the end of a row; ‘we can
only prove when it is broken. Put out your tongues!’
This direction was to the two grinning _vendangeuses_; and, in response,
two large tongues, as purple-black as a parrot’s, were presented to us,
while the eyes of their owners goggled above them with guilty
deprecation and an inextinguishable sense of the absurdity of the
situation. They had the full sympathy of the jury, and the judge only
held up his hands and laughed too.
It was already late in the day, and sunset and its signal to leave off
work came soon. The crowd flocked out of the vines--men, women, and
children, talking and laughing with unexhausted zest, and grouping
themselves in the sandy cart-track in unerring harmonies of blue and
white and grey, flecked here and there with the flash of a red kerchief
or cap. The movement towards home gradually assumed the aspect of a
religious procession. Headed by the sacrificial oxen and their load of
grapes, it passed slowly through the vineyards in the dewy spell of the
evening, till, as it moved distantly up the slopes and breasted the
afterglow, it seemed that a Samian glade and a temple to Ceres must be
its destination. It was the last of the vintage, and the first feeling
of coming farewell touched us while we came back among the stripped
vines; the metallic whirr of the _cigales_ and the loud interjections of
the bullfrogs were the only voices left to replace the shrill babble
that had penetrated every square yard of the green landscape. A
suspicion of frost was in the air, touching the tender evening like a
spur, to remind it of the tyranny that was to come, when the vines would
shrink to brown skeletons, and the winter day would darken above them to
its setting, in the chilly silence of the snow.
Dinner was scarcely over that evening when the scraping of a fiddle and
the husky note of a flute were audible in the hall, and as we came into
the drawing-room there entered by the other door a group of people who
might have come straight out of Arcadia or an Italian opera. In front
were the two musicians, playing a gay little tune, while behind them two
peasant girls advanced, carrying each an enormous bouquet of flowers,
with a party of the vintagers bringing up the rear. The music finished
with a flourish, and one of the bearers of the bouquets brought her
offering forward and presented it to Monsieur A. with a few eulogistic
sentences, followed by the second bearer, who performed the like office
for Madame A. How in this position would an English country gentleman
have stiffened, stammered, and assumed a galvanic gratification; how his
wife would have murmured inane thanks with uneasy condescension; and how
totally different in all particulars was the demeanour of Monsieur and
Madame A.! Each in turn made a speech of a few sentences, with perfect
graciousness, point, and fluency; they even looked as if they thoroughly
enjoyed doing it, and we gaped from the background with respectful
admiration. The fiddle and flute struck up again, and to their music
the deputation withdrew, leaving just enough flavour of garlic behind to
blend quaintly with the heliotrope and rose perfumes of the two
bouquets.
This ceremonial was the prelude of the dance that celebrated the _fin de
vendange_, and a little later we wrapped ourselves in shawls and went
out to join in the revels. The room in which the vintagers dine at the
Château Loudenne is an extremely large one, with a musicians’ gallery
running across one end of it--an accessory that showed that dancing was
as recognised a part of the programme as dinner. The dance had hardly
begun when we came in; a few of the smaller kind were plodding round in
a kind of polka with only three steps to the bar, but the men were for
the most part grouped near the door, and the ladies lined the benches,
calm in the certainty that they were in the minority. We took our seats
at the top of the room under the musicians’ gallery, prepared to observe
with the intelligent interest of the tourist this splash of local colour
that good luck had thrown in our way. The music ceased, and there was a
pause, during which the men filed into the room and partners were
chosen, while an incredible clang of talk filled the air. Presently a
hoot from the long horn announced the beginning of the dance, and each
man grasped his partner by the waist and led her forth. It was called a
_contre-danse_, and by the time that a tune of the most furious
friskiness had been played through once, ten or twelve couples were
standing, not only ready, but prancing in their impatience to start. The
men were mostly small, agile creatures of comparatively tender years;
the women, on the contrary, were tall and stout, seemingly of a
different race, and not by any means distressingly young. In fact, the
pretty girls whom we had picked out as the probable belles of the
entertainment were sitting neglected round the room, talking apparently
to their fathers and mothers.
As soon, however, as the signal to go had been given, we realised that,
in the practical Médoc, ‘handsome is that handsome does.’ The tall
person whom we had lightly compared to a bolster, went away down the
room as if there were a spiral spring inside the bolster-case, and her
matronly _vis-à-vis_ advanced to meet her in a manner only comparable to
‘the way the divil went through Athlone, in standing leps,’ to quote
Sergeant Mulvaney. We watched these gambols in undisturbed enjoyment for
about a minute, and then suddenly my cousin was aware of a man standing
in front of her, bowing, and silently holding out both hands.
