ENDYMION.
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BY THOMAS BUCHANAN READ.
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What time the stars first flocked into the blue
Behind young Hesper, shepherd of the eve,
Sleep bathed the fair boy’s lids with charméd dew
Mid flowers that all day blossomed to receive
Endymion.
Lo, where he lay encircled in his dream!
The moss was glad to pillow his soft hair;
And toward him leaned the lily from the stream;
The hanging vine waved wooing in the air
Endymion.
The brook that erewhile won its easy way
O’errun with meadow grasses long and cool,
Now reeled into a fuller tide and lay
Caressing in its clear enamored pool
Endymion.
And all the sweet, delicious airs that fan
Enchanted gardens in their hour of bloom,
Blown through the soft invisible pipes of Pan,
Breathed mid their mingled music and perfume,
Endymion.
The silvery leaves that rustled in the light
Sent their winged shadows o’er his cheek entranced;
The constellations wandered down the night,
And whispered to the dew-drops where they danced
Endymion.
Lo! there he slept; and all his flock at will
Went, star-like, down the meadow’s azure mist:—
What wonder that pale Dian, with a thrill,
Breathed on his lips her sudden love and kist
Endymion!
THE VINTAGE.
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BY A. B. REACH.
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[WITH AN ENGRAVING.]
Let us to the joyous ingathering of the fruits of the earth—the great yearly festival and jubilee of the property and the labor of Medoc. October is the joyous “wine month.” For weeks, every cloud in the sky has been watched—every cold night-breeze felt with nervous apprehension. Upon the last bright weeks in summer, the savor and the bouquet of the wine depend. Warmed by the blaze of an unclouded sun, fanned by the mild breezes of the west, and moistened by morning and evening dews, the grapes by slow degrees attain their perfect ripeness and their culminating point of flavor. Then the vintage implements begin to be sought out, cleaned, repaired, and scoured and sweetened with hot brandy. Coopers work as if their lives depended upon their industry; and all the anomalous tribe of lookers-out for chance jobs in town and country pack up their bag and baggage, and from scores of miles around pour in ragged regiments into Medoc.
There have long existed pleasing, and in some sort poetical, associations connected with the task of securing for human use the fruits of the earth; and to no species of crop do these picturesque associations apply with greater force than to the ingathering of the ancient harvest of the vine. From time immemorial, the season has typified epochs of plenty and mirthful-heartedness—of good fare and of good-will. The ancient types and figures descriptive of the vintage are still literally true. The march of agricultural improvement seems never to have set foot amid the vines. As it was with the patriarchs in the East, so it is with the modern children of men. The goaded ox still bears home the high-pressed grape-tub, and the feet of the trader are still red in the purple juice which maketh glad the heart of man. The scene is at once full of beauty, and of tender and even sacred associations. The songs of the vintagers frequently chorussed from one part of the field to the other, ring blithely into the bright summer air, pealing out above the rough jokes and hearty peals of laughter shouted hither and thither. All the green jungle is alive with the moving figures of men and women, stooping among the vines or bearing pails and basket-fulls of grapes out to the grass-grown cross-roads, along which the laboring oxen drag the rough vintage carts, groaning and cracking as they stagger along beneath their weight of purple tubs heaped high with the tumbling masses of luscious fruit. The congregation of every age and both sexes, and the careless variety of costume, add additional features of picturesqueness to the scene. The white-haired old man labors with shaking hands to fill the basket which his black-eyed imp of a grandchild carries rejoicingly away. Quaint broad-brimmed straw and felt hats—handkerchiefs twisted like turbans over straggling elf-locks—swarthy skins tanned to an olive-brown—black, flashing eyes—and hands and feet stained in the abounding juices of the precious fruit—all these southern peculiarities of costume and appearance supply the vintage with its pleasant characteristics. The clatter of tongues is incessant. A fire of jokes and jeers, of saucy questions, and more saucy retorts—of what, in fact, in the humble and unpoetic but expressive vernacular, is called “chaff”—is kept up with a vigor which seldom flags, except now and then, when the butt-end of a song, or the twanging close of a chorus strikes the general fancy, and procures for the morceau a lusty encore. Meantime, the master wine-grower moves observingly from rank to rank. No neglected bunch of fruit escapes his watchful eye. No careless vintager shakes the precious berries rudely upon the soil, but he is promptly reminded of his slovenly work. Sometimes the tubs attract the careful superintendent. He turns up the clusters to ascertain that no leaves nor useless length of tendril are entombed in the juicy masses, and anon directs his steps to the pressing-trough, anxious to find that the lusty treaders are persevering manfully in their long-continued dance.
