I
The winter and the vintage come on together at Villeneuve, and when the
snows had well covered the mountains around, the grapes in the valley
were declared ripe by an act of the Commune. There had been so much rain
and so little sun that their ripeness was hardly attested otherwise.
Fully two-thirds of the crop had blackened with blight; the imperfect
clusters, where they did not hang sodden and mildewed on the vines, were
small and sour. It was sorrowful to see them; and when, about the middle
of October, the people assembled in the vineyards to gather them, the
spectacle had none of that gayety which the poets had taught me to
expect of it. Those poor clusters did not
"reel to earth
Purple and gushing,"
but limply waited the short hooked knife with which the peasants cut
them from their stems; and the peasants, instead of advancing with
jocund steps and rustic song to the sound of the lute and tabor and
other convenient instruments, met in obedience to public notice duly
posted about the Commune, and set to work, men, women, and children
alike silent and serious. So many of the grapes are harvested and
manufactured in common that it is necessary the vintage should begin on
a fixed day, and no one was allowed to anticipate or postpone. Some cut
the grapes, and dropped them into the flattish wooden barrels, which
others, after mashing the berries with a long wooden pestle, bore off
and emptied frothing and gurgling into big casks mounted on carts. These
were then driven into the village, where the mess was poured into the
presses, and the wine crushed out to the last bitter dregs. The
vineyards were a scene of activity, but not hilarity, though a little
way off they looked rather lively with the vintagers at work in them. We
climbed to one of them far up the mountain-side one day, where a family
were gathering the grapes on a slope almost as steep as a house roof,
father, mother, daughter, son-in-law, big boy, and big girl all silently
busy together. There were bees and wasps humming around the tubs of
crushed grapes in the pale afternoon sun; the view of the lake and the
mountains was inspiring; but there was nothing bacchanalian in the
affair, unless the thick calves of the girl, as she bent over to cut the
clusters, suggested a Mænad fury. These poor people were quite songless,
though I am bound to say that in another vineyard I did hear some of the
children singing. It had momentarily stopped raining; but it soon began
again, and the vintage went sorrowfully on in the mud. All Villeneuve
smelt of the harsh juice and pulp arriving from the fields in the
wagons, carts, tubs, and barrels which crowded the streets and
sidewalks, and in divers cavernous basements the presses were at work,
and there was a slop and drip of new wine everywhere. After dark the
people came in from the fields and gossiped about their doors, and the
red light of flitting lanterns blotched the steady rainpour. Outside of
the village rose the black mountains, white at the top with their snows.
[Illustration: _The Wine-press_]
In the cafés and other public places there were placards advertising
American wine-presses, but I saw none of them in use. At a farm-house
near us we looked on at the use of one of the old-fashioned Swiss
presses. Under it lay a mighty cake of grapes, stems, and skins, crushed
into a common mass, and bulging farther beyond the press with each turn
of the screw, while the juice ran in a little rivulet into a tub below.
When the press was lifted, the grapes were seen only half crushed. Two
peasants then mounted the cake, and trimmed it into shape with
long-handled spades, piling the trimmings on top, and then bringing the
press down again. They invited us with charming politeness to taste the
juice, but their heavy boots bore evidence of too recent a visit to the
cherished manure heap, and we thanked them with equal courtesy.
This grape cake, when it had yielded up its last drop, would be broken
to pieces and scattered over the fields as a fertilizer. The juice would
meanwhile have been placed to ferment in the tuns, twelve and thirteen
feet deep, which lay in the adjoining cellar.
For weeks after the vintage people were drinking the new wine, which
looked thick and whitish in the glasses, at all the cafés. It seemed to
be thought a dainty beverage, but our scruples against it remained, and
I cannot say what its effect upon the drinkers might be. Perhaps it had
properties as a "sweet, oblivious antidote" which rendered necessary the
placard we saw in the café of the little Hôtel Chillon:
"Die Rose blüht,
Der Dorn der sticht;
Wer gleich bezahlt
Vergisst es nicht."
Or, in inadequate English:
The roses bloom,
The thorns they stick;
No one forgets
Who settles quick.
The relation of the ideas is not very apparent, but the lyric cry is
distinctly audible.