"*!

8913 yALe univeRSity LiBRARy
the gARVAfi collection
Of
BOOKS on iaelAnb
estABLished in 1971 By
f RAncis p. gARVAn, yALe 1S97
in honoR of his pARcnts
pAtRiCK gARVAn
mARy CARROLL gARVAn

IN THE VINE COUNTRY

IN THE
VINE COUNTRY

E. CE. SOMERVILLE and MARTIN ROSS
AUTHORS OF
'THROUGH CONNEMARA IN A GOVERNESS CART, ETC.

Illustrations by F. H. Townsend
From Sketches by E. CE. Somerville

LONDON
W. H. ALLEN & CO Limited
13 Waterloo Place S.W
1893

The following pages, with their accompanying
Illustrations, originally appeared in the columns of
' The Ladys Pictorial', and are hei^e reprinted by
permission of the Proprietors.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY.

CHAPTER L
|T was our first day's cub-hunting, and
11 things had been going against us from
the outset.
To begin with, we had started rather late, — it is
noticeable that the minutes between five and six
A.M. are fewer and closer together than they are at
any other period of the day, — and, when half way to
the meet we found that Betty had given way to her
sporting proclivities, and had surreptitiously followed
us. When it is explained that Betty is a St. Bernard
puppy of cart-horse dimensions, whose expression of
smiling imbecility only cloaks a will of iron, it will
be understood that there was trouble before us. The
7

8 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
trouble began at once. Directly she saw she was dis
covered she ran away, and the next time we saw her
she was three fields ahead of us, lumbering cheerfully
into covert at the heels of the hounds, pursued by
several cows and the curses of the master.

BETTY.
By the time that she had been caught and immured
in the bedroom of the nearest cottage, we were
covered with confusion and blazing with heat, and
while we were precariously scrambling on to our
horses' backs by the help of the pigstye door, we were

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 9
told by an excited old man that the hounds had found,
and were ' firing away like the divil ' out of the far
side of the wood. This happened to be one of those
statements that are founded not so much on fact as
on a desire to keep things stirring and pleasant, but
none the less did it send us at inconvenient speed to
the other side of the covert, there to find that the
hounds had never left it, and were hunting slowly
back towards the side from which we had just
come. Not long after this my second cousin lost her
temper, and said she hated cubbing, and wished she
was back in Connemara, or anywhere out of the
county Cork. This expression of opinion occurred
when she was picking herself up out of a potato
furrow, into which she and her horse had ingloriously
rolled, and it was a good deal embittered by the fact
that she had hurt her knee, torn her habit, and broken
her hunting crop.
The day ended with this incident, so far, at least,
as we were concerned. Betty was released from the

lo IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
captivity that she had not ceased to bewail in quiver
ing, infantine shrieks, and we turned our faces toward
home. There is something very humbling in coming
in at ten o'clock to a late edition of the family break
fast, with nothing to j'ustify the routing up of the
household at five A.M. except a torn habit and a
bruised knee ; and we said to each other, as we went
unostentatiously up the back stairs, that cubbing was
not worth the candle by which one had to get up to
be in time for it.
We did not know that a few days afterwards we
should be hanging out of the window of the train as,
at a painfully early hour, it passed a covert in the
vicinity, straining jaundiced eyes of jealousy at the
distant specks that represented the field and the
hounds — specks who were to remain in the county
Cork and go out cubbing, instead of faring forth,
as we were doing, to take our pleasure in foreign
lands. The letter that we found on the dining-room table,
when we came down-stairs on that day that had

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 13
been sacrificed to Betty, was responsible for this
unexpected change of circumstances. It said ma
jestically, 'You are to go to the vineyards of the
M^doc, and must start at once in order to be in
time for the vintage ; ' and in spite of a grand and
complete ignorance of Medoc, its vintages, and wines
in general, we accepted the position with calm, even
with satisfaction.
The gibes of our friends were many and untiring,
and were the harder to bear that we felt a secret
scepticism as to our fitness for this large and yet
delicate mission, — what did we know of Chateau
Lafite or Mouton Rothschild, except that a glass and
a half of the former had once compelled my second
cousin to untimely slumber at dessert ? — and when on
a foggy morning we drove away from home, the dank
air was heavy with the prognostications that we
should return as bottle-nosed dipsomaniacs, and the
last thing that caught our eye as we turned the final
corner of the avenue was the flutter of a piece of blue
ribbon.

14 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
We had a singularly detestable journey to London,
or perhaps it was that a summer spent in country
remoteness made the train and its loathsome sister,
the steamboat, more intolerable than usual. As far as
Dublin we were comparatively confident, though the
trees at the station were rustling a little in the wind,
and the window-frames shook ominously in dismal
accompaniment to the lamentations of the emigrants
who crowded the platforms, waiting for the down
train to Cork. There are happily few things in the
world that are as bad as they are expected to be, but
a bad crossing is worse than the combined efforts of
imagination and remembrance can make it. This, at
least, is the opinion of my second cousin, who ought
by this time to have some knowledge of a subject to
which, according to her own reckoning of the time
occupied in each crossing, she has given some fifty of
the best years of her life. The trees and the window-
frames had not overstated the case, and we had the
gloomy satisfaction of hearing the stewardess remark,
as we neared Holyhead, that it had been a rough

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 15
passage. We could have told her so ourselves, but
still it was gratifying to have the thing placed on an
official basis.
In the pale morning, as we endured that last long
hour before Euston is reached, we read in headachy
snatches a pamphlet that we had been lent about the
wines of the Mddoc, and our souls sank at the prospect
of expounding the laws of fermentation to readers
who would be as oppressively bored by it as we
ourselves. But our first day in London routed this
hobgoblin: we were to enjoy ourselves; we were to
taste claret if we wished, or talk bad French to the
makers of it if it amused us ; but to improve other
people's minds by figures and able disquisitions on
viticulture and the treatment of the phylloxera was
not, we heard with thanksgiving, to be our mission.
The three days before our start were spent in the
manner customary in such cases ; that is to say, we
moved incessantly and at an ever-quickening pace
between the Strand, the Army and Navy Stores, and
High Street, Kensington, laden with small parcels,

1 6 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
footsore from the unaccustomed flagstones, and care
worn from the efibrt to utilise the Underground return
tickets that an ideally perfect programme had induced

WE WERE LENT A KODAK.
US to take in the morning. In addition to these usual
cares, another more poignant anxiety fell to our lot.
We were lent a Kodak, — for the benefit of the

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 17
unlearned it may be mentioned that the Kodak is
a photographic camera of the kind that is to the
ordinary species as a compressed meat lozenge to a
round of beef, — and as neither of us knew anything
about it, it became necessary to learn its mechanism
in a fevered ten minutes, or to leave it behind.
Ambition fired us to the attempt, and having ad
journed with the Kodak and an instructor to the
severely simple scenery of the gardens on the Thames
Embankment, we received there our first and only
lesson. What its results were will never be known
to the public ; a group of intoxicated ghosts lolling
on a bench in the depths of a spotted fog can be of
little interest to any one except the artists, and even
to their indulgent eyes its charm is of a somewhat
morbid character.
After these agitations, the corner seats of a railway
carriage at Victoria had a restful luxury about them
that was almost stagnation. The consciousness of
two portmanteaus registered to Bordeaux almost
made up for the cumbrous row of hand packages that
2

1 8 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
squatted in the netting ; and the half-hour of waiting
for the train to start was a period of soothing inaction
scarcely ruffled by the slow filling of the carriage to
its limit of five on each side, and merely moved to a
languid enjoyment by the inexorable determination
of the latest comers, a bride and bridegroom, to sit
next to each other irrespective of all previous arrange
ments of old ladies and their baskets. They had
about them the well-known power of making their
innocent and well-meaning fellow-creatures feel in the
way and in the wrong, and the eyes of the carriage
sought the windows or the ceiling as if by word of
command when, after the settling down of glowingly
new bags and rugs was completed, the latest comers
leaned back and gazed into each other's faces with an
unaffected ecstasy, the fact that both wore gold-
rimmed spectacles imparting a sort of serious lustre
to their mutual regard. The gaze seemed to us to
last most of the way to Dover, except at those
moments when a glance or two was given to their
fellow-passengers, a glance of almost compassionate

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 19
wonder that people so uninteresting and so superfluous
should be alive. It gave us an instant of pleasure
when some time afterwards on board the boat we saw
that the bride's fringe was blown into dejected wisps,
and that her groom's nose was blue and his face
pinched. Before we reached Dover an example was vouch
safed to us in further proof, if such were needed, of the
difficulty of saying good-bye agreeably at the window
of a railway carriage. In this case the victims of the
custom stood on the platform, smiling spasmodically
at the other victim in the carriage, and saying at
intervals, ' Well, you'll write, won't you ? ' 'So good
of you to come and see me off.' ' Well, mind you
write ! ' ' Oh yes, dear, and be sure you give my
love to Mary and Aunt Williams.' Then they all
smiled brightly and nodded their heads, and the
traveller, with her chin upon the window-sill, beamed
galvanically down upon her friends, and in her turn
adjured them not to forget to write. As the train
moved off at last, the farewells thickened to a climax.

20 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
and we were privileged to observe how, when the final
delicate flutter of the hand had been given, the smile
disappeared from the face of the traveller, and she
thankfully yielded herself to the deferred enjoyment
of her newspaper.
Of the further journey to Paris there is happily
little to record. ' Das hbcliste Gliick hat reine Lieder,'
and the most satisfactory travelling is that which
lends itself least to description. The Calais boat
made its journey in the most brilliant of sunshine
and the most refreshing of breezes, trampling its way
along the water at a pace that made the tall merchant
men look more old-world and stately than usual as
they moved serenely down the Channel. The male
part of the passengers walked the deck as if their lives
depended on it, after the custom of men ; the ladies
sat in sheltered places and tried to keep their hair
tidy ; and all alike exhibited the hypnotic conscious
ness of the presence of a sketch-book, that makes the
most cautious sketcher the object of instant remark
and suspicion.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 21
We sat that night in the warm, airless courtyard of
a Paris hotel ; tall dusty shrubs in pots hung their
lank leaves limply over our heads ; waiters flitted like
bats to and fro between the kitchen on one side and
the salle-a-manger on the other. A French family,
consisting of a papa, a mamma, a beautifully behaved
daughter with her hair in a queue, a humorous old
friend of a godfatherly type, and a little boy with
tasselled boots, partook of various liquids at a table
near enough to us to permit of our hearing their
effortless, endless babble, and also to observe with
ever-growing hatred the self-conscious gambols of
the little boy. Later on, they adjourned to the salon,
and the daughter performed a selection of music.
She began with a confident rendering of 'La Priere
d'une Vierge,' one of those pieces which once was the
strength and glory of every budding pianiste, but now
in its old age is only heard limping and faltering over
the greasy keys of hotel pianos ; and she finished
with an operatic gallop in which the treble fled about
in lonely frenzy, and the bass retired on to the lowest

22 IN THE- VINE COUNTRY.
octave of the piano and there had a fit of St. Vitus's
dance. The little boy pirouetted about the room, the
papa, mamma, and godfather clapped their hands and
laughed indulgently, and a good many of the windows
that gave on to the courtyard were suddenly and
violently shut.
We went to bed after that ; that is to say, we
retired into a good-sized opera-box, with windows
opening on to lamps and palms, and a general interior
effect of red curtains and mirrors. It is one of the
strangest features of French hotels that dressing-
tables are not included in any suite of bedroom
furniture ; there are looking-glasses by the score,
there are handsome marble slabs bearing ornate
clocks that do not go, there are gorgeous armoires a
glace, but never a good, commonplace, useful dressing-
table. French people seem to do without them in
the same simple, uncomplaining way that they do
without baths.
We cannot pretend to say we slept well in our
opera-box. Everything in the hotel seemed to stay up

IN THE VINE COUNTRY.

all night, including a small but devoted party of fleas ;
and the atmosphere, even when diluted with as much

HE BROKE INTO A DEFIANT POLKA.
courtyard air as the windows would let in, was heavy

24 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
and hot. We came down next morning feeling un-
refreshed, and not at all disposed to bestow of our
substance on the street musician who, since eight
o'clock, had been playing national airs on an
accordion in the courtyard. Having seen us pass by
on our way to breakfast, he immediately played
' God save the Queen,' gliding subsequently into the
' Marseillaise ' as a kind of corrective, and then find
ing that we still drank our coffee unmoved, he broke
into a defiant polka, which, did he but know it, has
' sung in our sleeping ear and hummed in our waking
head ' in elusive, half-remembered snatches, revenging
a thousandfold the callousness of the two Anglaises.
We had not much time to spare after breakfast, as
the Bordeaux train by which we were going started
at II. 20. A mosquito net was, however, one of the
things we had forgotten, and one of the things which
we were assured was indispensable, and it was not
until we had entered a likely-looking shop that we
realised that we did not know the French for
mosquito. My second cousin and the shopwoman

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 25
regarded each other for a few seconds in polite
silence, and then the latter said interrogatively, —
' Madame desire— ? '

RESOLVED THAT DEATH ALONE SHOULD PART US FROM BELLOWS
DICTIONARY.
My second cousin answered diffidently that she
desired fine net as a — as a — in short, for a veil against
the — the files that bite.

26 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
The shopwoman looked at her with compassion,
and offered me a handsome long black lace veil, and
with it the assurance that mademoiselle would find it
very becoming. At this stage in the negotiation the
two purchasers began to laugh with the agonising
laughter that has too often overtaken them in shops,
and the shopwoman, as is usual in such cases, was
obviously convinced that she was being laughed at,
and haughtily replaced the lace veil in its box.
Having wept profusely and idiotically before her for
some moments, we recovered sufficiently to ask for
white muslin, and succeeded in buying a suitable
piece, with which we slunk out of the shop, resolved
that in future death alone should part us from
Bellows' Dictionary.

CHAPTER n.