Thither we will follow. The wine-press, or cuvier de pressoir, consists, in the majority of cases, of a massive shallow tub, varying in size from four square feet to as many square yards. It is placed either upon wooden tressels or on a regularly built platform of mason-work under the huge rafters of a substantial out-house. Close to it stands a range of great butts, their number more or less, according to the size of the vineyard. The grapes are flung by tub and caskfulls into the cuvier. The treaders stamp diligently amid the masses, and the expressed juice pours plentifully out of a hole level with the bottom of the trough into a sieve of iron or wicker-work, which stops the passage of the skins, and from thence drains into tubs below. Suppose, at the moment of our arrival, the cuvier for a brief space empty. The treaders—big, perspiring men, in shirts and tucked-up trowsers—spattered to the eyes with splatches of purple juice, lean upon their wooden spades, and wipe their foreheads. But their respite is short. The creak of another cart-load of tubs is heard, and immediately the wagon is backed up to the broad, open window, or rather hole in the wall, above the trough. A minute suffices to wrench out tub after tub, and to tilt their already half-mashed clusters splash into the reeking pressoir. Then to work again. Jumping with a sort of spiteful eagerness into the mountain of yielding, quivering fruit, the treaders sink almost to the knees, stamping and jumping and rioting in the masses of grapes, as fountains of juice spurt about their feet, and rush bubbling and gurgling away. Presently, having, as it were, drawn the first sweet blood of the new cargo, the eager tramping subsides into a sort of quiet, measured dance, which the treaders continue, while, with their wooden spades, they turn the pulpy remnants of the fruit hither and thither, so as to expose the half-squeezed berries in every possible way to the muscular action of the incessantly moving feet. All this time the juice is flowing in a continuous stream into the tubs beneath. When the jet begins to slacken, the heap is well tumbled with the wooden spades, and, as though a new force had been applied, the juice-jet immediately breaks out afresh. It takes, perhaps, half or three-quarters of an hour thoroughly to squeeze the contents of a good-sized cuvier, sufficiently manned. When at length, however, no further exertion appears to be attended with corresponding results, the tubfulls of expressed juice are carried by means of ladders to the edges of the vats, and their contents tilted in; while the men in the trough, setting-to with their spades, fling the masses of dripping grape-skins in along with the juice. The vats sufficiently full, the fermentation is allowed to commence. In the great cellars in which the juice is stored, the listener at the door—he cannot brave the carbonic acid gas to enter further—may hear, solemnly echoing in the cool shade of the great darkened hall, the bubblings and seethings of the working liquid—the inarticulate accents and indistinct rumblings which proclaim that a great metempsychosis is taking place—that a natural substance is rising higher in the eternal scale of things, and that the contents of these great giants of vats are becoming changed from floods of mere mawkish, sweetish fluid to noble wine—to a liquid honored and esteemed in all ages—to a medicine exercising a strange and potent effect upon body and soul—great for good and evil. Is there not something fanciful and poetic in the notion of this change taking place mysteriously in the darkness, when all the doors are locked and barred—for the atmosphere about the vats is death—as if Nature would suffer no idle prying into her mystic operations, and as if the grand transmutation and projection from juice to wine had in it something of a secret and solemn and awful nature—fenced round, as it were, and protected from vulgar curiosity by the invisible halo of stifling gas? I saw the vats in the Château Margaux cellars the day after the grape-juice had been flung in. Fermentation had not as yet properly commenced, so access to the place was possible; still, however, there was a strong vinous smell loading the atmosphere, sharp and subtle in its influence on the nostrils; while, putting my ear, on the recommendation of my conductor, to the vats, I heard, deep down, perhaps eight feet down in the juice, a seething, gushing sound, as if currents and eddies were beginning to flow, in obedience to the influence of the working Spirit, and now and then a hiss and a low bubbling throb, as though of a pot about to boil. Within twenty-four hours, the cellar would be unapproachable.
