AN INTERMITTENT PROCESSION OF MEN.
The first-class passengers maintained their attitude of suspicion as far as we were concerned; and when, 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 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 curé, 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 of their families, and were no doubt epigrammatic at dinner on the subject of the two absurdly emancipated Anglaises, with their sailor hats and brown shoes. At all events, we were getting our first impressions of the Médoc 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 château, with a name more or less familiar even to the ignorant and unlearned. We had a map of the Médoc with us—a map that gave all the châteaux in heavy capitals, and added the towns as trivial necessities in diamond type; it sometimes even gave a little picture of a particularly pet château so that there might be no mistake about it. From this we identified the Château Margaux, the home of one of the four kings of the classified Médoc 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 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 Médoc 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 vineyard 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 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 themselves out houses in it, and apparently finished them off with their penknives, or teaspoons, or any other implement that was convenient. Some people decorated 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 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 Hôtel, the one to which we had been recommended. It was a good deal of a shock when he told us that the Grand Hôtel 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 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