‘He wants you to dance with him, and you will have to do it,’ whispered
Madame A. to her, with unsympathetic ecstasy; ‘it is the custom of the
vintage.’
In another moment my cousin was swept into the line of the top couples,
and her partner, a pallid, oily youth of Jewish aspect, was whirling her
down the room with such a coruscation of capers as would have done
credit to a catherine-wheel. What exactly she looked like as, hopelessly
conspicuous in
[Illustration: ‘HE WANTS YOU TO DANCE WITH HIM, AND YOU WILL HAVE TO DO
IT; IT IS THE CUSTOM OF THE VINTAGE.’]
her white dress, she floundered, hopped, and jigged through the _mêlée_,
time was not given to me to determine. A blue-clad figure was already
bowing in front of me, and, as two warm, ungloved hands took mine, the
only balm left in Gilead was the sight of Madame A. cleaving the flood
of dancers in the arms of a little creature whom I took for a stout
child of ten years old, till I subsequently saw his moustache.
The _contre-danse_ in which we were thus embroiled stormed on with
conversational intervals between the figures for about twenty minutes.
It was an inflamed variety of kitchen Lancers, danced with a rhythmic
fury, and larded with impromptu flourishes on the part of the gentlemen.
We envied the bolster as she bobbed serenely past us, riding the waves
of the _contre-danse_ like a bottle in a chopping sea, while we were
struggling in its depths and trying with slides and springs to overtake
its impossible rhythm. A reel at a tenants’ dance in Galway, the
‘D’Alberts’ at a sergeants’ ball at the Curragh, the ‘barn-dance’ on a
carpet after dinner on New Year’s night,--in all these violent
amusements we have competed with a measure of success, but candour
compels us to state that our _début_ in the _contre-danse_ at Château
Loudenne was somewhat of a failure. Sorry spectacles as we were by the
time its five or six figures were over, we should have been still more
dilapidated had it not been for those intervals wherein we were talked
to by our respective vinedressers as agreeably, as politely, and with as
easy a selection of topics as if they were daily in the habit of
discoursing to English ladies. In this connection we may say that not
one of these peasants of the most wine-making district in the world owed
any of their hilarity to the claret in which they lived, moved, and had
their being; in fact, not once during our fortnight in the Médoc did we
see any man who had taken more than was good for him.
More and more dances followed, till our legs ached, and the cement floor
wore holes in our shoes, and then, as we were preparing to go back to
the house, it was said that _ces dames_ ought absolutely to see the
‘Bignou.’ The ‘Bignou’ sounded like the name of some monster of the
middle ages, and might have been the local name for a werewolf for all
we knew; but we stayed, nevertheless, and presently saw entering by
another door nothing more alarming than four little old women. It was
explained to us that the ‘Bignou’ was an ancient dance, almost obsolete
in that part of the country, and that these four were the only worthy
exponents of it, and had been actually awakened out of their first sleep
to dance it for us. A rough-looking boy was hoisted on to a barrel at
the end of the room--a boy who had come all the way from Brittany for
the vintage (if, as is highly probable, I did not misunderstand my
partner), bringing with him the little wooden instrument upon which he
now set up a shrill piping that sounded like a penny whistle with a
bluebottle in it. This archaic flute was itself the ‘Bignou’ from which
the dance took its name, and the extraordinary tune which it buzzed
forth might have been composed by Tubal Cain. The four old _danseuses_,
in their white caps and full black skirts, took their positions in the
middle of the room with a prim consciousness of their own importance,
and all that we had yet seen was child’s play compared with the
intricate measure
[Illustration: THE LITTLE FIGURES FLEW IN DARTING CIRCLES, LIKE FLIES IN
A POOL.]
that followed. The little figures flew in darting circles, like flies on
a pool, to the mad squeals of the ‘Bignou,’ their list-shod feet
slapping the floor in absolute accord, and their full skirts and white
cap-strings leaping out behind them in time to each angular twist of the
tune. As we watched them we no longer wondered at their age. Steps such
as those could not be learned in less than seventy years.
The onlookers stamped and clapped, the ‘Bignou’ player blew with a
possessed frenzy, and the little old women circled tirelessly, like
witches on the Brocken. I do not know how long the dance lasted, but as
we went back in the darkness to the _château_ we felt as if the music
had gone to our heads; and when I lay down under my mosquito curtains,
the dark figures whirled and swung giddily before me, as if the spirit
of the Médoc had been expressed in them as intoxicatingly as in its
wine.