'Twenty minutes — half an
hour — three-quarters — • what
mademoiselle pleases ! '
This was what the waiter
said when we asked him how
long it would take to drive to
the Gare d'Orleans on the
morning that we left Paris.
We selected half an hour,
and by so doing as nearly as
possible missed our train —
in fact, when we arrived at the
Quai d'Austerlitz the station clock was already at
the hour of departure. It was consoling to be told
officially that it was five minutes fast, but five
minutes does not go far in the maddening routine
27

28 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
of French stations, and we were wrecks, mentally
and physically, by the time we had wedged ourselves
into the crowded carriage, labelled ' Bordeaux —
Bastide,' that was to be our portion. French railway
officials never weary of this little practical joke of
keeping the outside clock of the station five minutes
fast. If they did it always it would lose its piquancy,
but they guard against this by occasional deviations
into truth, so that the nerve of the public is
effectively shattered, and the station officials never
fail of amusement.
Eleven hours in a train is an immeasurable time,
especially when the train goes through a country
that, after a first hour or so of picturesqueness, lacks
absolutely any distinction of colour or outline.
Greyish tilled plains stretched away on either side,
without a fence, without a boundary, except for the
occasional rows of housemaids' mops and birch-rods
that enlivened the horizon. These detachments of
poplars are inseparable from French travelling ; they
haunt the ridges of the plains like the ghosts of

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 29
worthier trees, with all the dejection befitting
those who know that they are only worth a few
francs, and can hope for no better transmigration
than a kitchen table or a pig's trough. The country
seemed silent and empty after the harvest ; we saw
very few living things except flocks of sheep, and
we meditated with an ever-growing wonder on what
might be the moral suasion that kept each of these
on its own undefended square of grass. Arguing
from the more than demoniacal perverseness of Irish
sheep in breaking bounds, it seemed to us that the
French must have hit on the supreme expedient of
offering no resistance whatever, and thereby destroyed ^
at one blow the essential joy of trespass.
The train progressed in an easy canter, giving us
time to observe all wayside objects: we could have
counted the big citrouilles that lay in magnificent
dbesity, with their sunset-hued cheeks glowing like
fire on the colourless fields, suggestive of immeasur
able pumpkin squash, and we could see on the low
bushes that we had at first taken for currant trees,

30 IN THE VINE COUNIRY.
the black clusters that told we had at last come into
the wine country. It was not so pleasant to see in
the waiting-room at Poitiers the black clusters of
men, each enveloped in his own halo of garlic or bad
tobacco smoke, that told us our chance of getting a
cup of coffee was not worth the attendant horror of '
elbowing our way through them to the buffet. We
had not got over the strangeness of knowing that at
any or every small hotel or railway station we could
have a really good cup of coffee, unflavoured by
chicory, liquorice, blackbeetles, or whatever may be
the master ingredient in the muddy draught that
is invariable at such places in England, and we had
looked forward to Poitiers with an enthusiasm quite
unconnected with the Black Prince, or any other
romantic memory of Mrs. Markham's History of
England. By the time we reached Angouleme it was quite
dark, and we had fallen into the sodden stupefaction
of travel. The carriage was nearly empty, and the
lamp cast a distorted light upon the puckered faces

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 31
of the old lady and gentleman who were our only
fellow-travellers, as their heads nodded and rolled
in anxious, uneasy slumber. The small stations
became more frequent, and we were drearily aware
of the same routine at each : the half-dozen lights of
a village across the fields, the nasal bellow of an
unintelligible name, the thump of a box or two on
the platform, and finally a sound that we took at
first for the bleat of a tethered kid, but which we
discovered to be the note of a small trumpet or horn,
wound by the guard as the signal for departure.
It was only towards the end of the journey that this
implement had replaced the ordinary whistle, and
for about eight or ten stations we laughed at it ;
after that the lament of the kid added itself seriously
to the general gloom.
The last hour or two before Bordeaux would have
been much harder to bear but for a display of sheet
lightning, the like of which we had never seen
before. The sudden beautiful flicker played hide-
and-seek like a living creature among the curtains of

32 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
cloud, flashing about all the points of the compass
between south and east, or sometimes thrusting to
and fro across an opening, like glimpses of the
rapiers in a giants' fencing bout. It was under this
mocking, elfish light that we first sighted Bordeaux
and its river, and realised that the time had come
for us to strap up our rugs, and say 'pardon' in our
best French accent to the old gentleman on whose
feet we trod as we did so, and to drag our stiff
bodies forth into the electric glare of the station.
We had reached such a stage of fatigue and
demoralisation that we should rather have stayed in
the carriage all night, and gone on with the old
lady to a place she called 'Erin,' in a fine Hammer
smith twang. We should not have cared much
whether it proved to be the land of our birth, or
Irun, on the Spanish frontier, which we now believe
to have been her destination.
We had a long quarter of an hour to wait before
the Douane could bring itself to give up its dead,
and there was another quarter of an hour of driving

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 33
through deserted and badly-lighted streets before we
got to our hotel. We crossed a bridge that must
have been half a mile long, we feigned to each other
an interest in a half-seen gateway at the end of it,
and our hearts were all the time groping in a
certain hold-all, where lay a spirit-kettle, a teapot,
and half a pound of English tea. The offensively
urbane and wide-awake head waiter, with his clean
shaven face and foxy eyes, had some evident
difficulty in repressing his scorn when he heard that
he was to faire monter to our room a little milk and
hot water, but it mounted to our third floor for all
that. It was a blow to find a skin on the top of
the milk that showed it had once been boiled : we
did not know then that French hotels considered
milk in its raw, uncooked state to be as baneful as
if it were water.
Our room was large, and of a somewhat gloorriy
magnificence, with towering bed canopies, and
darkly-gleaming mahogany ; and as our one bougie '
— valued in the bill at a franc — contended with its
3

34 Ilf THE VINE COUNTRY.
surroundings, we felt like a chapter out of almost
any of Scott's novels — the chapter where the hero
spends a night in some one's private and luxurious
dungeon, and having obtained writing materials, has
heard the last retreating footsteps of an attendant
who has unostentatiously locked and double-locked
the door. What we heard principally, while we
drank our surreptitious midnight cup of tea, was
not the howUng of the storm or the hoarse baying
of a bloodhound in the courtyard, but the snoring
of some one in the next room. It was hard to
believe that the artist was not doing it on purpose ;
each snore was so painstaking, so measured, and had
such a careful crescendo in its vibrating fortissimo.
He had certainly brought the accomplishment to
a high degree of perfection, and if he does not die
of concussion of the brain in the attempt, he ought,
with a little more practice, to be able to empty any
hotel in a single night.
It was broad summer in Bordeaux, so we dis
covered next morning when we escaped from the

OUR SURREPTITIOUS MIDNIGHT CUP OF TEA.
35

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 37
half-light of the coffee-room and walked forth to see
the town. We went down to the quays and crawled
along them in the shade, looking at the immense
river, and the long 'winter woodland' of masts of
all countries, stretching away seemingly to the Bay
of Biscay : it did not matter that the water was the
colour of caf^ au lait, churned to dirty froth by
innumerable screws and paddles, or that the hoarse
screams of steam whistles ascended through black
smoke to the brilliant heavens ; all was new. and
delightful, and of a cheerfulness unknown to the
British Isles. It was here that we began to realise
what the wine country could do when it gave its
mind to it. The great quays were packed close with
barrels as far as the eye could follow — barrels on
whose ends were hieroglyphs that told of aristocratic
birth as plainly as the armorial bearings on a
carriage; the streets were full of long narrow carts
like ladders on wheels, laden also with barrels, one
behind the other; and about every five minutes, as
it seemed to us, some big ship moved out from the

38 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
wharf, filled to the brim with claret, and slipped
down the yellow current to other climes. As we sat
under the chestnut trees and watched the tide of the
traffic, we began to notice that there are more grey
horses in France than one would have imagined
there could have been in the world. The streets of
Paris are mottled by them ; the streets of Bordeaux
are mottled in the opposite way — that is to say, the
dark horses are like specks among the white, and in
the M^doc the necessary difficulty of providing black
horses for funerals can probably be only solved by
blacklead. We carried a map of Bordeaux in our hands, and
stopped many times to study it as we strolled along,
causing thereby an ecstasy of interest among the
sailors and the women sitting at their stalls of
strange fruits and fungi. It was disappointing that
French wit did not on these occasions elaborate any
jest more sparkling than ' Ahl Les Anglaises!'
though the inhabitants seemed to find the humour of
the situation satiatingly expressed in this simple

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 39
formula. Once, in Paris, a butcher's boy screamed
' Angleesh spock-en ' after us, and convulsed the
whole street with the sally ; but we thought that we
oould have produced something better any day on
Patrick's Bridge, Cork. We perseveringly ciphered
out our route to the church of St. Michel, assisted a
good deal, it must be admitted, by the fact that its
steeple is the tallest thing in Bordeaux. We were
getting very hot indeed as we toiled through the
Tour de Cailhau — so hot that, as a Galway woman
once remarked, 'it would have been a pleasure to
any one to lie down and die,' and we longed to sit
down and rest on the kerbstone in the shade of the
Tour beside a man in a blue blouse who was
sharpening a razor in his entirely filthy palm.
This being out of the question, we struggled on
towards St. Michel, promising ourselves a bath of
coolness and darkness under its lofty roof, and more
especially in its underground caverns, where inhabit
the celebrated mummies that have been preserved by
the soil of the graveyard from dissolution. We

40 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
crossed the last and sunniest street, and passed
through a swing door into a large church, consider
ably hotter than anything or anywhere outside, and
with an atmosphere of an unknown and stifling kind.
We walked round it in silence, and, looking at each
other, as we fanned ourselves with guide-books, we
felt that our last chance of averting heat-apoplexy
was to go underground at once and see the mummies.
We found that the mummies lived in a place apart
from the church, under the clocher, as the beautiful
spire is called, by which we had steered our way, and
we approached with feelings of unmitigated awe and
creepiness the doorway to which we had been directed
by two little boys who were playing cards in the
shadow of a buttress. The door itself was round
another buttress, in a low and crumbling stone arch
way, and we knocked timidly at it. It opened, and
in a room of about the size and shape of a bonnet-
box we beheld, instead of mummies, a cheerful family
party at breakfast. We were about to retire, but the
mother, wiping the vin ordinaire from her jovial

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 41
mouth, assured us that she was ready to show us the
Cellar of the Mummies immediately. We squeezed
past the rest of the family, and saw that at their
very feet a precipitous stone staircase plunged into
darkness. Our guide picked up a candlestick of a pattern
that we were destined to see more of afterwards, — i.e.
a long piece of wood with a tallow bougie erect at one
end of it, — and after an anxious inquiry on our parts
as to whether there was any scent Id-bas in the cave
had been answered in the negative, we followed her
into the abyss. It proved to be a circular vault,
made, like everything else in Bordeaux, of dusty
yellow stone, and, after a minute of despondency on
the part of the bougie, we saw, lining its walls, a
dismal array of little brown figures, propped on end
behind a low wooden rail.
The guide advanced with alacrity to her task.
' Behold, mesdames, the celebrated mummies of St.
Michel '—
She paused, and flourished the candle in the awful

42

IN THE VINE COUNTRY.

faces of a group of objects who were just preserved

'BEHOLD, MESDAMES, THE CELEBRATED MUMMIES OF ST. MICHEL.'

from being skeletons by a ragged covering of dusty
leather which had once been flesh.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 43
' Voiqi la famille empoisonneel Observe the morsel
still in the mouth of the little one ! Mosh-rhume !
Hein ? ' She made a light-hearted attempt at the
English word, but seeing we looked bewildered,
passed easily back into French. 'Mushrooms,
mesdames. All the family are found dead together 1'
We looked at them, but not too closely, and also
at their companions — the porter, the fat woman (now
a shrivelled and dreadful dwarf), the boy who had
been buried alive, — at least, the guide hopefully said
that she was almost sure that he had been buried
alive, — and the General, evidently a special favourite,
who had been frequently wounded in the battle, so
she told us, as an apology for the fact that there was
very little of him left. How she knew these grue
some histories we did not inquire, and with the best
intentions in the world we could not altogether
believe them. There was nothing human or appeal
ing in these grotesque survivals of three centuries
ago ; they might have been little damaged terra-cotta
figures, had it not been for the dusty grins that

44 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
showed unmistakable teeth, and some indefinable
sentiment of genuineness and absence of effort.
As we climbed up the stone stairs into the sun and
heat, we felt that the immortality thrust upon the
mummies of St. Michel was a cruel one ; and nothing
but the affectionate satisfaction of the able show-
woman with her show reconciles us to its memory.

CHAPTER III.
I HE 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 here
after 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 new
comers. We took two seats in the background,
conscious that our English costume was the subject
of a scarcely concealed surprise, and feeling that
46

46 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 47
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

^^, ¦fjtlwj^gfejt^^.p;.-

WE SAID WE WERE GOING ROUND FOR A MOMENT TO THE
BUREAU OF CHANGE.
expressions, facial and otherwise, of the waiter, the
porter, and the chambermaid, whom we had left
hopefully waiting at the door. Our luggage had

48 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 49
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 cafe 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 oi St. Michel towered above the blur of houses,
a monument altogether too magnificent for the
4

50 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
deplorable little tribe of mummies that we had that
morning viewed in its foundations.
The first-class passengers maintained their attitude
of suspicion as far as we were concerned ; and when.

AN INTERMITTENT PROCESSION OF MEN.
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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 51
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
cure, 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

52 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
of their families, and were no doubt epigrammatic at
dinner on the subject of the two absurdly emanci
pated Anglaises, with their sailor hats and brown
shoes. At all events, we were getting our first
impressions of the M^doc 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 chateau, with a name more or
less familiar even to the ignorant and unlearned.
We had a map of the M6doc with us — a map that
gave all the chdteaux in heavy capitals, and added
the towns as trivial necessities in diamond type ; it
sometimes even gave a little picture of a particularly
pet chateau, so that there might be no mistake about
it. From this we identified the Chiteau Margaux,
the home of one of the four kings of the classified
Mddoc 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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 53
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 Medoc 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 vine
yard 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

54 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 them
selves out houses in it, and apparently finished them
off with their penknives, or teaspoons, or any other
implement that was convenient. Some people decor
ated 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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 55
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 Hotel, the one to which we had been recom
mended. It was a good deal of a shock when he told
us that the Grand H6tel 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

56 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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

A PLUNGE INTO THE UNKNOWN — ARRIVAL AT PAUILLAC.
57

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 59
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 compdtes 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 gargon 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 cThSte was nearly
over, but that we could have whatever we wished.
We said, ' CEufs sur le plat,' as we always feebly do
when in doubt, and descended to a very warm and
dinnerish little salle-a-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

6o IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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,

THE DOG APPROACHED WITH A SLOW POLITENESS.
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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 6i
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

62 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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.

CHAPTER IV.
H UTTERS In the Medoc are serious affairs,
impregnable barriers that are fastened
irrevocably outside the windows, and
admit neither air nor light. Neither do they admit
mosquitoes ; but we had so far seen none such, and
we resolved to risk them, and sleep with the windows
open. The mosquitoes forbore — perhaps we were
caviare to their countrified tastes, or perhaps they
missed the usual seasoning of garlic ; but the sun
shine that flamed in our windows at some six of the
Waterbury (I have not mentioned before that my
cousin is attached to a Waterbury watch by a leather
strap) had no scruples in the matter. To slumber
with the M^doc sun full on one's face is an art that
takes some learning, and the first angry rift in the
delicious sleep that French wool mattresses and
63

64 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
spring beds induce was broadened to a wide-awake
torture by a series of rasping, whistling screeches
from the street below, that made us grind our teeth,
and remember every slate pencil that had ever
squeaked on a slate. It was a matter that required
instant investigation, and it was not a little startling
to find a party of stonemasons perched like birds
upon a scaffolding exactly opposite our windows,
manipulating monster blocks of the creamy stone
out of which they build everything in these parts.
They were sawing and shaping these symmetrical
blocks down in the street as easily as if they were
cheese, and in time we became able to bear that iron
screech of the saws tearing their way through the
gritty stone ; indeed, it now lingers in our ears as a
memory inseparable from sunshine, blue linen coats,
and Pauillac. But the workmen on the scaffolding
remained always a difficulty ; when we went out on
to our private balcony to hang up our sponges, or to
throw the tea-leaves into the gutter of an adjacent
roof, it was embarrassing to have to lay bare these

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 65
domestic arrangements to an audience seated, seem
ingly, in the sky, not fifteen feet away. But they
were companionable people, and, if they had not had
a habit of walking over chasms on single planks, with
blocks of stone two feet square balanced on their
heads, we should have got quite fond of them.
When we had finished, with the help of a battalion
of flies, our petit dejeuner of excellent caf^ au lait,
admirable butter, and sour bread, we were conducted,
at our own request, to the kitchen to interview
Madame, having while at breakfast made up from
Bellows' Dictionary all the words under the headings
of 'vine' and 'grape' with a view to the conversation.
Madame was a solid lady, built much on the lines of
a cottage loaf, full of years, of good and greasy living,
and possessed of an almost excessive repose of
manner. She sat immutably in the kitchen window,
and kept a frugal eye on the cook and her handful of
wood embers, while she directed her houshold and
read the feuilletoJi in her five-centimes Bordeaux
paper.

