"You French," I ventured, "hardly seem worthy of your fine wines. You never appear to care about them; you seldom sit a moment after dinner to enjoy them; and if you relish anything more than another, it is Champagne, which, after all, is but a baby taste. All your very best wine goes to England; most of your second-class growths to Russia; and your lower sorts to the northern nations on the Baltic. I don't think there is anything like a generally cultivated taste for good wine in France, and yet you are supreme in the cuisine."
"It was the fermiers generaux, and the financiers," replied the priest, "who made French cookery what it is. They tried to outshine the old noblesse at table; they revived truffles, and they had the first dishes of green pease, at eight hundred francs a plat. Next to the financiers were the chevaliers and the abbés. Oh, mon Dieu! qu'ils étaient gourmands ces chers amis; the chevaliers all swagger and dash; the sword right up and down—shoulder-knot flaunting—a bold bearing and a keen eye. The abbés, in velvet and silk—as fat as carps, as sleek as moles, and as soft-footed as cats—little and sly—perfect enjoyers of the gourmandise. Oh, there was nothing more snug than an abbé commanditaire! He had consideration, position, money; no one to please, and nothing to do."
"These were the good old times," I said.
"Ma foi!" replied the clerical dignitary; "they were bad times for France in general; but they were rare times for the few who lived upon it. There were Frenchmen, at any rate, then, who understood wine; at least, they drunk enough of it to understand the science, from the alpha to the omega."
We parted, after a proper degree of hand-shaking; and a quarter of an hour afterwards I was rattling along the Montpellier and Cette railway, with a ticket for Lunel in my pocket.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
More about the Olive-tree—The Gathering of the Olives—Lunel—A Night with a Score of Mosquitoes—Aigues-Mortes—The Dead Landscape—The Marsh Fever—A Strange Cicerone—The last Crusading King—The Salted Burgundians—The Poisoned Camisards—The Mediterranean.
Passing, for the present, Montpellier, where people with consumptions used to be sent to swallow dust, as likely to be soothing to the lungs, and to breathe the balmy zephyrs of the whispering mistral, I made straight for Lunel, in order to get from thence to one of the strangest old towns in France—Aigues-Mortes. All around us, as we hurried on, were vines and olives—a true land of wine and oil. The olive-tree did not improve on acquaintance—it got uglier and uglier—more formal, and more cast-iron looking, the more you saw of it. And then it was invariably planted in rows, at regular intervals, so as to give the notion of a prim old garden—never of a wood. Like all fruit-trees in France, the olive is most carefully trimmed, and clipped, and tortured, and twisted into the most approved or fashionable shape. The man who can make his oliviers look most like umbrellas is the great cultivator; and the services of the peasants who have got a reputation for olive dressing are better paid than those of any agricultural labourers in France. They are eternally snipping and slashing, and turning and twisting the tree, until the unfortunate specimens have had any small degree of natural ease and harmony which they possessed assiduously wrenched out of them. And yet there are people in the South of France who are enthusiastic on the hidden beauty of the olive. There are technical terms for all the particular spreads and contortions given to the branches; and the olive amateur will hold forth to you by the hour upon the subtle charms of each. A gentleman from beyond Marseilles has dilated with rapture to me on his delight, after a residence in Normandy, in returning again to the hot South, and revisiting the dear olives, so prim, and orderly, and symmetrical—not like the huge, straggling, sprawling oaks and elms of the North, growing up in utter defiance of all rule and system.
The olives of France, this gentleman informed me, are very inferior to the trees of a couple of generations ago. Towards the close of the last century, there was a winter night of intense frost; and when the morning broke, the trees were nearly smitten to the core. That year there was not an olive gathered in Provence or Languedoc. The next season, some of the stronger and younger trees partially revived, and slips were planted from those to which the axe had been applied; but the entire species of the tree, he assured me, had fallen off—had dwindled, and pined, and become stunted; and the profits of olive cultivation had faded with it. The gentleman spoke on the subject with a degree of unction which would have suited the fall, not of the olive, but of man. It was a catastrophe which coloured his whole life. He was himself an olive proprietor; and very likely his fortunes fell on the fatal night as many points as the thermometer. On our way to Lunel we saw the olive-gathering just beginning; but, alas! it had none of the gaiety and bright associations of the vintage. On the contrary, it was as business-like and unexciting as weeding onions, or digging potatoes. A set of ragged peasants—the country people hereabouts are poorly dressed—were clambering barefoot in the trees, each man with a basket tied before him, and lazily plucking the dull oily fruit. Occasionally, the olive-gatherers had spread a white cloth beneath the tree, and were shaking the very ripe fruit down; but there was neither jollity nor romance about the process. The olive is a tree of association, but that is all. Its culture, its manuring, and clipping, and trimming, and grafting—the gathering of its fruits, and their squeezing in the mill, when the ponderous stone goes round and round in the glutinous trough, crushing the very essence out of the oily pulps—while the fat, oleaginous stream pours lazily into the greasy vessels set to receive it;—all this is as prosaic and uninteresting as if the whole Royal Agricultural Society were presiding in spirit over the operations. And, after all, what could be expected? "Grapes," said a clever Frenchman, "are wine-pills"—the notion of conviviality and mirth is ever attached to them; and the vintagers, when stripping the loaded branches, have their minds involuntarily carried forward to the joyous ultimate results of their labours. But who—our friends the Russians, and their cousins the Esquimaux excepted—could possibly be jolly over the idea of oil? It may act balsamically and soothingly; and the idea of the olive saucer, green amongst the bright decanters, does approach, in some respect, towards the production of a pleasant association of ideas; but still the elevated and poetic feelings connected with the tree are remote and dim.