Of course, it is quite foreign to my plan to enter upon any thing like a detailed account of wine-making. I may only add, that the refuse skins, stalks, and so forth, which settle into the bottom of the fermentation vats, are taken out again after the wine has been drawn off, and subjected to a new squeezing—in a press, however, and not by the foot—the products being a small quantity of fiery, ill-flavored wine, full of the bitter taste of the seeds and stalks of the grape, and possessing no aroma or bouquet. The Bordeaux press for this purpose is rather ingeniously constructed. It consists of a sort of a skeleton of a cask, strips of daylight shining through from top to bottom between the staves. In the centre works a strong perpendicular iron screw. The rape, as the refuse of the treading is called, is piled beneath it; the screw is manned capstan fashion, and the unhappy seeds, skins and stalks, undergo a most dismal squeezing. Nor do their trials end there. The wine-makers are terrible hands for getting at the very last get-at-able drop. To this end, somewhat on the principle of rinsing an exhausted spirit-bottle, so as, as it were, to catch the very flavor still clinging to the glass, they plunge the doubly-squeezed rape into water, let it lie there for a short time, and then attack it with the press again. The result is a horrible stuff called piquette, which, in a wine country, bears the same resemblance to wine as the very dirtiest, most wishy-washy, and most contemptible of swipes bears to honest porter or ale. Piquette, in fact, may be defined as the ghost of wine!—wine minus its bones, its flesh, and its soul! a liquid shadow!—a fluid nothing!—an utter negation of all comfortable things and associations! Nevertheless, however, the peasants swill it down in astounding quantities, and apparently with sufficient satisfaction.
And now a word as to wine-treading. The process is universal in France, with the exception of the cases of the sparkling wines of the Rhone and Champagne, the grapes for which are squeezed by mechanical means, not by the human foot. Now, very venerable and decidedly picturesque as is the process of wine-treading, it is unquestionably rather a filthy one; and the spectacle of great, brown, horny feet, not a whit too clean, splashing and sprawling in the bubbling juice, conveys, at first sight, a qualmy species of feeling, which, however, seems only to be entertained by those to whom the sight is new. I looked dreadfully askance at the operation when I first came across it; and when I was invited—by a lady, too—to taste the juice, of which she caught up a glassfull, a certain uncomfortable feeling of the inward man warred terribly against politeness. But nobody around seemed to be in the least squeamish. Often and often did I see one of the heroes of the tub walk quietly over a dunghill, and then jump—barefooted, of course, as he was—into the juice; and even a vigilant proprietor, who was particularly careful that no bad grapes went into the tub, made no objection. When I asked why a press was not used, as more handy, cleaner, and more convenient, I was everywhere assured that all efforts had failed to construct a wine-press capable of performing the work with the perfection attained by the action of the human foot. No mechanical squeezing, I was informed, would so nicely express that peculiar proportion of the whole moisture of the grape which forms the highest flavored wine. The manner in which the fruit was tossed about was pointed out to me, and I was asked to observe that the grapes were, as it were, squeezed in every possible fashion and from every possible side, worked and churned and mashed hither and thither by the ever-moving toes and muscles of the foot. As far as any impurity went, the argument was, that the fermentation flung, as scum, to the surface, every atom of foreign matter held in suspension in the wine, and that the liquid ultimately obtained was as exquisitely pure as if human flesh had never touched it.
In the collection of these and such like particulars, I sauntered for days among the vineyards around; and utterly unknown and unfriended as I was, I met everywhere the most cordial and pleasant receptions. I would lounge, for example, to the door of a wine-treading shed, to watch the movements of the people. Presently the proprietor, most likely attired in a broad-brimmed straw hat, a strange faded outer garment, half shooting-coat half dressing-gown, would come up courteously to the stranger, and learning that I was an English visitor to the vintage, would busy himself with the most graceful kindness, to make intelligible the rationale of all the operations. Often I was invited into the château or farm-house, as the case might be; a bottle of an old vintage produced and comfortably discussed in the coolness of the darkened, thinly-furnished room, with its old-fashioned walnut-tree escrutoires, and beauffets, its quaintly-panneled walls, and its polished floors, gleaming like mirrors, and slippery as ice. On these occasions, the conversation would often turn on the rejection, by England, of French wines—a sore point with the growers of all save the first-class vintages, and in which I had, as may be conceived, very little to say in defense either of our taste or our policy. In the evenings, which were getting chill and cold, I occasionally abandoned my room with illustrations from the Tour de Nesle for the general kitchen and parlor of Madame Cadillac, and, ensconcing myself in the chimney corner—a fine old-fashioned ingle, crackling and blazing with hard wood logs—listened to the chat of the people of the village; they were nearly all coopers and vine-dressers, who resorted there after the day’s work was over to enjoy an exceedingly modest modicum of very thin wine. I never benefited very much, however, by these listenings. It was my bad luck to hear recounted neither tale nor legend—to pick up, at the hands of my compotatores, neither local trait nor anecdote. The conversation was as small as the wine. The gossip of the place—the prospects of the vintage—elaborate comparisons of it with other vintages—births, marriages, and deaths—a minute list of scandal, more or less intelligible when conveyed in hints and allusions—were the staple topics, mixed up, however, once or twice with general denunciations of the niggardly conduct of certain neighboring proprietors to their vintagers—giving them for breakfast nothing but coarse bread, lard, and not even piquette to wash it down with, and for dinner not much more tempting dishes.