66 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
All the country was ' en plein vendange', she told
us; wherever we went we could see the vintagers, and

if we wished to make a folic petite course a pied' we

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 67
could not do better than walk to the little village of
St. Lambert. En effet, she herself was propriHaire,
and it would give her son great pleasure to show us
his cuvier and all else that we might care to see.
' And peasants ? ' we said vaguely ; ' we want to
talk to the peasants.'
Madame looked slightly bewildered.
' II y en avait bien assez de ces gens-lct ! ' she said,
with a contempt that we afterwards understood, when
we heard she had been a peasant herself ' I have
a peasant of my own ; ces dames can go and talk to
her as much as they wish.'
The broad esplanade was full of sun, and dogs,
and sailors, as we debouched upon it with our
note - books, sketch - books, and the Kodak, at
some nine o'clock of the morning. A steamer
was hooting at the wooden pier over which we
had crawled in gloomy fatigue the night before ;
a boat with a big lug-sail was performing wonder
ful and strange manoeuvres of going about with
the help of the current ; and a full-rigged ship, with

68 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
a dazzling green hull, was being towed up to
Bordeaux by a black and misshapen tug-boat called
Ercule, the family name of all Bordeaux tug-boats.
It seemed to be a market or fete day of a minor
sort in Pauillac ; something connected with a saint,
probably, which in Ireland would have meant that
every one would have gone to Mass and done no
work for the rest of the day ; but here every one
worked, just as they did on Sunday, and the
people who had no work to do went about and
enjoyed themselves. We remember once asking
a man at home why the people were going to Mass
and what holy day it was. He said he didn't
rightly know, but he thought the ' Blessed Vargin '
was implicated. We did not find out who or
what it was that was implicated in the Pauillac
fete, but we take this opportunity of thanking
them for celebrating themselves on our first day
in the M^doc. All manner of unexpected things
and people went by on their way to the town that
straggled on the hill behind the Boulevard de la

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 69
Marine. Donkey - carts, waggons, and charettes,
driven by brown - faced, white - capped women, or
boys in flat felt caps of scarlet or blue, — the berets
that are found up the west of France from Biar
ritz to Brittany, — a man on stilts, stalking by with

A mI;doc dog-caet.
the grave composure of a heron ; and, creeping
through the midst of all these, came now and again
a long cart drawn by fawn - coloured oxen, who
paced with that swinging saunter that became
afterwards so familiar to us, their faces and sleek
bodies covered absurdly with a thick netted

70 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
material to keep the flies off, and their neatly-shod
hoofs keeping time like clockwork.
We had been told by Madame the way we
should go, and we walked in it with alacrity,
especially when it involved leaving the white, sandy
high - road, and crossing a vineyard, the property
of our amiable hostess. It was the first time that
we had been let loose on grapes in this fashion,
and we fell upon them with an incredulous delight,
that was scarcely checked by the hideous discovery
made at this period, that the dog and the monkey
had followed us. The monkey was chained to the
dog's collar, — that was always something, — but it
was none the less disturbing to see suddenly, while
stooping to cut one of the long blue bunches, the
little black face with its blinking eyes looking
greedily and cunningly through the leaves, and
the nimble clammy claw extended imperiously
for the grapes that we were afraid to refuse.
They were delicious grapes — small and sweet
and ' inconvayniently crowded' with juice, as a

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 71
certain Irish wood was reputed to be with
woodcock, and so tightly packed on their stalks
that it was difficult to pick the first one of the
bunch. We, however, overcame this difficulty
nobly. Our arrival at the village of St. Lambert was
attended with considerable pomp. The procession
was headed by the proprietor, who had overtaken
us on his tricycle, and now rode very slowly and
majestically before us, eating grapes ; next came
Cesar, the dog, bestridden by the monkey (also
eating grapes), and thereby inspiring the most
agonising panic in all other dogs along the road ;
then we came, carrying the Kodak, and bending
under bunches of grapes ; and after us an enthusi
astic body, composed of the infant population of
St. Lambert, announcing in clear tones, to all
whom it might concern, that 'These' — meaning us
— were ' des etrangeres.'
The procession was halted about half way through
the straggling village ; the tricycle turned up a

72 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
side street, and the next moment we had our first
sight of wine-making.
There was an archway in one of the long white
houses, an archway of a shape that we knew very
well before we left the Mddoc. It was a kind of
large window in the wall, about four feet from the
ground, with a heap of brown and bare grape stalks
outside it, and, looking in, we saw in full swing the
working of one of the oldest trades in the world.
It must be admitted that we found it startling.
In the mouth of the archway was a broad and
shallow wooden receptacle, called the pressoir ;
heaped up in it were mounds of grapes, all black
and shining, with their splendid indigo bloom gone
for ever, and, splashing about amongst them, bare
footed, and ankle-deep in the thick magenta juice,
were the treaders of the winepress. It was those
bare feet, crimsoned with juice, that took our
whole attention for the first few minutes. We had
been given uncertain warnings as to what we might
or might not see, but we had always hoped against

a TREADER OF THE WINEPRESS.
73

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 75
hope for sabots. I think the proprietor felt for
us — not sympathetically, of course, but compas
sionately. He hastened to explain that the ferment
ing process purified everything; the old plan had
been for the men to join hands and dance round
and round the pressoir, trampling the juice out of
the grapes, and singing a little sacrificial vintage
song, but now nothing like that obtained. All
this was very consoling and nice, but it did not in
the least mitigate the horror that fate had in store
for us.
We had watched the carts unloading the big
douilles packed with grapes at the mouth of the
archway, and had heard, and straightway forgotten,
how many douilles were yielded by an acre. We
had seen with considerable repugnance the wiry
and handsome little blue-clad workmen scrub the
berries from the stems on the grillage, a raised
grating that let the bruised grapes fall through,
while the stalks remained on the top. We had
watched them shovel the grapes in dripping shovel-

76 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
fuls into a small double-handled barrel, which was
then snatched up by two of them, who, with it on
their shoulders, would trot across the dusty floor of
the cuvier, up two ladders that leaned side by
side against a tall vat, and, having emptied their
load into this immense maw, would trot back, and
jump into the pressoir again. Through all these
things we clung to the beautiful, purifying thought
of the fermentation, anJ said to each other that
when we ordered our bottle of Grand St. Lambert
at our English hotel we should see that we got it,
and would think fondly as we drank it of that
good, comforting process. At this juncture one
of the barefooted and blue-clad workmen ap
proached with a small tumbler in his singularly
dirty hand.
' These ladies would like to taste the vtout,' he
observed, dipping the tumbler in a tub half full of
the muddy juice that was trickling out of the
pressoir. He proffered us the tumbler with a bow,
and we looked at each other in speechless horror.

TASTING THE MOOt.

78

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 79
We were quite certain we should not like to taste
it ; but there in front of us was held the tumbler,
with behind it a pair of politely observant black
eyes, and an unbroken flow of commendation in
sing - song Bordelais French. We were assured
that the moM was delicious, mild, and sweet, that
the vintagers drank it every day by the gallon,
and, lastly, that it was very wholesome ; and we
replied with a ghastly smile that we were not
concerned about its wholesomeness, we did not
contemplate a surfeit just at first ; while all the
time we heard the splashing of the feet in the
pressoir, and the quiet trickle ot the juice into the
tub. The inevitable moment came, in spite of
temporising, and the glass was put into my hand.
The stuff was a sort of turgid magenta, thick and
greyish, with little bubbles in it, and the quarter
of a teaspoonful that I permitted to ooze between
my lips was deadly, deadly sweet, and had a faint
and dreadful warmth. That I swallowed it shows
partly my good breeding and partly my extreme

8o IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
desire that my second cousin should not be dis
couraged. ' C'est bon ? Hein f ' said the vigneron. ' Qa vous
fera du bien ! '
He said bong and biang in the friendly British
way that they pronounce such words in the Medoc.
(We had' already found that if we could relax the
strain, and, obeying our native instincts, talk about
vang, and say combiang, we should do well with
the Bordelais ) I turned to watch the effect on
the other victim, but found that she had retreated
with extraordinary stealth and swiftness to the
far end of the cuvier, and, having mounted one of
the ladders that leaned against a giant cuve, was
looking down into its pitchy depths. It is one of
the most unamiable traits in my cousin's character
that she has neither enterprise nor good fellowship
about tasting nasty things, and I immediately led
the vigneron to the foot of the cuve with a fresh
and brimming tumbler of moilt.
The wood of the great barrel was quite warm.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 8i
and from within came a low humming, like a swarm
of bees high up in a chimney. I went up the
second ladder, and looked down into a darkness
that had black gleams in it like a coal-cellar, show
ing where was the surface of the sweltering mass
of grapes. My cousin hurried into conversation
about it, regardless of the sour, heady smell of
the fermentation, until we heard a voice below
warning us not to stoop so long over the fumes ;
and then I felt that it was quite worth the disgust
ing flavour of moilt that still haunted my palate to
see her come down the ladder and find the man
with the tumbler waiting for her at the foot of it.
I could never have believed that she would have
been so lost to all sense of politeness and policy
as to dodge past his extended hand and bolt
through an unknown doorway into a dark room
that had apparently nothing in it except a great
deal of straw and a musty draught.
It was a very long room, so I saw as I fol
lowed, lighted principally by an open door at the

82 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
far end of it, and over half the floor was strewn a
thick litter of , straw. The open door framed an
oblong of glaring white road, and tendrils of vine
with the sun shining through their leaves, and
the light struck up on the boarded ceiling, and
dealt mercifully with the details of a long table
with black bottles on it that was disposed beyond
the region of the straw.
' It is here that the vintagers eat and sleep,' said
the vignero7i, taking a loving sip from the tumbler
for fear it should overflow. ' Mais voild ! ' — with
ecstasy — ' mademoiselle is about to walk upon one
of them ! He has drunk too much of the moiit ! '
My cousin was plunging her way through the
straw with uncertain strides and without her
eyeglasses, so that it must have been a consider
able shock to her when a crimson face with a white
beard reared itself from the straw at her feet, and
stared with a petrified terror at this episode in the
dreams induced by moitt. It was not only at her,
however, that the old man thus gazed transfixed.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 83
The monkey had escaped, and was advancing,
evidently much exhilarated by the straw, with de
moniac leaps and cries, and doubtless the vintager
was realising that he must have got ' them ' very
badly this time. Whatever he may have thought,
the monkey settled the question for my cousin.
She fled back to us, and when in safety took her
gulp of moAt with a heroism that I well knew to
be a refinement of spite.

CHAPTER V.
The sitting-room in our hotel at
Pauillac was discovered and an
nexed by us on the afternoon of
our first day in the Medoc. It
|| was a large room and a pleasant,
and, so far as we were aware,
had never before been trodden
by the foot of man ; certainly none trod it once
we had taken possession. The sandy bootmarks
that we distributed about its polished red floor
remained there during the whole of our stay at
Pauillac undisturbed by a brush, and unmingled
with the footprint of the negociant en vins. The two
big plaited maize-straw arm-chairs stood at atten
tion by the table just as they were left ; and, most
wonderful of all, we could open the windows and know
84

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 85
they would not be shut the moment our backs were
turned. Apparently the other people in the hotel had
no time to spend in the sitting-room. The wine
merchants went forth in loud companies every morn
ing, but — like the Irish lady who was said to be 'the
most thronging woman ever you seen ; sure, she'd
go out o' the house twenty times for the once she'd
come in ' — they never seemed to return, and, whatever
may have happened to them, the salon remained
undisturbedly ours.
It was while sitting at tea at the large admirable
table belonging to this room, on the afternoon of our
first experience in the cuviers, that we became con
scious of the eye of the Kodak regarding us from
behind our eighteenpenny teapot with a cold reproach.
As yet the gardens on the Thames Embankment
reigned in lonely beauty in the recesses of the
machinery ; nothing French had been given to the
mysterious custody of the black box, though we had
carried it, at considerable inconvenience, to the cuvier
of St. Lambert in the morning. The right moment

86 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
never seemed to come ; the sun was where it ought
not to be, or we were afraid that the suitable peasant
might be offended, and we had besides a latent dis
belief in the Kodak's willingness to deal with southern
sunshine and a foreign sky tingling with light.
' It has the surly English turn in it somewhere,' my
cousin had said, with Galway arrogance. But it was
now saying ' Ici on park Fran^ais ' with all the power
of its sunken eye ; and as soon as we had thrown the
tea-leaves out of the window, and hidden the jug of
cold boiled milk behind the stuffed fox on the side-
table, we went down and ordered a wagonette for
the next morning from a livery stable, and felt that
we were going to do our duty seriously by the Kodak.
The weather certainly did its part of the business
to perfection. The sun blazed upon our departure, as
we emerged from the hotel in the morning, and the
heat came through the cool wind in streaks, as the
vanille biscuit intersects the aching monotony of the
lemon ice. Under the awning outside the coffee-room
windows sat Madame, filling out her straw chair in

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 87
magnificent meditation. Ours had been the last of
the petits dejeuners, so that there was no longer any
need for her to watch over the expenditure of red
embers and cafi au lait in the kitchen, and she could
now exhibit her elegant leisure and her blue cloth
slippers to the loungers of Pauillac for an hour or so.
We wished, for her sake, that the wagonette was larger
and had two horses, and that the Kodak's resemblance
to a box of ' samples ' had not given us so much the
effect of commercial travellers ; but she gave us a
' bonne promenade', and a wave of the hand, that showed
she had a heart that did not despise the humble.
Before we had got clear of the town, our cocher had
begun to betray symptoms of intelligence. Our
directions as to where we wished to go had been but
vague, and, twisting him>self round on his seat, he
cross-questioned us until he had grasped the situation.
' These demoiselles wished to see vineyards and
vintagers at work in them, voyons ! ' — he twisted up
the ends of his little black moustache, and grinned at
us with unutterable comprehension, till his fat cheeks

88 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
must have impeded his vision. 'And they wish to
make "A^^ photographic ? Eh, bien ! It is I who know
where to conduct them. Allans, I will make them
to see Chiteau Latour!' His black eyes beamed
delightedly upon us, and his horse crawled unmolested
down the hill, while a series of apparently agreeable
ideas displayed themselves on its driver's face. He
resumed his usual position on the box, cracked his
whip, and frightened the horse into a canter by saying
'Hue I' in a soprano voice.
It was very satisfactory. We told each other that
we had indeed lighted upon a treasure — a man who
understood what photography was, and who seemed
to know the sort of things we wanted to photograph.
We did not know that his mind was occupied in
mapping out conveniently those of his friends whom
he wished to visit, to photograph, to impress generally
with his position of 'Cicero' (as a county Cork paper
has classically expressed this office) ; but we realised
all these things afterwards.
We drove for a while through the broad stretches

