‘I suppose you think I’m a liar!’
A thing that has made me circumspect in such matters ever since.
Our way led through the market—a great iron tent, filled with the most variegated colours, voices, and smells. We roamed through damp, brilliant aisles, with vivid splendours of fruit and flowers mounting high over our heads on either hand; we explored the remarkable collections of birds, beasts, and herbs that were being confidently purchased by the housewives of Bordeaux for family consumption; and, with a bow of recognition to a poisonous barrowload of fungi, we pursued our way into the sunny street wherein was the restaurant which had been indicated to us by our late host. We presented the card entitling us to the bottle of Grand St. Lambert without delay, and it was presently borne in in state by the proprietor himself—a civility obviously owing to the curiosity that was displayed on his red and round-eyed countenance. It was a large bottle, with a beautiful white-and-gold label, and after we had scientifically smelt its bouquet, and slowly absorbed as much as we thought becoming, morally and physically, there was still two-thirds of the bottle left, far too much either to squander upon the waiter or to finish ourselves. The waiter had left a mound of grapes in front of us, and had decorously retired; on a buffet behind us were a number of old newspapers; the hand-basket was on the floor at our feet; all was as perfect as if it had occurred in a romance of detective life. My second cousin stealthily abstracted an Intransigéant of a responsible age from the buffet, wrapped up the bottle in its woolly folds, and forced it diagonally into the basket, while the various matters it dispossessed were forced, diagonally or otherwise, into our pockets, so that when I came to pay the bill, the expeditionary purse lay as deep as the coins at the base of a public building.
Libourne is only half an hour by train from Bordeaux,—a chequered half-hour of bursts in and out of tunnels, and of consequently intermittent amenities on the part of a resplendently-dressed newly-married pair, who faced us all the way there,—and the bridge that spans a placid curve of the Dordogne, under the town of Libourne, came into view so unexpectedly that we had hardly time to gather our things together before the train stopped in the station. We had been fortunate enough to have been given an introduction to a gentleman and his wife who spend each vintage season in their charming little old-fashioned country-house near Libourne, and we found that their kindness had even gone to the length of waiting for us outside the barrier that in France so relentlessly separates the travelling public from the rest of mankind. It was humiliating to discover that Monsieur and Madame A. (I suppose the time-honoured formula must again be employed) both spoke English so many thousand times better than we could speak French, that our acquaintance with that language became wholly superfluous; but it was also refreshing. It was a wonderful thing to feel that we need no more take thought to our luggage, or to the reproving or instruction of porters in a foreign tongue. Monsieur A. had a wholesome belief in female incapacity, and in an instant we found that we were no longer mere literary tramps, but had been raised to the serene and almost forgotten position of ladies of quality.
In a very short time we found ourselves being whirled off in a carriage to Quinault, the country-house aforesaid, and were being told all manner of strange things. We had not looked at a newspaper since we left Paris, and it was hard to believe that the most notable figure in Irish politics should have left them for ever, and no echo of such a thing come to us, even in the quiet, far-away vineyards of the Médoc. We were now in the St. Emilion district, and without wishing to insult the Médoc, it must be said that it cannot compare in beauty with the opposite side of the Gironde. There was an air of generous luxuriance about the vines themselves that began to realise for us the vineyards of our more poetical visions. The stunted little shrubs on which we had been forming our eye were no more to be seen. Tall bushes, trained to spread like fans on espaliers, had taken their place, and pictorially, at any rate, there can be no comparison between the two systems. There was a sunset that evening that made the first sight of the St. Emilion vines a thing greatly to be remembered. Quinault is a scientific vineyard, and the charm of colour conferred by the blue-green sulphate of copper that stains all the leaves, is a fine confirmation of the theory that the useful is necessarily the beautiful. These blue-green leaves had turned to a mysterious metallic grey in the evening light; up the middle aisle came a cart drawn by a big white horse, a scarlet-capped man was standing up in it between the barrels of grapes, his figure showing ‘dark against day’s golden death;’ after it followed a procession of vintagers, women and boys mostly, the yellow light behind them giving to the long row of figures the effect of being a company of saints on an early Italian background; and, last of all, came a little, incredibly bowed woman, who had been vintaging here at Quinault for the last eighty years—La Mère Mémé, the oldest and the most conscientious vendangeuse of the district.
‘She is always the first at the end of the row,’ we were told, ‘and she never leaves a bunch behind her, and she has eighty-seven years; n’est-ce pas, ma Mère?’
LA MÈRE MÉMÉ—ALWAYS FIRST AT THE END OF HER ROW.
Mère Mémé admitted the eighty-seven years with an almost bored acquiescence. She had been very old for so long that she was less proud of it than she had