In Medoc, there are two classes of vintagers—the fixed and the floating population; and the latter, which makes an annual inroad into the district, just as the Irish harvesters do into England and Scotland, comprising a goodly proportion of very dubious and suspicious-looking characters. The gen-d’armerie have a busy time of it when these gentry are collected in numbers in the district. Poultry disappear with the most miraculous promptitude; small linen articles hung out to dry have no more chance than if Falstaff’s regiment were marching by; and garden-fruit and vegetables, of course, share the results produced by a rigid application of the maxim that la proprieté c’est le vol. Where these people come from is a puzzle. There will be vagrants and strollers among them from all parts of France—from the Pyrenees and the Alps—from the pine-woods of the Landes and the moors of Brittany. They unite in bands of a dozen or a score men and women, appointing a chief, who bargains with the vine-proprietor for the services of the company, and keeps up some degree of order and subordination, principally by means of the unconstitutional application of a good thick stick. I frequently encountered these bands, making their way from one district to another, and better samples of the “dangerous classes” were never collected. They looked vicious and abandoned, as well as miserably poor. The women, in particular, were as brazen-faced a set of slatterns as could be conceived; and the majority of the men—tattered, strapping-looking fellows, with torn slouched-hats, and tremendous cudgels—were exactly the sort of persons a nervous gentleman would have scruples about meeting at dusk in a long lane. It is when thus on the tramp that the petty pilfering and picking and stealing, to which I have alluded, goes on. When actually at work, they have no time for picking up unconsidered trifles. Sometimes these people pass the night—all together, of course—in out-houses or barns, when the chef can strike a good bargain; at other times they bivouac on the lee-side of a wood or wall, in genuine gipsy fashion. You may often see their watch-fires glimmering in the night; and be sure, that where you do, there are twisted necks and vacant nests in many a neighboring hen-roost. One evening, I was sauntering along the beach at Paulliac—a little town on the river’s bank, about a dozen of miles from the mouth of the Gironde, and holding precisely the same relation to Bordeaux as Gravesend does to London—when a band of vintagers, men, women, and children, came up. They were bound to some village on the opposite side of the Gironde, and wanted to get ferried across. A long parley accordingly ensued between the chief and a group of boatmen. The commander of the vintage forces offered four sous per head as the passage-money. The bargemen would hear of nothing under five; and, after a tremendous verbal battle, the vintagers announced that they were not going to be cheated, and that if they could not cross the water, they would stay where they were. Accordingly, a bivouac was soon formed. Creeping under the lee of a row of casks, on the shingle of the bare beach, the women were placed leaning against the somewhat hard and large pillows in question; the children were nestled at their feet, and in their laps; and the men formed the outermost ranks. A supply of loaves was sent for and obtained. The chief tore the bread up into huge hunks, which he distributed to his dependents; and upon this supper the whole party went coolly to sleep—more coolly, indeed, than agreeably; for a keen north wind was whistling along the sedgy banks of the river, and the red blaze of high-piled fagots was streaming from the houses across the black, cold, turbid waters. At length, however, some arrangement was come to; for, on visiting the spot a couple of hours afterward, I found the party rather more comfortably ensconced under the ample sails of the barge which was to bear them the next morning to their destination.