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 91
of the vineyards, where the myriad low vines stood
with their octopus arms drooping untidily over the
supporting wire, and the grapes hung heavy and ripe,
taking their last look of the sun before their plunge
into the seething night of the cuves. No one but the
ardent negociant en vins could, we think, call the Medoc
a beautiful land. Even at its gayest and greenest
time these long slopes require all the romance and
richness and mystery of the grapes to give them
an interest, and the much-vaunted fact that the land
was annually worth anything from £2'^o to ;£'8oo per
acre cannot give it the sympathy that lies in an Irish
hillside of furze and rock, whose price is adjusted in
shillings and pence by Sub-Commissioners of the Land
Court. The vintage had hardly begun. We had to drive
for some distance before we saw the first group of
vendangeurs, standing waist-deep in the vines, snipping
off the bunches and putting them into square wooden
baskets, eating grapes by handfuls, and talking in a
penetrating, incessant gabble that was as strident on

92 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
the quiet vineyard slope as were the dazzling white
sun-bonnets and kerchiefs and blue blouses in the
toneless expanse of green. The Treasure pulled up,
informing us that here was a suitable subject for
photography, and we docilely got the Kodak into
position. The vintagers turned as one man to stare
at us, and we tried to isolate some half-dozen in the
little focussing mirror, while the Treasure leaped
from his box, and, circulating among the crowd,
explained to them his position of proprietor of the
entertainment with a sense of its humour that was
only kept within bounds by the still stronger sense
of self-importance. My cousin balanced the Kodak
on her arm with all care, and said, ' Maintenant
tres tranquille, s'il vous plait ! ' to the mirrored
half-dozen, who with one accord shrieked with
delight, put their arms round each other, did their
hair, and otherwise prepared themselves for the
ordeal. ' How fortunate it is that they don't object to being
photographed 1 ' said my cousin. ' Now, you pull the

IN 7HE VINE COUNTRY. 93
bobbin — I mean the button — and I will press the
other thing.'
There followed a disintegrating click from the
heart of the Kodak.
' The photograph is taken,' said my cousin, not as
confidently as could have been wished. ' What did
the book say we were to do next .'' '
' Put a penny in the slot,' I suggested.
' Idiot I' replied my cousin, searching in my sketch
ing wallet on the earthquake principle — that is, to
go at once to the lowest depths, and then to burst
upwards and outwards through all resisting elements.
'Here is the book! It says we are now to turn' this
handle and replace the cap.'
The handle was turned, and it was then discovered
that the cap was irretrievably lost. It was not on the
floor of the wagonette, it was not in our pockets, it
was not in the hood of my cousin's cloak, or in her
hand, or anywhere that it might reasonably have been.
We said that, we would hold a hat over the thing
instead, and on going to the front for this purpose I

94 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
became aware that the black cap was nestling in its
usual place in front of the lens. It was one of the
bittere.st points of the incident that at this moment
the group at whom the Kodak's sightless eye had been
directed, advanced upon us to see results, doubtless
expecting that each of its six members would receive
on the spot a picture on glass with a brass frame.
It was so surpassingly difficult to explain the acci
dent and the general peculiarities of the Kodak, and
the disappointment and scorn were so unconcealed
when the faltering photographers finally made them
selves understood, that as a possible, though doubtful
method of consolation, I plunged among the vines
and began a pencil sketch of the disappointed ones.
In an instant the cocher was at my shoulder, summon
ing all the others with a wave of his hand to come
and see the show. It is scarcely necessary to add
that they came, and for the next five minutes I and
my models were the centre of a hollow square, which
was, so to speak, lined and canopied with billowy
vapours of garlic.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 95
The sketch was finished with unexampled speed,
and in the teeth of the most scathing criticism, the
critics showing an artistic intelligence that was almost
unearthly, and for which an experience of the Irish
peasant was no sort of preparation. I broke my way
forth from the square, amidst shrill bursts of laughter
and shrieks of ' del ! Que je suis vilaine ! ' ' Mais
regarde moi un peu le chateau de feanne ! ' ' Eh !
Dieul C'est pas moi qa I Ouf ! C est vilaine ! ' and,
having collected my cousin from red-handed gluttony
in the background, we succeeded in driving away in
time to prevent the sketch-book being torn bodily out
of my hand.
We ventured after a few minutes to ask the Treasure
where he was now taking us, and after a long and
meditative gfin at each of us in turn, he condescended
to tell us that we were going to see the vintagers at
their dinner. Almost as he spoke we whirled in at
the gate of a big yard, and saw, under a penthouse
at the end of it, a kind of school feast going on : rows
of tables covered with platters and jugs, and rows of

96 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
vintagers devouring untold quantities of vintage soup.
Our cocJier drove straight up to these, and, having
whirled showily round, drew up with the air of
Napoleon confronting his army, and addressed the
meeting. As he progressed with his explanation of
our mission we gloomily produced the Kodak, and
waited for the outward rush of those who wished to
be immortalised : we were becoming alive to the fact
that the Medoc peasant had not that shrinking from
publicity that we had believed. But providentially
the succulent soup, with the meat and cabbage and
bread floating in it, was too good to be left in a hurry,
and at the end of our driver's address one candidate
only came forward, an extremely plump young lady,
with an expression of placid self-contentment, and an
apron of an infuriated Scotch plaid. The Treasure
leaped from his box like an antelope, and, leading her
forth to a convenient spot, proceeded to pose her
according to his own ideas. After a few experimental
positions the inspiration came, and we had the
privilege of focussing the fair vcndangeusc, standing

THE TREASURE WAS POSED BESIDE HER, WITH HIS FAT ARM ROUND HER NECK.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 99
placidly heedless of the fact that the Treasure, with
his moustache twisted up to his eyes, from the very
extremity of gallantry, was posed beside her, with his
fat arm round her neck. Thus they were photo
graphed, and as the words ' Cest fait ' were uttered,
the Treasure's hat was raised with a flourish, and a
ponderous kisswas deposited upon the cheek of beauty.
There was a roar of delight from the luncheon party
under the penthouse ; even the photographers so far
forgot themselves as to titter sympathetically, and
as our cocher whipped up his horse, and swung out of
the yard on two wheels, he turned to us and winked
with an intimacy that made my cousin take out
her most unbecoming pair of spectacles and put
them on, in order to sustain the character of the
expedition. .
After this the events of the day became blended
into a monotony of hot green vineyards, with pink
and white houses on the hazy horizon ; narrow roads,
without a fence between their warm yellow, gravel and
the yellow gravel in which the vines grow ; gangs of

100 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
vintagers stooping among the plants ; fawn-coloured
oxen pacing at ease with their loads ; the clack and
twang of Bordelais tongues ; and, most prominent of

FAWN-COLOURED OXEN.

all ingredients, the heat and the Kodak. Every friend
of the cocher was found and photographed, the sketch
book was utilised for those who insisted on an im-

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. loi
mediate result, and, as the afternoon sun began to
drop towards the western uplands, we hoped that we
might, in the fulness of time, be permitted to go home.
But the Treasure had yet another friend, one who
lived still farther away from Pauillac, and it was not
till we had driven for half an hour that we saw in
front of us the now familiar chai, with its arched open
ing into the cuvier, and its magenta-legged proprietor
standing inside in the juice, shovel in hand. It was
becoming too late in the day for the Kodak, and the
cocher desired that a sketch should be made of this
most particular friend, and also of the friend's wife,
whom, in the twinkling of an eye, he had fetched from
her house and placed on the edge of the pressoir in
utter absurdity and incongruity. But the artist was
too completely subjugated to remonstrate ; even when
the sketch-book was snatched from her by the cocher
and deposited in the vinous fingers of the grape treader
with long and loud explanation of every page, she
merely sank back in voiceless despair.
We heard without interest or emotion that we were

102 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
to be driven home by a different and longer way.
Our only articulate longing was for tea, but that
being a mere vision, as impossible as beautiful, we
gradually took refuge in fatalism, telling ourselves
that if we got home that night, well and good ;, if
not, we could sleep in the wagonette, waking up
obediently at intervals to make moonlight sketches
of such of the cocher' s friends as he chose to summon
from their beds for the purpose. We were in the act
of dividing our last gingerbread, while the cool breath
of the Mddoc evening gave us its first nip, and the
vines became fragrant in the dew, and the chorus
of cigales in the roadside grass sounded like the
rhythmic reeling of line off innumerable trout-rods,
whfen I was thrown violently against my cousin by
the collapse of the wagonette on one side, and after
an instant of extreme anxiety and discomfort, we
found ourselves rolled out in a heap into the vines,
with the cigales' note at our very ears, and the hind
wheel of the wagonette finding a bed for itself in the
shallow 4itch beside us.

CHAPTER VL
I E stood side by side, my cousin and I, and
viewed the disaster with the gloomy, help
less ignorance of jurymen at a coroner's
inquest, and the mirage of tea that had risen before
our thirsty eyes a few moments before, sank into the
yellow sand in which wallowed our broken-winged
wagonette. The cocher made light of it. There was a black
smith quite close — en effet, a cousin of his own, and
a man of great intelligence, and all would be arranged
in a little quarter of an hour. My cousin with some
trouble disinterred the Waterbury — she was in the
habit of saying that she had no wish to display it as
jewellery, but it seemed to me she might have struck
a mean between a chatelaine or a wristlet, and a lair
so profoundly situated that I hesitated to ask her the
105

io6 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
hour unless I knew she was going to bed. It was
half-past six o'clock ; the blacksmith, however in
telligent, could, not come without being fetched, the
re-fixing of the wheel would take some time, getting
back to Pauillac would take some more, and the
evening was becoming chilly, as October evenings even
in the Mddoc have a knack of doing. Our driver
had by this time untackled the tired white horse, and
we were all pacing along toward nothing more
definite than the setting sun, while hunger and ill-
temper ran neck and neck in our bosoms. The road
stretched implacably on to the horizon, its yellow
reaches turning grey as the warmth slowly went out
of the sky ; the vintagers had all gone home to their
dinners, and there was nothing moving except the
topsails of a ship that glided spectrally along behind
the shoulder of a low hill on our left, and told us of
the nearness of the great river highway where the
steamers and sailing vessels were going on their way,
sublimely independent of such things as linch-pins or
table d'hote at Pauillac.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 107
Two stone pillars, a small clump of trees, and a
railed-in track connecting these, broke at length the
blue-green monotony of the vines ; and a low gate,
with a little black-pinafored girl sitting on it, seemed
to suggest a house somewhere near. It also suggested
a possibility of repose till such time as the carriage
should be repaired, and we stopped the cocher and
his flow of conversation to ask if there was a house
Id-bas. Perfectly, there was a house. Did he think
its proprietor would permit us to rest there till, etc.
etc. ? Perfectly, again ; in fact, the lady to whom it
belonged was yet another of his cousins, a person
altogether charming, Madame Suzanne Marcault, and
behold one of her children. The little girl was here
imported into the conversation, and after some inter
change of patois, we found ourselves following the
black pinafore up the narrow lane, to demand hospi
tality from Madame Marcault in the name of M.
Joseph Blossier.
It had become almost dark, and presently the last
of the light was lost under a thick trellis of vines;

io8 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
then our noses were smitten by a smell of almost
painful deliciousness, and our small guide, who had
demurely stepped along in front of us, suddenly ran
round the corner of a wall that half closed the end of
the lane, and we heard ourselves announced —
' Maman ! Via deux A nglaises ! '
We followed upon the heels of this introduction,
and found ourselves at the wide-open door of a
cottage kitchen, wherein a broad-backed peasant
woman was stacking logs on a blazing wood fire, and
was thereby stimulating a couple of cauldrons to
a state of bubbling perfumed ecstasy. This was
Madame Suzanne Marcault.
We decided afterwards that we had never met
any one with quite such good manners as Madame
Suzanne. Hers was one of the many cuisines de
vendanges, and we had stumbled in upon her at the
critical moment known to the Irish cook as ' dishing-
in the dinner,' but not for a second did she let us
realise how intensely inconvenient our visit must
have been. Her politeness was as sincere as the

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 109
smell of her potage, and the fulness of her sympathy
as we recounted our adventure was not in the least

daunted by the fact that my cousin alternately referred

no IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
to the wheel as the boue or the rue. Her heart was
so kind that she felt what we meant.
While we were still labouring with our story,
wheels were heard on the road, and a whip
exploded into a coruscation of crackings at the
door. 'Ah, Dieu ! Les voild. pour le diner I DepecJie-
toi, voyons I' A long row of quaint brown and
yellow earthen vessels was set out on a table along
one wall of the kitchen ; there must have been two or
three dozen of them, but in a few whirling minutes
our hostess and the little girl had not only filled them
with the savoury contents of the cauldrons, but had
somehow or other stacked them all in the gig that
had just driven up to the door.
' Nous n'avons pas du monde ce soir^ explained
Madame Suzanne, when she had ladled out the last
potful of soup, and had settled down into a sort of
steaming tranquillity. ' lis sont tons Id-bas, pres St.
Est^phe! ' They ' meant the vintagers to whom she
was temporary cook, and while the wheels, or rather

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. in
the wheel, of our chariot still tarried, we fell into
discourse with her about them.
' Le patron feeds them well, pardi', she said,
' Tiens, would ces dames like to taste the soupe de
vendange ? '
We tasted it, and it was perhaps the noble flavour
of that vintage soup that inspired the scheme that
simultaneously occurred to us both. Should we ask
this nice woman, with her Irish friendliness, and her
sympathetic comprehension of bad French, and her
excellent cookery, to put us up for the night ? We
discussed it hurriedly between scalding, inelegant
mouthfuls of soup, sopped bread, and tresses of
cabbage, interspersed with flatteries on its quality.
We wanted to see the MMoc au fond, — what more
than this could show us its nethermost profundities ?
If we had lived out a night in a Connemara cottage,
could we not stand one in a Yrzr^c^s. ferme ? So clean,
so convenient, so glowing with local colour. Was it
not almost a duty to accept such an opportunity ?
It is a useful thing to be pronounced eccentricities.

