In the vine country

by E. Oe. Somerville; Martin Ross

smell of her potage, and the fulness of her sympathy as we recounted our adventure was not in the least daunted by the fact that my cousin alternately referred to the wheel as the boue or the rue. Her heart was so kind that she felt what we meant.

While we were still labouring with our story, wheels were heard on the road, and a whip exploded into a coruscation of crackings at the door.

‘Ah, Dieu! Les voilà pour le dîner! Dépêche-toi, voyons!’ A long row of quaint brown and yellow earthen vessels was set out on a table along one wall of the kitchen; there must have been two or three dozen of them, but in a few whirling minutes our hostess and the little girl had not only filled them with the savoury contents of the cauldrons, but had somehow or other stacked them all in the gig that had just driven up to the door.

‘Nous n’avons pas du monde ce soir,’ explained Madame Suzanne, when she had ladled out the last potful of soup, and had settled down into a sort of steaming tranquillity. ‘Ils sont tous là-bas, près St. Estéphe.’ ‘They’ meant the vintagers to whom she was temporary cook, and while the wheels, or rather the wheel, of our chariot still tarried, we fell into discourse with her about them.

‘Le patron feeds them well, pardi,’ she said. ‘Tiens, would ces dames like to taste the soupe de vendange?’

We tasted it, and it was perhaps the noble flavour of that vintage soup that inspired the scheme that simultaneously occurred to us both. Should we ask this nice woman, with her Irish friendliness, and her sympathetic comprehension of bad French, and her excellent cookery, to put us up for the night? We discussed it hurriedly between scalding, inelegant mouthfuls of soup, sopped bread, and tresses of cabbage, interspersed with flatteries on its quality. We wanted to see the Médoc au fond,—what more than this could show us its nethermost profundities? If we had lived out a night in a Connemara cottage, could we not stand one in a French ferme? So clean, so convenient, so glowing with local colour. Was it not almost a duty to accept such an opportunity?

It is a useful thing to be pronounced eccentricities. As we diffidently unfolded the suggestion to Suzanne, she put her hands on her hips and smiled at us with that smile of lenient amusement with which our sojourn in the Médoc was making us familiar. It was droll, pardi! She had never before had pensionnaires, but she had once been servant in a hotel, and if we feared the long drive in the cold—this was how we had put it—she would know how to make us comfortable. Voyons!

Delightful creature! so practical, so unconventional, so Irish in fact, we said to each other, as we listened to her explaining our scheme, with bursts of laughter, to M. Joseph Blossier, who had come to tell us that the carriage would be ready tout-à-l’heure. We had left her to deal with him; he required a more masterful treatment than our French would rise to, and it was with sincere thankfulness that we finally saw him depart, with promises to return for us in the morning with sundry essentials enumerated in a note to Léonie, our femme de chambre.

We sat hungrily in a corner of the kitchen while the little girl spread a surprisingly clean cloth on the table, and Madame Suzanne stirred the ragoût, and delicately added to it some further finishings which we trusted were not garlic. The yellowish walls and the smoke-stained wooden ceiling took the firelight with warm good fellowship; the blue china-tiled stove, hard-working aide-de-camp to the big open fireplace, sent an upward glow from its red charcoal upon the glittering array of pots and pans and glazed earthen vessels upon the wall above it; and round the open door the vine leaves and bunches of grapes were emphasised theatrically by the firelight, and the last light of the evening and the whirring of the cigales came strangely through them from without. The master of the house was late, and feeling, no doubt, like other hostesses, that the interval before dinner required alleviation, Madame Suzanne offered to show us over the rest of her house.

She began paradoxically by leading us out of it, and then took her way round the corner of the house under the grape trellis. She stopped at what was apparently a coach-house door, and after some difference of opinion between a large key and its keyhole, pushed it open. A blast of cold air nearly extinguished the flame of the little chimneyless lamp that she carried, as we followed her into a lofty barn, with giant barrels looming round its walls, and permeated with the sour, unforgetable, indescribable smell of a Médoc cuvier. This place was about forty feet long, and at the end of it we dimly descried a ladder, with a hand-rail, mounting to a door high up in the wall. Towards this we incredulously followed our hostess, and having stumbled up it after her, found ourselves in a musty loft; and then, saying something, whose import we did not quite catch, about her eldest daughter, Suzanne unlocked another door, and told us that this was where we were to sleep. Our courage receded to the toes of our boots; were we to share the room with that eldest daughter, or could it be that we were to join in an even more general family party? It was a long bare room, with nothing in it except a very large bed, swathed and canopied all over with heavy brown draperies, a chair, and a small table in the middle of the room, on which was a toy piano, a manual of devotion, and a little mirror made of something resembling tinfoil.