The dinner-party formed every day, when the process of stripping the vines is going on, is, particularly in the cases in which the people are treated well by the proprietor, frequently a very pretty and very picturesque spectacle. It always takes place in the open air, amongst the bushes, or under some neighboring walnut-tree. Sometimes long tables are spread upon tressles; but in general no such formality is deemed requisite. The guests fling themselves in groups upon the ground—men and women picturesquely huddled together—the former bloused and bearded personages—the latter showy, in their bright short petticoats of home-spun and dyed cloth, with glaring handkerchiefs twisted like turbans round their heads—each man and woman with a deep plate in his or her lap. Then the people of the house bustle about, distributing huge brown loaves, which are torn asunder, and the fragments chucked from hand to hand. Next a vast cauldron of soup, smoking like a volcano, is painfully lifted out from the kitchen, and dealt about in mighty ladlefulls; while the founder of the feast takes care that the tough, thready bouilli—like lumps of boiled-down hemp—shall be fairly apportioned among his guests. Piquette is the general beverage. A barrel is set abroach, and every species of mug, glass, cup, and jug about the establishment is called to aid in its consumption. A short rest devoted to chatting, or very often sleeping in the shade, over, the signal is given, and the work recommences.
“You have seen our salle à manger,” said one of my courteous entertainers—he of the broad-brimmed straw-hat, “and now you shall see our chambre à coucher.” Accordingly, he led me to a barn close to his wine-cellars. The place was littered deep with clean, fresh straw. Here and there rolled-up blankets were laid against the wall; while all round, from nails stuck in between the bare bricks, hung by straps and strings the little bundles, knapsacks, and other baggage of the laborers. On one side, two or three swarthy young women were playfully pushing each other aside, so as to get a morsel of cracked mirror stuck against the wall—their long hair hanging down in black elf-locks, in the preliminary stage of its arrangement.
“That is the ladies’ side,” said my cicerone, pointing to the girls; “and that”—extending his other hand—“is the gentlemen’s side.”
“And so they all sleep here together?”
“Every night. I find shelter and straw; any other accommodation they must procure for themselves.”
“Rather unruly, I should suppose?”
“Not a bit. They are too tired to do any thing but sleep. They go off, sir, like dormice.”
“Oh, sil plait à Mossieu!” put in one of the damsels. “The chief of the band does the police.” (Fait la gen-d’armerie)
“Certainly—certainly,” said the proprietor, “the gentlemen lie here, with their heads to the walls; the ladies there; and the chef de la bande stretches himself all along between them.”
“A sort of living frontier.”
“Truly; and he allows no nonsense.”
“Il est meme éxcessivement severe,” interpolated the same young lady.
“He needs be,” replied her employer. “He allows no loud speaking—no joking; and as there are no candles, no light, why they can do nothing better than go quietly to sleep, if it were only in self-defense.”
One word more about the vintage. The reader will easily conceive that it is on the smaller properties, where the wine is intended, not so much for commerce as for household use, that the vintage partakes most of the festival nature. In the large and first-class vineyards the process goes on under rigid superintendence, and is, as much as possible, made a cold matter of business. He who wishes to see the vintages of books and poems—the laughing, joking, singing festivals amid the vines, which we are accustomed to consider the harvests of the grape—must betake him to the multitudinous patches of peasant property, in which neighbor helps neighbor to gather in the crop, and upon which whole families labor merrily together, as much for the amusement of the thing, and from good neighborly feeling, as in consideration of francs and sous. Here, of course, there is no tight discipline observed, nor is there any absolute necessity for that continuous, close scrutiny into the state of the grapes—all of them, hard or rotten, going slap-dash into the cuvier—which, in the case of the more precious vintages, forms no small check upon a general state of careless jollity. Every one eats as much fruit as he pleases, and rests when he is tired. On such occasions it is that you hear to the best advantage the joyous songs and choruses of the vintage—many of these last being very pretty bits of melody, generally sung by the women and girls, in shrill treble unison, and caught up and continued from one part of the field to another.
Yet, discipline and control it as you will, the vintage will ever be beautiful, picturesque, and full of association. The rude wains, creaking beneath the reeking tubs—the patient faces of the yoked oxen— the half-naked, stalwort men, who toil to help the cart along the ruts and furrows of the way—the handkerchief-turbaned women, their gay red-and-blue dresses peeping from out the greenery of the leaves—the children dashing about as if the whole thing were a frolick, and the gray-headed old men tottering cheerfully a-down the lines of vines, with baskets and pails of gathered grapes to fill the yawning tubs—the whole picture is at once classic, venerable, and picturesque, not more by association than actuality.