112 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
As we diffidently unfolded the suggestion to Suzanne,
she put her hands on her hips and smiled at us with
that smile of lenient amusement with which our
sojourn in the Medoc was making us familiar. It
was AxoW, pardi ! She had never before ha^dpension-
naires, but she had once been servant in a hotel, and
if we feared the long drive in the cold — this was how
we had put it — she would know how to make us
comfortable. Voyons I
Delightful creature ! so practical, so unconventional,
so Irish in fact, we said to each other, as we listened
to her explaining our scheme, with bursts of laughter,
to M. Joseph Blossier, who had come to tell us that
the carriage would be ready tout-d-theure. We had
left her to deal with him ; he required a more
masterful treatment than our French would rise to,
and it was with sincere thankfulness that we finally
saw him depart, with promises to return for us in the
morning with sundiy essentials enumerated in a note
to L6onie, o\xv femme de chambre.
We sat hungrily in a corner of the kitchen while

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 113
the little girl spread a surprisingly clean cloth on the
table, and Madame Suzanne stirred the ragout, and
delicately added to it some further finishings which
we trusted were not garlic. The yellowish walls and
the smoke-stained wooden ceiling took the firelight
with warm good fellowship ; the blue china-tiled stove,
hard-working aide-de-camp to the big open fireplace,
sent an upward glow from its red charcoal upon the
glittering array of pots and pans and glazed earthen
vessels upon the wall above it ; and round the open
door the vine leaves and bunches of grapes were
emphasised theatrically by the firelight, and the last
light of the evening and the whirring of the cigales
came strangely through them from without. The
master of the house was late, and feeling, no doubt,
like other hostesses, that the interval before dinner
required alleviation, Madame Suzanne offered to
show us over the rest of her house.
She began paradoxically by leading us out of it,
and then took her way round the corner of the house
under the grape trellis. She stopped at what was

114 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
apparently a coach-house door, and after some differ
ence of opinion between a large key and its keyhole,
pushed it open. A blast of cold air nearly extin
guished the flame of the little chimneyless lamp that
she carried, as we followed her into a lofty barn, with
giant barrels looming round its walls, and permeated
with the sour, unforgetable, indescribable smell of a
M6doc cuvier. This place was about forty feet long,
and at the end of it we dimly descried a ladder, with
a hand-rail, mounting to a door high up in the wall.
Towards this we incredulously followed our hostess,
and having stumbled up it after her, found ourselves
in a musty loft ; and then, saying something, whose
import we did not quite catch, about her eldest
daughter, Suzanne unlocked another door, and told
us that this was where we were to sleep. Our
courage receded to the toes of our boots ; were we to
share the room with that eldest daughter, or could it
be that we were to join in an even more general
family party ? It was a long bare room, with nothing
in it except a very large bed, swathed and canopied

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 115
all over with heavy brown draperies, a chair, and a
small table in the middle of the room, on which was
a toy piano, a manual of devotion, and a little mirror
made of something resembling tinfoil.
' It seems we need not have sent for our washing-
gear,' observed my cousin. ' I wish we were well out
of this.'
' It is a pretty bed, hein ? ' said the amiable Suzanne,
thumping the awful brown swaddlings of our couch.
' And you need fear nothing ; my husband and I
and la petite sleep in there.' She pointed to another
door. ' If you are ill, anything, you have but to
knock ' —
' And mademoiselle, votre file atnie ? ' we fal
tered. Ouf! We need not trouble ourselves about her.
It was but last week that she had had a fever in that
very bed — a fever scarcely worth mentioning ; but
she was now in Bordeaux for change of air : ' et
maintenant, mes demoiselles, descendons ! '
We did not dare to inquire further as to

ii6 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
Mademoiselle Marcault's fever, but we felt that it gave
the finishing touch of horror to those dusky draperies.
It was too late now, however, to' draw back, and, ex
pressing a lying satisfaction in all that we had seen, we
followed our hostess's devious course to the kitchen.
M. Marcault was there with another man, who, it was
explained, was a friend who had come to dine. Both
were dressed in blue linen blouses, and were of the
sharp-nosed, long-moustached type common in Medoc
and both rose and bowed solemnly as Madame
Suzanne introduced us,
' Deux demoiselles Irlandaisesl she explained, with
an up-and-down flourish of the lamp, in order that no
details of the appearance of the maniacs might be
lost, ' who are anxious to become acquainted with an
int&ieur paysan.' At this juncture we were far more
anxious that la nourriture paysanne should become
acquainted with our interior, but we made reply in
fitting terms, and beguiled the remaining interval
before dinner with political conversation. We always
found it advisable in France to announce our true

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 117
nationality as soon as convenient. We found our
selves at once on a different and more friendly
footing, and talk had a pleasant tendency to drift
into confidential calumny of our mutual neighbour,
perfidious Albion, and all things ran smoother and
more gaily. Dinner was ready at last, and we all
sat down very close to each other round the narrow
table. Suzanne fetched the soup and the ragout off"
the - stove, and helped us all out of the pot. Our
glasses were filled with excellent ordinaire, and we
began to think it was a charming party. The two
men were most agreeable and instructive, talking with
astonishing ease and well-bred self - possession on
any subject that was started, and giving us much
useful information on the subject of vines and vine-
growing. We were most careful to copy our hosts in all things.
We put salt in our soup with the blades of our knives ;
we absorbed the rich sauce of our delicious ragout with
pieces of bread, being indeed pressed to do so by M.
Marcault ; we cleaned our knives on rinds of leathery

II 8 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
crust ; in fact, we conformed, as we thought, admir
ably. Everything was going on velvet, when, after
the ragoilt, the smell of fried oil became apparent,
and from a covered-in pan Suzanne helped us each
to a large piece of something that resembled sweet
bread, and cut rather like a tough custard pudding.
It was fried bright brown, but the inside was yellowish
white, and the whole thing was swimming in hot oil.
We asked nervously what it was.
' Mais, manges le done' responded Suzanne, as she
reversed the frying-pan to let the last drops of oil
run on to our plates. ' C'est biang bong ! C'est du
c^pe — du champignong, vous savez,' seeing that we
did not seem much enlightened. Here was local
colour with a vengeance ! There rose before us in a
moment the brown, contorted visages of La Famille
Empoisonn^e among the mummies of St. Michel,
and the dusty bits of fungus that they still retained
in their jaws. The situation, however, did not admit
of retreat. And we attempted none. The mushroom,
or fungus, whatever it was, had a dreadful taste, as

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 119
though rotten leaves and a rusty knife had been fried
together in fat. Moreover, it was patent to the
meanest intelligence that, whatever its taste might be,
no digestion save that of a native or an ostrich could
hope to compete with it. We each swallowed two
lumps of it whole, and then my cousin looked wanly
at me and said, ' One more, and I shall be sick.'
It was hard and humiliating to explain that we
both disliked and feared this crowning treat of a
M^doc repast, but we did it ; and though we sank
in Suzanne's estimation, it was more in pity than in
anger that she removed the horror from before us,
and replaced it with a delicious compote of pears of
her own making. We spent an agreeable evening,
in conversation so instructive that we fear to repro
duce it here, mingled with confidences as to Suzanne's
winter clothes, and criticisms of the sketch I was
making oi la petite. Ten o'clock struck, and Madame
Suzanne gave a final tidying-up to her kitchen, and
then, opening the great chestnut wood wardrobe that
stood near the door, she selected from its layers of

I20 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
coarse brownish linen a pair of sheets, clammy with
damp and cleanliness, and led the way once more to
our barn.
It was a curious feeling when, after we had helped
our hostess to make our bed, and said our good-nights,
we found ourselves alone in the depths of peasant
France without so much as a toothbrush to remind
us of our connection with British efifeteness, while the
huge empty cuves in the barn beneath us roared and
sang like organ-pipes in the rising wind. Under
ordinary circumstances I do not think we should
have survived the dampness of those sheets, but they
were not given a fair chance. That night in the
Widow Joyce's cabin in Connemara was recalled to
us by many things, — things that, though small in
themselves, recurred with a persistence quite dispro-
portioned to their bulk, — and often, while the mosquitoes
piped their drinking-songs beneath the canopy, and
the fleas came steeplechasing from the boards to the
bed, and the candle burnt lower and lower, and the
slaughter waxed grimmer and greater, we said to each

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 123
other that the exercise would at least save us from
pleurisy or rheumatic fever.
It was somewhere during an interval of exhausted
sleep that we were aware of Suzanne standing at our
bedside and asking us in her strong voice if we would
like some coff'ee or some wine. We sleepily said No,
but perhaps, plus tard, when our things had come
from the hotel, some water. It seemed a very short
time before those things made their appearance, but
it is obviously impossible to wash one's self in a toy
piano — a fact which we explained as gently as possible
to la petite. She retired, and presently we heard a
heavy step on the cuvier ladder ; something was set
down outside, and, rising, we found a very large
garden watering-pot full of ice-cold water, and a very
small white basin, sitting side by side on our door
step. They were tedious, and the toy piano was
nearly washed away in the flood ; but they sufficed.

CHAPTER VII.
\\AIS ! vous etes fraiches 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 stiff
ness 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 dis
contented 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 coff'ee had been waiting for
us since seven o'clock and that it was now a quarter
124

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 125
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 break
fast 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 gentle
man 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 morn
ing'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 intro
duction that had been written about us, and what
untold discredit were we now about to heap on our

126 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 1' she cried, as I held- out a hand for her to
shake, ' il me faut vous donner une bise ! Ld ! et Id ! '
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

M. BLOSSIER, WITH HIS CIGARETTE, APPEARED AT THE DOORWAY.
127

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 129
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 discern
ible. 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 neigh
bourhood, and would finally have the honour of
escorting us to his own chateau, where, he hoped, we
would dine. The large commercial face of the hall
9

I30 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 accom
plishment, 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 THE VINE COUNTRY. 131
in his well-chosen Enghsh, 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 dejeuner at a rival Pauillac
hotel before going any farther. We did partake.

ONLOOKERS OF THE TRIUMPHAL DEPARTURE FROM PAUILLAC.
From oysters, served with hot sausages, to black
coff'ee and fruit, we went hand in hand with the
menu, and when we rose to go we felt serene and
equal to the occasion.

132 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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-a-manger, now
crowded for dejeuner. 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 contin
gency 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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 133
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 negociant en vins.
We left the carriage, and proceeded with all dignity

134 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 I ' 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 ifAfrique, 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 M^doc. 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 Mition

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 135
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 fore
ground. 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

136 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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

<i%

HER VOICE BROKE INTO A SHRIEK.

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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 137
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 in
digestion settled upon us as we whirled along the
hog-backed vineyard road to Chateau Lafite. It is
not only in wine that Mouton Rothschild is beaten

138 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
by its nearest neighbour. In the matter of a chateau,
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
chdteaux, 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 Roths
child 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 in
terested, 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
Chdteau Lafite imparted fact upon fact antiphon-
ally and seriously, without a shadow of distrust

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 139
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 humilia
tion to us.
Enfiladed thus by a cross-fire of what might be
called grape-shot, we progressed in fullest import
ance 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

140 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 fioor 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, eye-
browed sometimes, or bearded, with a fungus as
snowy and delicate as crepe 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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 141
according to its tribe and family, in a ' monotony of

ON EITHER SIDE THE TIERS OF BOTTLES LOOKED AT US OUT OF THEIR
PARTITIONS WITH COLD UNCOUNTABLE EYES.
enchanted pride,' as Ruskin has said about pine trees.

142 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 chateau, 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 con
versation. We shall never know what absurdities we said, or
what bitises we committed ; we can only feel satisfied

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 143
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
M^doc.

CHAPTER Vin.
T 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 d 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
144

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 14S
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 asseverat
ing 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 melan
choly number must now be added the Grand Hdtel
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 coff'ee, nor such a foaming jug of freshly
boiled milk. Leonie the chambermaid, Louis the
gargon, 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 afifectingly 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 10

146 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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

"l^'^j.

MY COUSIN ENDURED THE CLAMMY TOUCH OF ' BAMBOO ' UPON HER
FINGER WITH SCARCELY A SHUDDER.
little girl had given us a flaming bouquet of scarlet
geraniums and heliotrope ; two bunches of grapes

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 147
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

148 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 1 '
A thing that has made me circumspect in such
matters ever since.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 149
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

ISO IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
either to squander upon the waiter or to finish our
selves. 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
Intransigiant 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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 151
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

152 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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
M^doc. We were now in the St. Emilion district,
and without wishing to insult the Medoc, 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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 153
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 M^re Mem6, the oldest and the most
conscientious vendangeuse of the district.
' She is always the first at the end of the row,' we

154 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
were told, ' and she never leaves a bunch behind her,
and she has eighty-seven years ; n'est-ce pas, ma Mere?'

LA m6RE M^ME — ALWAYS FIRST AT THE END OF HER ROW.

M^re M^m^ 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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 155
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.

A SKETCH WAS MADE OF HER AS SPEEDILY AS MIGHT BE.
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

156 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 ragout, 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 VINE COUNTRY. 157
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 con
versation, and they returned to sit lamentably upon
the shelf, with all the other agreeable but untrans
latable 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

158 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 indiffer
ence to the charms of general society in the barn.
M^re M^m4 at the end of the long table, with the
lamplight deepening her wrinkles into trenches, and

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 159
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.

CHAPTER IX.

\ ^ T was market day at Li
bourne. We were aware
of that from a very
early hour of the
morning, as the
complaining utter-
^^%^r-^ ances of every class
of rickety waggon
and ungreased
wheel were
wafted in at the
windows of our
hotel, blended
with the solid, carpet-like whacking of donkeys' backs,
and the screams of their drivers, all ladies of advanced
age and leathern lung power. Monsieur and Madame
160

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. i6i
A. called for us at nine, and before setting forth on
the legitimate expedition allotted to the day, we
drove round the market square.
A helpless depression comes over us at the thought
of attempting to describe a foreign market-place. It

MARKET PLACE, LIBOURNE.
has been so often done, and from such an exhaustive
number of points of view, that there seems nothing in
the least original left to be said. I do not suppose
that any account of journeyings in France is really
perfect without a semi-humorous description of an
11

1 62 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
old woman under a great blue or a great red umbrella.
It should be dashed with a pathetic brilliancy, and
there should, as a rule, be something smouldering
and suggestive of ancient coquetry about the eyes of
the old woman. We both felt this, and my cousin
ran about feverishly, snapping off" Kodak plates in
the most extravagant way, but failing to find quite
the old lady we wanted.
Another disappointment was the peasant straw hat
upon which she had set her heart, such a hat as
I had bought in Brittany — conical, broad-brimmed,
many-coloured. We shouldered round the sunny,
noisy square, finding everything imaginable for sale
except straw hats ; finally we left the open-air
merchants, and in a bonnet shop, whose only claim
to romance was. its position in the arcades that — like
the 'Rows' at Chester — surrounded the square, she
bought for twenty sous a hat that might easily have
been worn in Bond Street.
We were to be shown St. Emilion this delicious
mid-June day, — by the calendar it was about the

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 163
8th or 9th of October, but it was evident that there

MY COUSIN RAN ABOUT FEVERISHLY, SNAPPING OFF KODAK PLATES IN
THE MOST EXTRAVAGANT WAY.

was a mistake somewhere, — and the drive to that

1 64 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
small but remarkable town was one of most brilliant
and fragrant pleasantness. We were mounting up
out of the levels about Libourne, rising higher and
higher into the bright morning, till we could see some
of the silver coils of the Dordogne beginning to
reveal themselves, and red-roofed villages broke
through the vines on the slopes below us, giving
unexpected suggestions of Arcadia.
Presently above the coachman's hat a yellow
crocketed spire thrust itself into the blue of the sky ;
there came crowding after it towers and roofs, and
finally a tall crumbling wall, standing quite alone
outside old fortifications, with nothing but the Gothic
window-openings left to show that it had once been
part of a great church. We drove in through a
towered gateway, and over the cobble-stones dear
to the writers of mediaeval romance and the makers
of carriage springs, and, squeezing our way along a
street narrow enough to allow us to shake hands
simultaneously with the occupants of the houses on
both sides, we pulled up at the opening of a street

