hope for sabots. I think the proprietor felt for us—not sympathetically, of course, but compassionately. He hastened to explain that the fermenting 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 shovelfuls 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, and 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 approached with a small tumbler in his singularly dirty hand.
‘These ladies would like to taste the moût,’ 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 MOÛT.
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 moût 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 of 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 desire that my second cousin should not be discouraged.
‘C’est bon? Hein?’ said the vigneron. ‘Ça vous fera du bien!’
He said bong and biang in the friendly British way that they pronounce such words in the Médoc. (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 moût.