A strange feature in the wine country is the wonderously capricious and fitful nature of the soil. A forenoon’s walk will show you the earth altering in its surface qualities almost like the shifting hues of shot silk—gravel of a light color fading into gravel of a dark—sand blending with the mould, and bringing it now to a dusky yellow, now to an ashen gray—strata of chalky clay every now and then struggling into light only to melt away into beds of mere shingle—or bright, semi-transparent pebbles, indebted to the action of water for shape and hue. At two principal points these blending and shifting qualities of soil put forth their utmost powers—in the favored grounds of Margaux, and again, at a distance of about fifteen miles farther to the north, in the vineyards of Lafitte, Latour, and between these latter, in the sunny slopes of St. Jullien. And the strangest thing of all is, that the quality—the magic—of the ground changes, without, in all cases, a corresponding change in the surface strata. If a fanciful and willful fairy had flown over Medoc, flinging down here a blessing and there a curse upon the shifting shingle, the effect could not have been more oddly various. You can almost jump from a spot unknown to fame, to another clustered with the most precious vintage of Europe. Half-a-dozen furrows often make all the difference between vines producing a beverage which will be drunk in the halls and palaces of England and Russia, and vines yielding a harvest which will be consumed in the cabarets and estaminets of the neighborhood. It is to be observed, however, that the first-class wines belong almost entirely to the large proprietors. Amid a labyrinth of little patches, the property of the laboring peasants around, will be a spot appertaining to, and bearing the name of, some of the famous growths; while, conversely, inserted, as if by an accident, in the centre of a district of great name, and producing wine of great price, will be a perverse patch, yielding the most commonplace tipple, and worth not so many sous per yard as the surrounding earth is worth crowns.
How comes this? The peasants will tell you that it doesn’t come at all. That it is all cant and blague and puff on the part of the big proprietors, and that their wine is only more thought of because they have more capital to get it bragged about. Near Château Lafitte, on a burning afternoon, I took refuge beneath the emblematic bush; for the emblem which good wine is said not to require, is still, in the mid and southern districts of France, in universal use; in other words, I entered a village public-house.
Two old men, very much of the general type of the people of the country—that is, tall and spare, with intelligent and mildly-expressive faces and fine black eyes, were discussing together a sober bottle. One of them had lost an arm, and the other a leg. As I glanced at this peculiarity, the one-legged man caught my eye.
“Ah!” he said, “looking at our misfortunes; I left my leg on Waterloo.”
“And I,” chimed in his companion, “left my arm at Trafalgar.”
“Sacré!” said the veteran of the land. “One of the cursed English bullets took me in the knee, and spoiled as tight a lancer as they had in the gallant 10th.”
“And I,” rejoined the other, “was at the fourth main-deck gun of the Pluton, when I was struck with the splinter while we were engaging the Mars. But we had our revenge. The Pluton shot the Mars’ captain’s head off!”—a fact which I afterward verified. Captain Duff, the officer alluded to, was thus killed upon his quarter-deck, and the same ball shattered two seamen almost to pieces.
“Sacré!” said the ci-devant lancer, “I’d like to have a rap at the English again—I would—the English—nom de tonnerre—tell me—didn’t they murder the emperor!”
A rising smile, which I could not help, stopped him. I had spoken so few words, that the fact that a son of perfide Albion was before them was only manifested by the expression of my face.
“Tiens!” continued the Waterloo man, “You are an Englishman.”
The old sailor, who was evidently by no means so keen a hand as his comrade, nudged him; a hint, I suppose, in common phrase, to draw it mild; but the ex-lancer of the 10th was not to be put down.
“Well, and if you are, what then, eh? I say I would like to have another brush with you.”
“No, no! We have had enough of brushes!” said the far more pacific man of the sea. “I think, mon voisin—that you and I have had quite enough of fighting.”
“But they killed the emperor. Sacré nom de tous les diables—they killed the emperor.”