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 165
too steep for a carriage. Down this we went on foot,
reminded a good deal of Clovelly, and yet glad that
it was not Clovelly, but a walled town in the heart of
the vineyard country, with a saint and a shrine, and
a history as gorgeous as an illuminated missal. Level
ground was granted at. last to our aching knees, a
little plateau where was a shading chestnut tree, a
railing, and behind these the unassuming front of an
inn, — the Hotel Dussaut, if our memories are correct,
— with its doors opening straight in upon a room
where a cleanly-laid table glimmered in the cool
obscurity. As we stood under the chestnut tree a sound as of
the beating of eggs rose to us presently from a flagged
yard about fifteen feet below our plateau, and, look
ing over the edge, we had an excellent bird's-eye view
of two young ladies engaged respectively in beating
a yellow compound with a fork, and in shaking
some other yellow compound in a frying-pan over a
charcoal fire. One of them wore pince-nez, both had
early Florentine shocks of hair, and a general appear-

i66 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
ance of such aesthetic culture that we refused at first
to believe that they were preparing our dejeuner ;
and when later we seated ourselves at the table
within the French window, and received from the
hands of the wearer of the pince-nez the delicious
omelette that had been cooked in the open air, we

THE .ESTHETIC DAUGHTER OF THE HOTEL.
felt embarrassed by a sense of the favour conferred.
Our hostesses must, we fear, have been taken at a
slight disadvantage by us ; we felt rather than saw
some want of completeness in their attire during the
first stages of dejeuner, — a bareness as to neck, a

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 167
skimpiness as to skirt ; but as the meal progressed, so
did the toilettes. By the time that we had finished
our dish of smelts, with their wonderful wood-sorrel
sauce, the wearer of the pince-nez was glowing in a
scarlet smocked silk jersey; and when the roast chicken
was placed on the table, her sister had endued a
flowing skirt, and wreathed her throat with some ten
or twelve yards of amber beads. We could not swear
that the pince-nez themselves had been changed,
but certainly it was only when dessert was arrived at
that we noticed for the first time that they were gold-
rimmed, and were attached by a slim gold chain to a
brooch of barbaric splendour.
It was a dessert greatly to be remembered that we
had at the Hotel Dussaut : the monster pears and
grapes, the rich velvety wine of the district, and
finally, the speciality of the town, ordered expressly
for us by Monsieur A., the macaroons made at the
convent according to an ancient recipe known- to
the nuns. Certainly the ecclesiastical macaroon tran
scends the secular variety ; these come in warm and-

1 68 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
palpitating, still cleaving to the white square of paper
on which they had been baked, looking like lumps of
yellow foam at the foot of a waterfall, melting in the
mouth as foam itself might melt, and suggesting the
idea that the conventual life has its alleviations.
A small salon opened out of the little verandah
room in which our lunch was served, a sitting-room
replete with photograph frames, crochet antimacassars,
oil paintings, and green velvet furniture, and blocked
in one corner by the altogether astonishing circum
stances of a bed, whose sumptuous draperies suggested
the proscenium of a puppet show. The window
looked down into a precipitous street at the back of
the hotel, and, craning out, the pointed arch of an old
gateway was visible at the top of the hill between the
crooked lines of houses, the Porte de la Cadene, so a
little old-fashioned guide-book to St. Emilion informed
us. There was a long explanation of the name, from
which we gathered that it had something to say to
the bar that once fastened the gate, but what exactly
it was not given to our poor intelligence to discover.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 169
Whenever the guide-book felt that it was becoming
unbefittingly lucid, it threw in a few words of patois,
or early French in inverted commas, and went full
speed ahead again, secure from pursuit. The photo
graphs that thronged the room, like Ruskin's pine
trees elsewhere referred to, 'on barren heights and
inaccessible ledges, in quiet multitudes,' proved a
more attractive study than the guide-book, and we
travelled slowly round the collection till we came
upon a cabinet-sized head of a young lady with
disordered hair, pince-nez, a swan -like length of
throat, and an evening dress of which only a single
row of Valenciennes trimming showed above the
lower edge of the photograph. We sat down before
it with a gasp, as we recognised in this ethereal
being one of our late cooks, and at the same instant
Madame A. made the discovery of a dwarf easel on
the floor at the foot of the bed, on which a still larger
portrait of a lady, in the dress of a Russian princess,
with an inscription to the effect that she was Madame
Dussaut herself, owner of the hotel, and mother of

170 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
the two peeresses who had served for us our admir
able dejeuner. We retired after this, and said that it
would be better to go away and see the town before
we found out that these people were closely related
to the Bourbons, which seemed the next thing to
expect. The streets had the noonday heat and silence about
them when we emerged from beneath the chestnut
tree, and went downhill to where a lofty yellow cliff
towered sheer in the hollow of the town, carrying on
its crest the crocketed spire that we had seen lifting
its long throat above its retainers like a serene high
ness, as we drove through the vineyards to St. Emilion.
Low down on the cliff, below the reach of the swing
ing arms of a huge old fig tree that had rooted itself
on the verge of the yellow rock, were carvings like
the fa5ade of a church, and finally a door disclosed
itself, through which we plunged after our guides,
much as we had plunged into the private cellar of
the Rothschilds. We were in the famous monolith
church, hewn and dug in the living cliff" by monks.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 171
headed by the industrious St. Emilion, in the eighth
century, and going down a few steps to the level of
the floor, we looked about us in the extremely
moderate light that came through sloping shafts in
the thickness of the cliffs sixty feet above. The fig
tree roots had burrowed through the cliff", and hung
in loops and knots from the roof, intersecting the
cold and dusty streaks of light, and the flicker of
a sun-lit green spray at the mouth of one of the
shafts gave the solitary touch of colour to the sombre
vault. It was a bare, immense place, with two rows
of square pillars of solid rock supporting the arched
roof, black with age, empty of everything save a stone
altar or two, and a few tombs, dead silent, and
abounding in dark hiding-places for rats and bats.
' All this makes you experience I know not what
sentiment of religious terror,' exclaims the guide
book at this juncture, in discreet rhapsody, having
cantered through a page of architectural French,
that had almost resulted in a case of ' Bellows to
mend ' for the owner of that admirable dictionary.

172 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
Our sentiments were far from religious after a tour
of that church, during which we had seen some
hundreds of names, addresses, ages, birthdays, en
gagements, and other data inscribed in the soft stone
by tourists. Only those who have seen the corona
tion chair in Westminster Abbey gashed with vile
initials, could believe the ravages of vulgarity at St.
Emilion. The pillars arid tombs were fully garnished
with these hall marks of the barbarian. That was
only to be expected, as even the bones in the tombs
had been carried away bit by bit as agreeable souvenirs,
but one would have imagined that the altar might
have been spared. It was here, however, and on the
old bas-relief above the altar, that a gentleman
called Merritt had achieved his deadliest triumphs ;
we tracked him subsequently through the grotto of
St. Emilion and the monastery cloisters, but this was
his highest effort, and probably the one that he
recounts with most pride to his envious acquaintances.
May the milkman and butcher's boy scribble his
name upon the imitation granite of his suburban

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 173
door-posts, and may it be wiped out from the will of
his father-in-law !
We went on into a sort of annexe of the church,
into which they used to shoot people through
oubliittes when they became superfluous, and thence
we scrambled out into the street again, and across
to the grotto of St. Emilion. Apparently the saint
had not been able to find anything above ground
that combined privacy with excruciating discomfort,
and accordingly scratched out this rabbit hole a
dozen feet below the rest of the community, and
lived there in damp and darkness for twenty or
thirty years. His furniture was limited. The light
of a match showed a bed cut in the wall, with a
bolster of the same sympathetic description, a stone
block for a table, another for a chair, and a holy
well in an alcove. The old woman who had charge
of the grotto struck another match, and held it low
in the alcove of the sacred well for us to see the
dark gleam of the water. It was more like a
shallow pool than a well, and the water lay still

174 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
and perfectly transparent upon its yellow bed. Its
ancient nymph scooped up a tumblerful with the
assurance that it was the best in the world, and
when we had satisfactorily tasted it, she lowered
her match and said archly, ' Et les epingles. Re-
gardcz les epingles, mesdemoiselles!
We regarded as desired, and saw lying at the
bottom of the pool a small collection of pins, some
old and rusty enough to have fastened up St.
Emilion's gown on wet days, others new and
glittering. These, it was explained by the old lady
wiih many knowing side-glances at our companions,
were a means of fortune - telling peculiar to the
sacred well. Gentlemen and ladies who visited it
were accustomed to drop two pins into it, and if
these fell so as to form a cross, then the thrower
would be married before the year was out; this
was asseverated with chapter and verse, and the
testimony of brides and bridegrooms who had re
turned there on their honeymoons. I searched
silently and secretly in my inner economy for a

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 175
pin ; so, I perceived, did my cousin, but apparently

'ET LES EPINGLES, MESDEMOISELLES.'
without better success than I. The chief props of
a declining costume could not be sacrificed to super-

176 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
stition, and our fortunes remain undivined to this
day. There was more, much more, to be seen in St.
Emilion, and we saw some of it. We trust it may
yet be given to us to stay for a clear three days at
the hotel of the Russian princess, and to dawdle in
a trance of idleness up and down the little streets,
unharassed by time, or letter-writing, or newspapers.
As it was, we went slowly and gradually round the
beautiful ruins of a monastery in the upper part of
the town, where the beeches and ashes grew freely
in the nave and side aisles, and spread what shelter
they could over the defenceless shafts and columns.
The remembrance of those still cloisters, with their
leafy sunlight fiickering year after year on the worn
fiags and the gentle invasions of the grass, is
pleasant in the mind — a possession chief among
many gains of that very white day at St. Emilion.
The bell-foundry working leisurely in the blackened
shell of what had been another monastery was an
episode in perfect keeping with the general religious

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 177
calm of the town ; so was the Pilgrim's-Progress
kind of landscape that we viewed from a corner of
the fortifications — a delectable land, lying wide and
rich in the hot afternoon haze. Indeed, had it not
been that in a quiet back street we came upon a
group of old women who sat knitting at their vine-
hung doors, and discussed with shrill and personal
directness the intentions of one of the party with
regard to her will, we might have thought it was
' within in in heaven we were,' as an Irishman said,
with an intensifying wealth of prepositions, in de
scribing a whisky tent.

12

CHAPTER X.

.0.
^\~ 7 T happened to one of
us — no matter which
— in early youth to
have a governess who
hailed from the parts
about Bordeaux. She
was a small rigid lady,
with a cast-iron black
silk skirt, and an en
vironing squint that
extended her jurisdic
tion round illimitable
corners, and up and
down stairs at the

same time. So, at least, her pupils felt, as they
178

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 179
trembled in the glare of that erratic green-brown eye,
and quavered the regulation early French to one
another, even in the fastnesses of their own rooms.
Mademoiselle still holds sway among certain outly
ing members of our family, and on the eve of our
departure for France there came a note in the
well-known hand, suggestive of nothing so much as
a paper of pins, in which she begged us, if our
travels took us near St. B., to present the enclosed
introduction at the country-house of Monsieur de
Q., whose little daughters had been among ' les plus
gentilles de ses eleves.'
We were not near St. B., unless an hour by train
can be called near, and our last afternoon in varied
French society had not persuaded us that we were
likely to shine in that sphere, but the habit of early
years of subjection was too strong for us. We
posted the letter of introduction, and when the
answer came that Madame de Q. would hope to
meet us at the station of St. B. at three o'clock on
the day following our visit to St. Emilion, we said

i8o IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
' Kismet,' and tried to shake the ChMeau Lafite
dust from our Sunday hats. The journey to St. B.
was hot and uneventful, and we spent the time it
occupied mainly in the futile amusement of finding
out in Bellows' Dictionary words that fate was
never destined to bring us into contact with.
Outside the St. B. station we were accosted by one
of those nondescript, smug, red-faced servants who
are met with only in France, and were conducted by
him towards a green alley of plane trees, in whose
shade was standing a landau with one somnolent
black horse in the shafts. A tall lady advanced to
meet us, hook-nosed and handsome, dressed with
awe-inspiring smartness, and with a chill perfection
of manner that awoke in us a simultaneous longing
to run away. She neither spoke nor understood
English, so she gave us to understand at once ; and
another point about which she did not long leave
us in doubt was that she would have ' scorned the
haction.' Moreover, the monstrous hearse-horse had
not shambled more than a mile or so, at a trot that

THE COCHER.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 183
was with difficulty maintained by adjurations and
whip-crackings from the coachman, before we began
to make the further discovery that we had already
bored our hostess almost to tears. We cannot be
surprised at it ; the penetrating regret that we had
ever started on the expedition would have paralysed
our powers even of English conversation, and Ollen-
dorfFs earliest exercise is a thrilling romance when
compared with the remarks that we churned ardu
ously forth for Madame de Q.'s benefit.
It is true that she gave us no assistance. She
leaned back and answered our questions without an
effort either to appear less ennuyee than she was, or
to amplify her replies, while her eyes strayed from
time to time to the novel that lay on the seat beside
her — 'Les Confessions de some one or other. Par
la Comtesse Dash,' or some very similar title. She
would not even discuss Mademoiselle, whom we
played as our trump-card early in the game ; in
fact, she had never even seen her. Mademoiselle
had been the governess of her stepdaughters, and

i84 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
had left before Madame's marriage with Monsieur
de Q. The old landau rumbled slowly on, up and
down hill, with the interminable vineyards on either
hand, and occasional hamlets with houses crowded
close to the white dusty road. At one of these,
brightly-coloured electioneering posters of some local
hero seemed to offer something to talk about.
'Nous avons a Londres' said my cousin very
slowly and distinctly, breaking what had been a
long and nerve - trying silence, ' tant de ces — a —
postiches! ' Pardon ? ' said Madame, with a certain languid
interest ; 'je ne vous ai pas compris, mademoiselle.'
' Oh, sur des murs, vous savez,' said my cousin,
wavering a little ; ' des postiches, comme cela', — she
indicated another orange-coloured placard.
'Ah!' Madame smiled very faintly. ' Des affiches,
peut-itre ? '
Then it occurred to us that a postichc was a name
for a small pad for the hair, and humiliation almost
overbore our usual feeble necessity of laughter.

'NOUS AVONS A LONDRES TANT DE CES— A— POSTICHES.'

