the christening procession of King Richard the Second.
We shall step into one church, and only one, that of the Feuillans. There, upon a dark and massive pedestal, lies stretched the effigy of an armed man. His hands are clasped, his vizor up shows his peaked beard, and he is clad cap-à-pied in steel. Who was the doughty warrior, thus resting in his mail? Strange to say, no warrior at all; but the quietest and most peaceable of God's beings. He had an odd, pedantic father, who brought him up in strange Paganwise. The boy was never addressed but in Latin. He never had a mother-tongue. He was surrounded with a blockade of Latin speakers to keep afar off the profanation of French; he was mentally fed upon the philosophers and the poets of old Rome, and taught to weep for Seneca in the tub, as the nearest catastrophe which could touch his sympathies. Furthermore, his father, out of respect for his nerves, had him awakened every morning by the sound of soft music. Happily, even this sublimity of pedantry and pedagoguism was insufficient to ruin the native genius of Michael, Seigneur of Montaigne, whose "essays ought to lie in every cottage window."
I have said that I was in search of some one to introduce me to the vineyards and the vintagers. In a day or two I had pitched upon my landlord as my protector. His hotel was a very modest one, where never before, I do believe, had Englishmen come to make everything dear and disagreeable. The red boards of the aristocratic Murray were unknown in his salle à manger. He hadn't an ounce of tea in his house, and very probably, if he had, he would have fried it with butter, and served it à la something or other. When I say he, however, I mean madame, not monsieur. The latter would have made a capital English innkeeper, but he was a very bad French one. My gentleman, who was more than six feet high, and a stately personage, was cut out for a "mine host." He would have presided in a bar—which means drinking a continued succession of glasses of ale—with uncommon effect, for his temperament was convivial and gossippy; but he had no vocation for the kitchen, which is the common sphere of a French innkeeper not of the first class, and where, under the proud denomination of the chef, and clad in white like a grimly ghost, he bustles among pipkins and stew-pans and skillets, and lifts little trap-doors in his smoky range, and peers down them at blue charcoal furnaces—over which the plats are simmering. Now my good landlord never troubled himself about these domestic matters; but he was very clever at standing on the outer steps of his door, smoking cigars; and, indeed, would stay very willingly there all day—at least, until he heard his wife's voice, upon which he would make a precipitate retreat to a neighbouring café, where he would drink eau sucreé and rattle dominoes on a marble table till dinner-time. With this worthy I formed a personal acquaintance, by buying from him, at the reasonable rate of six sous a-piece, a number of quaint brass-set flat stones, very like red and grey cornelians, and just as pretty, which it was the fashion in the days of the Directory to mount in watch-keys, and wear two at a time, one dangling from each fob. These stones are picked up in great quantities from the light shingly soil, whereon ripens the grape, which is pressed into claret wine; and handsome and lustrous in themselves, they thus become a species of mementos of chateau Margaux and chateau Lafitte. To the landlord, then, I stated that I wished to see some vine-gathering.
"Could anything be more lucky? His particular friend M. So-and-so was beginning his harvesting that very day, and was going to give a dinner that very night on the occasion. I should go—he should go. A friend of his was M. So-and-so's friend; in fact, we were all friends together." The truth I suspect to be, that my ally was dreadfully in want of an excuse to go to the dinner, and he welcomed my application as the Israelites did manna in the desert. It was meat and drink and amusement to him, and off we went.
As I shall presently describe the real claret vintage upon a large scale, I shall pass the more quickly over my first initiation into the plucking of the grapes. But I passed a merry day, and eke a busy one. There are no idle spectators at a vintage—all the world must work; and so I speedily found myself, after being most cordially welcomed by a fat old gentleman, hoarse with bawling, in a pair of very dirty shirt-sleeves and a pouring perspiration—with a huge pair of scissors in my hand cutting off the bunches, in the midst of an uproarious troop of young men, young women, and children—threading the avenues between the plants—stripping, with wonderful dexterity, the clustered branches—their hands, indeed, gliding like dirty yellow serpents among the broad green leaves—and sometimes shouting out merry badinage, sometimes singing bits of strongly rhythmed melody in chorus, and all the time, as far as the feat could be effected, eating the grapes by handfuls. The whole thing was very jolly; I never heard more laughing about nothing in particular, more open and unblushing love-making, and more resolute quizzing of the good man, whose grapes were going partly into the baskets, tubs, pots, and pans, carried every few moments by the children and old people out of the green alleys to the pressing-tub, and partly into the capacious stomachs of the gatherers. At first I was dainty in my selection of the grapes to be chosen, eschewing the under-ripe and the over-ripe. A damsel beside me observed this. From her woolly hair and very dark but merry face, I imagined her to have a touch of Guadeloupe or Martinique blood. "Cut away," she said; "every grape makes wine."
"Yes—but the caterpillars—"
"They give it a body."
"Yes—but the snails—"
"O, save the snails, please do, for me!" said a little girl, holding out her apron, full of painted shells.