My modest exculpation on behalf of Great Britain and Ireland was listened to with great impatience by the maimed lancer, and great attention by the maimed sailor, who kept up a running commentary:
“Eh! eh! entendez cela. Now, that’s quite different (to his friend) from what you tell us. Come—that’s another story altogether; and what I say is, that that’s reasonable.”
But the lancer was not to be convinced—“Sacré bleu!—they killed the emperor.”
All this, it is to be observed, passed without the slightest feeling of personal animosity. The lancer, who, I suspect, had passed the forenoon in the cabaret, every now and then shook hands with me magnanimously, as to show that his wrath was national—not individual; and when I proposed a bottle of rather better wine than they had been drinking neither soldier nor sailor had a word to say in objection. The wine was brought, and very good it was, though not, of course, first-class claret.
“What do you think of that?” said the sailor.
“I wish I had as good every day in England,” I replied.
“And why haven’t you?” said the fierce lancer. “You might, if you chose. But you drink none of our wines.”
I demurred to this proposition, but the Waterloo man was down on me in no time. “Yes, yes; the wines of the great houses—the great proprietors. Sacré—the farceurs—the blageurs—who puff their wines, and get them puffed, and great prices for them, when they’re not better than ours—the peasant’s wines—when they’re grown in the same ground—ripened by the same sun! Mille diables! Look at that bottle!—taste it! My son-in-law grew it! My son-in-law sells it; I know all about it. You shall have that bottle for ten sous, and the Lafitte people and the Larose people would charge you ten francs for it; and it is as good for ten sous as theirs for ten francs. I tell you it grew side by side with their vines; but they have capital—they have power. They crack off their wines, and we—the poor people!—we, who trim and dig and work our little patches—no one knows any thing about us. Our wine—bah!—what is it? It has no name—no fame! Who will give us francs? No, no; sous for the poor man—francs for the rich. Copper for the little landlord; silver—silver and gold for the big landlord! As our curé said last Sunday: ‘Unto him who has much, more shall be given.’ Sacré Dieu de dieux!—Even the Bible goes against the poor!”
All this time, the old sailor was tugging his comrade’s jacket, and uttering sundry deprecatory ejaculations against such unnecessary vehemence. The Trafalgar man was clearly a take-it-easy personage; not troubled by too much thinking, and by no means a professional grievance-monger. So he interposed to bring back the topic to a more soothing subject, and said that what he would like, would be to see lots of English ships coming up the Gironde with the good cottons and woollens and hardware we made in England, and taking back in exchange their cheap and wholesome wines—not only the great vintages (crus) for the great folk, but the common vintages for the common folk. “Indeed, I think,” he concluded, “that sitting here drinking this good ten sous’ wine with this English gentleman—who’s going to pay for it—is far better than fighting him and hacking him up, or his hacking us up, with swords and balls and so forth.”
To this most sensible opinion we had all the pains in the world to get the doughty lancer to incline. He couldn’t see it at all. He would like to have another brush. He wasn’t half done for yet. It was all very well; but war was grand, and glory was grand. “Vive la guerre!” and “Vive la gloire!”
“But,” said the sailor, “there is death in glory!”
“Eh bien!” shouted the warrior, with as perfect French sentiment as ever I heard, “Vive la mort!”
In the end, however, he was pleased to admit that, if we took the peasant wines, something might be made of us. The case was not utterly hopeless; and when I rose to go, he proposed a stirrup-cup—a coup de l’itrier—to the washing down of all unkindness; but, in the very act of swallowing it, he didn’t exactly stop, but made a motion as if he would, and then slowly letting the last drop run over his lips, he put down the glass, and said, bitterly and coldly, “Mais pourtant, vous avez tué l’Empereur!”
I have introduced this episode principally for the purpose of showing the notions entertained by the small proprietary as to the boasted superiority of the large vineyards; but the plain truth is, that the great growers are perfectly in the right. I have stated that the quality of the soil throughout the grape country varies almost magically. Well, the good spots have been more or less known since Medoc was Medoc; and the larger and richer residents have got them, by inheritance, by marriage, and by purchase, almost entirely into their own hands. Next they greatly improved both the soil and the breed of plants. They studied and experimentalized until they found the most proper manures and the most promising cultures. They grafted and crossed the vine plants till they got the most admirably bearing bushes, and then, generation after generation, devoting all their attention to the quality of the wine, without regard to the quantity—scrupulously taking care that not a grape which is unripe or over-ripe finds its way into the tub.