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 187
After this reverse we relinquished the unequal
contest, and fell into a silence, dappled only by
occasional topographical inquiries, until, as we
turned in at a gateway, Madame de Q. roused her
self sufficiently to tell us that we had arrived at her
husband's house. We drove through the wide old-
fashioned yard, surrounded by ivy -covered brick
buildings, and round a gravel sweep to the front
of an imposing white stone house. The coach
man ceased from his admonishments at a flight
of stone steps, the black horse discontinued his
advance, and we dismounted with the feeling
that whatever might be before us, it could not be
worse than what we had just gone through. The
steps led up to a long stone-paved verandah, with
handsome white columns supporting it, giving it a
certain air of classic distinction ; pots of bright
scarlet geraniums were ranged along the balustrade,
and there was a group of chairs and a small table
at one end of the verandah. From these, as we
ascended the steps, two gentlemen rose and came

i88 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
forward to meet us. One, a short stout man, un
expectedly attired in a Norfolk jacket and leather
gaiters, with a blind eye, and a strong resemblance
to the late John Bright, was introduced to us by
Madame de Q. as ' Mon mari;' and the other, a
spotty young man in a high-crowned straw hat,
clicked his heels together, and made a low bow,
while we were informed that he was Madame's
cousin, M. le Vicomte de R. John Bright apologised
for the temporary absence of his daughters, and then
we sat down and began to talk seriously with him
about vines and their culture, while Madame and
her cousin discussed in rapid undertones, and with
suppressed amusement, some topic that our self-
consciousness told us was not unconnected with
ourselves. A little apart, and turned away from the table,
there stood a thing that looked like a cross between
a sentry-box and a sedan-chair ; it was made of
basket-work, and as we prosed sapiently with Monsieur
de Q. of the rival merits of the Malbec, Merlot, and

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 189
Cabernet - Sauvignan grapes, we were aware of a
curious agitation on its part. It was a little behind
us, and the creaking of the wicker-work made us
look round quickly — just in time to see, to our
amazement, a small round female spring out of the
chair and run nimbly through a long glass door
into the drawing - room, followed by a waddling,
wheezing ball of yellow fur which had been lurking
with her in the recesses of the sentry-box.
Monsieur de Q. betrayed no surprise. ' My sister,'
he said explanatorily, and then he added in English,
' She is vair shy.'
Madame and her Vicomte took no notice of the
episode, and we were addressing ourselves again to
our discourse on grapes — the only subject on which
Monsieur de Q. seemed to care to talk — when a jing
ling of glasses was heard, and the red-faced servant
appeared, bearing a large tray, which he put down
on the table. At the same moment a sort of dog
cart drove up, and two young ladies jumped out of
it, without waiting for the servant, who hurried down

I go IN THE VINE COUNTRY,
to proffer his help. Madame's brow had contracted
beneath her admirably curled and netted fringe, and
we at once knew that we were about to meet les plus
gentilles of the pupils of Mademoiselle.
It is superfluous to give our preconceived ideas of
these young ladies, unless, indeed, for the sake of
saying that they reversed them all. They were
dressed in shirts and short skirts and jackets, and
wore thick boots and sailor hats, and their manner
had a cheerful unconcern and want of stiffness that
was as reassuring to us as it was evidently detestable
to their stepmother. One of them addressed herself
promptly to the table, whereon was the tray with
tumblers, two carafes of cold water, a sugar-basin,
and a tall bottle of what we afterwards found to be
rum. The other sat down in the chair vacated by
her father, and began to talk to us in broken English,
that was so immeasurably bad that my cousin, partly
from politeness, partly from some theory of making
herself understood, began to answer her in as near
an imitation of the same lingo as she could arrive at.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 191
speaking loudly and very slowly, and using, as far
as possible, words of no more than three letters. In
the meantime I watched the movements of the other
sister with a fascinated horror. She first put two
lumps of sugar in each glass, then about two tea-
spoonfuls of rum, and then the tumblers were filled
with water, and were handed round, along, with
biscuits, to the company. Through the glass doors
into the drawing-room I could see the aunt, waiting,
apparently, in hopes that her share would be brought
to her ; but as this did not occur, she presently crept
back, and, with a flying bow to the party, immured
herself again in her sedan-chair, with a heavily-
sugared tumbler of the same dreadful eau sucree au
rhum with which my cousin and I were toying. The
sugar rose through the pale liquid in oily curls ; the
sickly smelj of the rum 'curdled under our noses,' as
a Cork carman said, in affected reprobation of a glass
of whisky. It was as disagreeable a drink as I have
ever had to undertake for convivial purposes, not
even excepting moi\t or 'fresh' poteen; and as we

192 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
slowly sipped our way towards the two half-melted
lumps in the bottom of the tumbler, not even the
vanille biscuits could reconcile us to this too-con
centrated nectar. But release from the necessity of
drinking came unexpectedly. The yellow dog had
returned with his mistress, and, finding the seclusion
of the sentry-box unremunerative, he went round
from chair to chair, staring at the biscuits of the
revellers with filmy, greedy eyes, and when he came
to me, rearing up on his hind legs and clawing
importunately at my dress. I fed him, being weak-
minded in such matters, and then I tried to pat
his head. He immediately gave a shrill yelp and
snapped at my hand, and, in the uncontrollable jump
with which I saved my fingers, the remainder of the
rum and water was spilled over my last clean skirt.
A chorus of horror arose. The pallid face and
weak saucer eyes of the timid aunt appeared furtively
round the straw rim of the chair, and she murmured,
' Mees ! Mees ! ' in tones of faint reproof (I had
forgotten to say that as the dog was supposed to be

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 193
an ¦ English terrier, he was called ' Miss,' a generic
term in France for the British dog, irrespective of
size or sex.) Madame de Q. and the spotty cousin
offered polite condolences; Monsieur de Q. aimed
some opprobrious epithets at the offender instead
of the kick that he so richly deserved ; and Mdlle.
Hortense in an instant whirled me out of my chair,
through the drawing-room, and into a bedroom, there
to take off my own skirt and endue one of hers, while
mine was sent to the kitchen to be washed and dried.
It took a fair amount of philosophic calm to walk
back to the verandah in a full white calico skirt some
four inches too short for me, and it was a relief to
find that a number of fresh visitors had arrived, and
-that my entrance was consequently unobserved.
Almost immediately afterwards, it was suggested
that we should be taken to see the park, and I
crouched down the verandah behind the crowd,
trying to decrease my height by those uncom
promising four inches, and painfully conscious that
all the gentlemen of the party had remained behind, 13

194 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
and were watching our exit with some interest.
' Now ces messieurs are content,' said Mdlle. Rosalie,
dropping behind to talk to me. ' They will be able
to talk of nothing but the vintage till we return —
ga m'agace I '
We crossed the yard, and went on past the in
evitable cuvier, through a garden full of all-coloured
dahlias and wall-fruit, and under the arch of a gate
way into a wide shrubbery with elm and chestnut
trees shading close-shorn expanses of grass, and a
serpentine piece of water, on the farther side of
which the largest meadow that we had seen in the
much-cultivated Medoc stretched away to a pine
wood. 'In winter they chase the woodcock there,' re
marked Mdlle. Rosalie.
' We chase him also in Ireland,' we said, ' but he is
a difficult bird to catch.'
It then transpired that our hostesses were sports
women, and had shot almost every bird that there
was to be shot in their district, from sparrows to

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 195
quails. ' Nous chassons de race! they said ; ' our
grandmother was a noted shot in her day.'
We felt an incongruity about a French grandmother
being bon tireur that was probably derived from a con
fused belief that the period of grandmothers in France
was coincident with the costumes on a Watteau fan ;
but the descendants of this sporting lady assured us
that it had been, and was, quite comme il faut in the
Medoc for ladies to shoot, and they further imparted
to us in confidence that their stepmother disapproved
deeply of their sporting proclivities — a fact that did
not take us by surprise. They were altogether
a revelation, these Mdlles. de Q., with English
manners and tastes, and even clothes, while Great
Britain's language and literature were a sealed book
to them, except for a few absurd phrases they had
picked up at their convent school at Lyons from a
'demoiselle dcossaise, je crois, qui s'appelait Haut-
Brion! We wondered why a Scotch young lady
should have been named after one of the classified
clarets, and it was only in subsequent conversa-

196 JN THE VINE COUNTRY.
tion that it transpired that the demoiselle lived in
Dublin and was called O'Brien.
As we wandered back through the beautifully
laid-out grounds, with such tropical plants as are
usually associated with Kew Gardens meeting us on
every hand, we heard how our hostesses loved riding,
and hoped to get an amazone made by an English tailor,
and inquiry elucidated the fact that the amazones in
which they rode at present were made with long full
skirts, and were generally as absurd as their name.
The party of men whom we had left in the ver
andah were still seated there when we returned.
Monsieur de Q. looking more than ever like John
Bright as he held forth in eloquent periods on the
treatment of influenza, which, it appeared, was rag
ing among his vintagers. Madame de Q. had not
accompanied the walking expedition, and had retired,
so her husband informed us, with a bad headache,
the result of driving in the sun. We guiltily
murmured condolences, but as a few minutes later
we all sat down round the polished oak table in the

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 197
dining-room, it appeared to us that the party seemed
in no way to suffer from the absence of its hostess.
Tea was served in a rather peculiar manner. Empty
teacups were placed in front of the guests ; one sister
went round with the teapot, -and the other followed
with liqueurs and cold boiled milk, while a variety of
little cakes and piled-up dishes of fruit circulated in
her wake. The tea was hot and bitter with strength ;
the certain prospect of indigestion depressed us, and
unfitted us to cope with the not unreasonable curiosity
of the other visitors as to us and our, to them,
astonishing mission in the Mddoc. We felt that our
vocabulary was being tried rather too high, and on
the whole we were glad that we had to catch a train
back to Libourne at six, and had to decline the
hospitable invitation of the daughters of the house
to stay to dinner.
While the carriage was coming round, I made
haste to change into my own skirt. I have no bump
of locality for the interior of strange houses, and when
I had left the room in which the change was effected.

198 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
I found myself confronted by three doors all equally
likely to lead into the hall. I selected the most
likely one, and rashly advanced. It was the boudoir
of Madame, — Madame who had retired with a
bad headache, and was now seated over a bright
wood fire, with her yellow-covered book of ' Con
fessions ' in her hand, and a cigarette between her
lips. Sympathy for her, thus cornered in her last
stronghold, was my first emotion as I fled, but
sympathy for myself has been a more lasting feeling
as I think how I have established myself in the mind
of Madame de Q. as a crowning example of the
gaucherie and stupidity of Les Anglais pour rire.

CHAPTER XL
AMILIAR ground, but with what a differ
ence ! While the early train from Libourne
neared the Bastide Station at Bordeaux, we
sat serene and languid in our carriage, reading Lon
don 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. 109

200 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 Medoc,
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 inexor
able Blossier had driven us, — -Blossier, who now would
lick the dust before us could our cortege 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.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 201
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 chdteau 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

202 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 Chateau 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 hospi
talities. 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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 203
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 chdteau 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 in
spiriting 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 every
thing, and the creamy oxen stepping slowly and
imperturbably through it all, with their seventeen
hands of height shrouded in grey draperies to pre
serve them from the flies, sentient apparently of
nothing except the driver's voice and the guiding

204 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 mediaeval warhorse are

— f hi'J.'H^tNC l^J^

FIN DE VENDANGE.

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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 205
days of oxen are said to be numbered in the Medoc,
they still pace in couples from vineyard to cuvier,
setting their hoofs down together with the grave
accuracy of a minuet, neither slackening nor strain
ing, 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
Medoc peasant, unless it be a Galway beggar, or a
Skibbereen fishwoman before the Bench. The next
piece of information seemed, from previous observa
tion, 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.

2o6 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 ven
dangeuses ; 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 un
erring 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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 207
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 metaUic 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

2o8 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 time, while be
hind 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 bou
quets 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. 1 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 respect
ful admiration. The fiddle and flute struck up again,

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 209
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^« 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 Chateau 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 intelhgent interest of
the tourist this splash of local colour that good luck
14

zio IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 in
credible 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 M6doc, ' hand-

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 211
some 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-d-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

212 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
her white dress, she floundered, hopped, and jigged
through the meUe, time was not given to me to
determine. A blue-clad figure wqj already bowing

' HE WANTS YOU TO DANCE WITH HIM, AND YOU WILL HAVE TO DO IT ;
IT IS THE CUSTOM OF THE VINTAGE.'
in front of me, and, as two warm, ungloved hands
took mine, the only balm left in Gilead was the

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 213
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 dibut in the contre-danse at
Chdteau Loudenne was somewhat of a failure. Sorry

214 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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 Mddoc 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 enter-

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 215
ing 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

2i6 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
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

THE LITTLE FIGURES FLEW IN DARTING CIRCLES, LIKE FLIES IN A POOL.
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

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 217
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 chdteau
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 Medoc had been expressed in
them as intoxicatingly as in its wine.

CHAPTER XII.

HE lamps were all lighted on the long

bridge over the Garonne ; the lights quivered and
218

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 219
lengthened in the sleek broad ripples; other lights
twinkled on the masts and in the rigging of the
half-seen shipping, and but for the trams and the
traffic all things were as they had been at our
midnight arrival in Bordeaux. It was only 6.30
o'clock, but autumn was catching up to us even
in the Mddoc, robbing us daily of more and more
light, and blunting our regret for a portmanteauful
of soiled white skirts by impressing the melancholy
fact that this year we should have no further need
of them. We had said good-bye to the Medoc and
its kind people, and our faces were turned for the
bleak North.
There were four large dark hours to be disposed of
before the departure of the Paris train, and, as we
stood in the blue electric glare of the station, the
question of what we were going to do with ourselves
rose solemnly and awfully before us. Shopping in
the dark was intolerable, even if we had known one
shop from another, and there had been anything we
wanted to buy ; the conventional resource of going

220 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
to see a church was obviously out of the question ;
the rather unconventional one of going to see 'La
Fetnme d Papa' at the big colonnaded theatre was
tempting, but would either impose in the future an
exhausting burden of secrecy upon us, or would
finally overthrow whatever confidence our relations
might still retain in our discretion. There remained
dinner as an occupation, and, leaving the arid bril
liance of the station, we prowled forth along the
quays in search of a suitable restaurant. We were
ready to endure much for the sake of interest or pic
turesqueness, but there is neither one nor the other
to be found in a room with a sawdusted floor, a block
tin bar, and a contiguous billiard-table ; and these
features discounted successively the charms of the
restaurants of ' The Antilles,' ' The Brazil,' ' The Spain
and Portugal,' the ' H6tel a la Renomm^e de I'Ome-
lette,' and the ' Cafe au Bon Diable,' outside all of
whose flaring windows we paused and surveyed with
exceeding disfavour the company within.
We reached again the long bridge, with the trams

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 221
going to and fro upon it like fireflies, and with the
power of fulfilling it came the desire for respectable
comfort at the Hotel de Bayonne, where we had
lunched with the A.'s on our way to Loudenne. We
stopped, a tram and confided our wi.shes to the con
ductor. His tram did not go there, but we could
' correspond ; ' it would be quite simple — The end
of the explanation was lost in the jerk with which
we were hoisted on to the step, and in the blatant
braying of the driver's signal-horn as the tram
plunged forward again. We began our journey by
standing in a throng on the platform of the tram,
and though a light rain had begun, the samples of
the atmosphere of the interior that from time to time
were wafted to us prevented us from being specially
grateful when two gorgeous red-and-blue soldiers
pohtely gave us their seats. After ten or fifteen
minutes, however, there was no lack of room ; the
tram, having taken its way through promising
thoroughfares, shook itself free of all passengers
saving ourselves, and headed for the open country at

222 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
a round pace. Before the conductor permitted us
to part from him it seemed to us that we might have
corresponded not only with every other line in
Bordeaux, but with our relatives in Galway as well ;
and when, somewhere in a dark and silent suburb,
we changed to the rival tram, there was a further
half-hour before we sank exhausted on our chairs in
the Hdtel de Bayonne.
The advantages of an introduction were shown in
the effusion of the proprietor's greeting, and under
the ministrations of Alphonse, the head waiter, we
revived. We were late for the ordinary dinner, and
for some time the clean, electric-lighted dining-room
had us for its only occupants, as we sat in a trance
of repose and quietness, while Alphonse, with his
decorous hooked nose and clerical black whiskers,
gave us his serious and undivided attention. It was
not until after the delicious omelette au rhum had
come in, in its winding-sheet of spectral blue flame,
that a party entered and took possession of a table
near us. From the unhurried way in which they

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 225
came in and seated themselves it was easy to guess
that to dine was the only amusement they proposed
to themselves for the evening, and as we drank our
coffee and watched their dinner through its stately
and solid progress, we began to think that there are
few greater fallacies than the general belief that the
French middle-classes are small eaters as compared
with the English. That the shopkeeper-like man
and the fuzzy-headed woman were the givers of the
feast, and the parents of the frightful and gluttonous
child, was apparent from their disparaging criticisms
of the soup and their indulgence of their offspring,
but it was necessary for the guest to endure from
the child a kiss that, as some one says, was also a
baptism, for us to feel that she was no relation to it,
unless one of the very poorest kind. The whole
party, as it went steadily through their menu of ten
courses, without omitting the nethermost leek in the
salad, opened our eyes, as we have said, to the
staying qualities of the French appetite, and it was
privileged to demonstrate for us that the mysterious 15

226 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
little tumblers of water and peppermint that had been
brought in with our finger-glasses were for the fell
purpose of rinsing out the mouth before proceeding to
coffee and liqueurs. It was a solace to us during our
long wait at the hotel ; and monsieur's dexterity with
the macaroni cheese and his knife, and madame's
gesticulations with a bitten peach, were each in their
way agreeable and instructive.
The dame seide is an unusual feature in French
travelling, especially at night, and it seemed to us,
while we wandered down the long platform of the
Bastide, with twenty minutes to spare, that we could
not do better than get into the carriage reserved for
ladies only. But one glance into that fastness was
enough. A mamma, a white-capped ' nou-nou! an
underling, an infant, and three children (two of them
in tears) were already in possession, and beginning
the first of the meals that experience had taught us
would continue through the night. The next carriage
was empty ; better the maniac or the inebriate,
better even the Government cigar — these things were

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 227
among the possibilities, but we chanced them. They
none of them happened. We adopted the tried
stratagem of pulling down the blinds and holding
the handle from inside, and had the satisfaction of
hearing the possible maniacs, drunkards, and smokers
of French tobacco remark to each other, after they
had tried the handle, that it was either a mail-van
or a reserved carriage.
We had hired two pillows at a franc each, accord
ing to the convenient custom on the Paris-Orleans
railway, and thanks to them, the worst part of the
eleven hours was spent in sleep that was just
pleasantly conscious of the stops at the stations, and
was lulled into blander repose by an occasional
muffled squall from the pandemonium next door.
At Blois the daylight began, and it was then, in
the cold dawn, while the train shuffled uneasily to
and fro on meaningless slidings, and the green-grey
mass of a great castle deepened each time we looked
from behind the blinds, that we drew forth the half
bottle of Grand St. Lambert that had for the last few

228 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
days been carried perilously about in a bonnet-box,
and with grapes and croissants began a repast that
continued through stages of bovril, tea, and ginger
bread biscuits till we neared Paris. The water for
the tea was near proving a difficulty. To get it, it
was necessary to shuffle in 'night's disarray' to the
buffet, and a fair amount of nerve was required to
advance through the crowd of sleepily devouring men
and fill a disreputable tin kettle from a carafe of
water under the very eyes of an indignant waiter.
We flatter ourselves that the most courageous man of
our acquaintance would have been afraid to do it.
There is on the south side of the Seine, not far
from the Gare Montparnasse, a hotel beloved of art
students. It is clean and cheap, and is bounded on
all sides by the tram lines that cleave Paris through
and through, and put the whole town in the hollow
of one's hand for six sous {avec correspondance). The
Quartier Latin looked as fresh and clean and respect
able on this October morning as if it had not a
world-wide reputation for opposite qualities, and as

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 229
mademoiselle of the hotel rushed out and greeted us
in such strange English as is learnt from American
art students, and with the effusion that is reserved by
her for old friends, a serene assurance settled down
upon us that here, at least, our appearance, manners,
and accents would excite no surprise. We had our
luncheon at a cremerie, a place known of yore, where
a beefsteak {saignant, according to French custom,
unless specially forbidden), confiture, a saucerful of
curd known as fromage d la creme, and a cup of
black coff'ee could be obtained in sufficient cleanli
ness for a franc or less. It was rather too early in
the season for the art student to be in full bloom ;
the two hot little rooms that were so like the cabins
of an inferior steamer were almost empty, instead of
being stuffed to their utmost capacity and resounding
with as many languages as the Tower of Babel, and
when we went on to the studio, and, with pleasurable
anticipation, climbed the long staircase and knocked
at the door, no voice responded. There was no one
there. The easels were heaped up in one corner, the

230 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
stools in another, the clock had stopped, the model
stand was covered with dust, and desponding sketches
of undressed deformities dangled from the walls, each
by a single drawing-pin. Angelo, the hoary and
picturesque attendant, followed us into this desola
tion, and said that such monde as there was, with a
contemptuous shrug, was Id-bas. A glance into the
lower studio, where half-a-dozen unknown English
women were fighting over the position of a sulky
model in the dress of a cardinal, was enough for us.
We felt that ' superfluous lags the veteran on the
stage.' We wandered on by familiar ways to the Luxem
bourg galleries — there, at least, we should find old
friends ; and we looked at Rosa Bonheur's oxen with
the eye of knowledge, and found them by no means
up to the standard of Chdteau Loudenne. When we
got out into the gardens again, with their linked
battalions of perambulators, and their thousand
children courting sea -sickness on the zoological
merry-go-rounds, the afternoon was still young. The

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 231
tops of the tall horse-chestnuts were yellow in the
sunshine, and above them, in the blue sky, the Eiffel
Tower looked down on us, suggesting absurdly the
elongated neck of Alice in Wonderland, when the
pigeon accuses her of being a serpent. Its insistent
challenge could no longer be resisted ; in spite of the
needle-cases, yard-measures, and paper-weights that
had horridly familiarised us with its outlines, it was
decidedly a thing to be done. People who would go
to sleep if we talked to them about the vineyards,
would wake to active contempt if they heard we had
not been to the Eiffel Tower.
We were deluded into getting off our tram too
soon, and consequently had a long crawl through the
empty Exhibition buildings and grounds before we
reached our destination. To this, however, we owed
the sight of the strange row of variety entertainments
which we passed en route. A cup of coff'ee at forty-five
centimes, or even a glass of beer at thirty centimes,
would have entitled us to a chair or a marble table
at any of these spectacles ; but having taken a cursory

232 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
view, from outside the crowd at the barriers, of the
man in evening clothes mournfully bellowing some
thing that sounded like a funeral ode to his mother,
of the young lady with long yellow hair and short
yellow petticoats giving a comic recitation flavoured
with dancing, and of the infant phenomenon, whose
performance on the piano was unfortunately reduced
to dmnb show by the success of the funny man next
door, we were disposed to think that the coffee would
be dear at the price.
We found ourselves at last under the four arching
dachshund legs from which the Tower tapers im
probably into space, and strayed round on the gravel
underneath it, lavishing upon each other truisms
appropriate to the occasion, and expressing artificial
regrets that we had apparently come too late in the
afternoon for the lift. While we spoke, a clicking
sound dropped to us from the sky; we looked up,
and saw amidst the cobwebs of iron a large square
fly descending. I hardly know how we came to find
ourselves at the entrance of the ascenseur. We both

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 233
dislike lifts ; and my cousin can repeat many rousing
tales of lift-accidents, in which the point is usually
the apparent identity of the attendant with the
leading character in a thrice-repeated nightmare ;
but some form of false shame impelled us to the
first stage. We held our breaths as we slid upwards
through the girders that looked like all the pro
positions in Euclid run mad, and it was not till the
horrible hiccough came, that told us we had stopped
at the first platform, that we ventured to glance at
the lift-man.
We walked round the long galleries, my cousin
making herself both conspicuous and absurd by her
de'termination to find out how many dragoon-like
strides went to each side. It will doubtless be a
blow to the designer to hear that the four faces of the
Tower vary in length, two of them measuring ninety-
seven yards, another a hundred, and the fourth
ninety-nine and a hop. We had thought of going
to the top — thought of it vaguely and valiantly for
some little time after the lift had shaken us out on

.234 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
the first ^tage, and before we had looked over the
edge. One glance, however, down at the black
specks crawling on the strips of tape that represented
;the gravel paths of the Exhibition grounds satisfied
us that we were as high as we wished to go. Even
here the height was making my fingers tingle, and
my cousin had retired unsteadily from the verge
under the pretext of buying a photograph at a neigh
bouring stall ; while as to the view, all Paris was
already far below us, a marvellous gray and green
toy, with the afternoon sun striking flame out of the
tiny gilded domes and spires, and the pale thread
of a river winding from one microscopic bridge to
another, all showing clear in the smokeless air with
a magical precision of detail.
There is a staircase that circles dizzily down the
Tower, a Jacob's ladder that would make an angel
giddy, and rather than enter again the lift that was
even now sliding down to us on its steel cable through
the iron network, my cousin said she would walk
down. It was the final dispute of the expedition.

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 235
and, after affording much amusement to the by
standers, it ended in my leading my cousin, with her
eyes tightly shut, and the expression of Lady Jane
Grey on her way to execution, into the box with the
sloping floor, in whose safety it was so impossible to
believe. We sit safely now in the ground floor of a
two-storeyed house, and as we look back to that
experience, it seems to us that no dentist's chair
can have cradled more suffering than the lift of the
Eiffel Tower.
We left Paris by a late train that night. Summer
and its habiliments had alike been crushed out of
sight by dint of a final war-dance upon our port
manteaus. Everything connected with the Medoc
was put away ; the Kodak, with its hidden
store of vintage pictures, the apparatus of after
noon tea, even the well-thumbed and invaluable
copy of Bellows' Dictionary that had up to
this abided immutably in our pockets, was laid
sorrowing to rest in the crown of the Libourne
straw hat. What use was it to us on a degraded

236 IN THE VINE COUNTRY.
line of railway on which all the porters spoke
English ?
We took a last look out of the train window at the

SUCCESS TO THE VINTAGE OF 1891.

electric star of the Eiffel Tower, perched among the
elder stars in the sky behind us, and my cousin
opened her bonnet-box and drew forth for the last

IN THE VINE COUNTRY. 237
time that widow's cruse, the bottle of Grand St.
Lambert. There was about a wine-glassful left, and
out of a thick green Pauillac mug we solemnly drank
success to our first vintage.

MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.

Just published, crown %vo, Illustrated, y. 6d.,
THROUGH CONNEMARA IN A
GOVERNESS CART.
By E. CE. SoMERViLLE and Martin Ross,
AUTHORS OF * IN THE VINE COUNTRY.'
' A bright and breezy narrative of two ladies in Connemara who preferred
independence and a mule to society and a mail car. Their simple story
is divertingly told.' — Times.
' The delightful wilderness of mountain, peat bog, and heather, and all
that they said and did, are graphically described in this chatty and
extremely readable volume.' — Daily Telegraph.
'The freshness and vivacity of these holiday experiences come hke a
savoury dish to a jaded palate after all the dull bits of book-making in
whicli so many globe-trotters find relief. They are related with a continual
flow of conscious — and, still more charming, unconscious — Irish humour.
The most prosaic details of travel are touched -with so light a hand as to be
invested with new interest. ' — Bradford Observer.
' Sketches of Irish life, the eccentricities of wandering Saxons, and
descriptions of local scenery, are worked up in a manner which makes
the book a pleasant companion. Mr. Russell has in his illustration ably
supported the writers. ' — Morning Post.
' The genuine fund of wit and humour which sparkles throughout will be
enjoyed by all.' — Glasgow Herald.
' The authors have the knack of putting their readers in the situations in
which they themselves were, and so the book, light and smart as it is, is
heartily enjoyable.' — Scotsman.
' A bright and amusing volume . . . and any one who knows anything
of Ireland will recognise the fidelity with which the characteristic traits of
the people are hit off, and the admirable manner in which their mode of
speech is interpreted. . . . To read such a joyous book as this makes us
envy the happy faculty of the writers for seizing upon the incidents that
make up the "admirable drama of small things," and when to this happy
faculty is added the blessed sense of humour, we feel that hfe holds in its
hand a sheaf of delightful possibilities for men and women, but more
especially for women who are so richly endowed.' — Lady's Pictorial.
' This vivacious narrative, well illustrated, ought to have many readers,
— Yorkshire Post.
LONDON; W. H. ALLEN ¦& CO. Ltd., 13 Waterloo Place.

W. H. ALLEN & CO.'S LIST OF NEW BOOKS.

Just published, crown Zvo, with Special Map and Illustrations, 7 J. dd. ,
MOROCCO AS IT IS.
With an Account of Sir Charles Euan Smith's Recent Mission to Fez.
By Stephen Bonsal (Special Correspondent Central News).
'Will be read with interest by all who are curious about the present
prospects of affairs in Morocco. ' — Scotsman.
' "The author brings down the history of Morocco to the very latest date.
His work has, therefore, solid value for politicians, while general readers
will find in it much to amuse and much to tempt them to pay a visit to the
Sultan's dominions.' — People.
' Deserves to be widely read. To any who desire a full and picturesque
account of this mission this book will be of special interest. '- -Manchester
Examiner. Dedicated, by Permission, to H.R.H. The Duke of Edinburgh.
Medium Zvo, 12s. 6d,,
THE STEAM NAVY OF ENGLAND:-
Past, Present, and Future.
By Harry Williams, R.N. (Chief Inspector of Machinery).
Contents : — Part L — Our Seamen. Part II. — Ships and Machinery,
Part II L — Naval Engineering. Part IV, — Miscellaneous Summary,
Conclusion. 
Crown Svo, with Frontispiece, (>s.,
A Retrospect of Life and Travel in Lower Burmah.
By Dept. -Surgeon-Gen. C. T. Paske and F. G. Aflalo.
' The magnitude of the change that in a generation has come over
politics,' trade, and sport in the Irrawaddy and Salwen Valleys lends a
certain interest and value to the unpretending narrative which Mr. Aflalo
has revised and edited ; while other districts of Lower Burmah — the Mergin
Archipelago, for instance — are little better known than they were when Dr.
Paske visited them.' — Scotsman.

Two Vols., demy Sz/o, with Eighteen Maps, 301.,
THE LAND REVENUE OF BOMBAY.
A History of its Administration, Rise, and Progress.
By Alexander Rogers (Bombay Civil Service, Retired).

London: W. H. ALLEN & CO. Ltd., 13 Waterloo Place.

NEW NOVELS.

Tivo Vols., crown Svo, 21s.,
AN AMERICAN MONTE CRISTO:
A ROMANCE.
By JtTLiAN Hawthorne.
'Full of interest, excitement, and general "go.'' . . . Mr. Hawthorne
rises to the height of his great opportunity. May not be quite the best,
but very good indeed.' — Daily Chronicle.
' There is a touch of the supernatural in the story wisely left unexplained,'
and for the rest, though wildly romantic, it is not a book to begin and lay
aside. ' — Graphic.
Just published, with numerous Illustrations by the Author,
crown '&V0, 6s.,
ABSOLUTELY TRUE.
A NOVEL.
By Irving Montagu (late Special War Correspondent Illustrated
London News).

Crown Svo, 6s.,
THE BOW OF FATE.
A STORY OF INDIAN LIFE.
By Surgeon-Major H. M. Greenhow.

Crown Svo, 6s. ,
CAVERTON MANOR; or, FORESHADOWED.
By May Brotherhood.

Crown Svo, Three Vols., 3IJ. 6d.,
THE HARLEQUIN OPAL
A NOVEL.
By Fergus Hume (Author of ' The Island of Fantasy ').

London: W. H. ALLEN & CO. Ltd., 13 Waterloo Place.

YALE UNIVERSITY L

3 9002 08561 9063