THE ÆSTHETIC DAUGHTER OF THE HOTEL.
of such æsthetic culture that we refused at first to believe that they were preparing our déjeuner; and when later we seated ourselves at the table within the French window, and received from the hands of the wearer of the pince-nez the delicious omelette that had been cooked in the open air, we felt embarrassed by a sense of the favour conferred. Our hostesses must, we fear, have been taken at a slight disadvantage by us; we felt rather than saw some want of completeness in their attire during the first stages of déjeuner,—a bareness as to neck, a skimpiness as to skirt; but as the meal progressed, so did the toilettes. By the time that we had finished our dish of smelts, with their wonderful wood-sorrel sauce, the wearer of the pince-nez was glowing in a scarlet smocked silk jersey; and when the roast chicken was placed on the table, her sister had endued a flowing skirt, and wreathed her throat with some ten or twelve yards of amber beads. We could not swear that the pince-nez themselves had been changed, but certainly it was only when dessert was arrived at that we noticed for the first time that they were gold-rimmed, and were attached by a slim gold chain to a brooch of barbaric splendour.
It was a dessert greatly to be remembered that we had at the Hôtel Dussaut: the monster pears and grapes, the rich velvety wine of the district, and finally, the spécialité of the town, ordered expressly for us by Monsieur A., the macaroons made at the convent according to an ancient recipe known to the nuns. Certainly the ecclesiastical macaroon transcends the secular variety; these come in warm and palpitating, still cleaving to the white square of paper on which they had been baked, looking like lumps of yellow foam at the foot of a waterfall, melting in the mouth as foam itself might melt, and suggesting the idea that the conventual life has its alleviations.
A small salon opened out of the little verandah room in which our lunch was served, a sitting-room replete with photograph frames, crochet antimacassars, oil paintings, and green velvet furniture, and blocked in one corner by the altogether astonishing circumstances of a bed, whose sumptuous draperies suggested the proscenium of a puppet show. The window looked down into a precipitous street at the back of the hotel, and, craning out, the pointed arch of an old gateway was visible at the top of the hill between the crooked lines of houses, the Porte de la Cadène, so a little old-fashioned guide-book to St. Emilion informed us. There was a long explanation of the name, from which we gathered that it had something to say to the bar that once fastened the gate, but what exactly it was not given to our poor intelligence to discover. Whenever the guide-book felt that it was becoming unbefittingly lucid, it threw in a few words of patois, or early French in inverted commas, and went full speed ahead again, secure from pursuit. The photographs that thronged the room, like Ruskin’s pine trees elsewhere referred to, ‘on barren heights and inaccessible ledges, in quiet multitudes,’ proved a more attractive study than the guide-book, and we travelled slowly round the collection till we came upon a cabinet-sized head of a young lady with disordered hair, pince-nez, a swan-like length of throat, and an evening dress of which only a single row of Valenciennes trimming showed above the lower edge of the photograph. We sat down before it with a gasp, as we recognised in this ethereal being one of our late cooks, and at the same instant Madame A. made the discovery of a dwarf easel on the floor at the foot of the bed, on which a still larger portrait of a lady, in the dress of a Russian princess, with an inscription to the effect that she was Madame Dussaut herself, owner of the hotel, and mother of the two peeresses who had served for us our admirable déjeuner. We retired after this, and said that it would be better to go away and see the town before we found out that these people were closely related to the Bourbons, which seemed the next thing to expect.
The streets had the noonday heat and silence about them when we emerged from beneath the chestnut tree, and went downhill to where a lofty yellow cliff towered sheer in the hollow of the town, carrying on its crest the crocketed spire that we had seen lifting its long throat above its retainers like a serene highness, as we drove through the vineyards to St. Emilion. Low down on the cliff, below the reach of the swinging arms of a huge old fig tree that had rooted itself on the verge of the yellow rock, were carvings like the façade of a church, and finally a door disclosed itself, through which we plunged after our guides, much as we had plunged into the private cellar of the Rothschilds. We were in the famous monolith church, hewn and dug in the living cliff by monks, headed by the industrious St. Emilion, in the eighth century, and going down a few steps to the level of the floor, we looked about us in the extremely moderate light that came through sloping shafts in the thickness of the cliffs sixty feet above. The fig tree roots had burrowed through the cliff, and hung in loops and knots from the roof, intersecting the cold and dusty streaks of light, and the flicker of a sun-lit green spray at the mouth of one of the shafts gave the solitary touch of colour to the sombre vault. It was a bare, immense place, with two rows of square pillars of solid rock supporting the arched roof, black with age, empty of everything save a stone altar or two, and a few tombs, dead silent, and abounding in dark hiding-places for rats and bats. ‘All this makes you experience I know not what sentiment of religious terror,’ exclaims the guide-book at this juncture, in discreet rhapsody, having cantered through a page of architectural French, that had almost resulted in a case of ‘Bellows to mend’ for the owner of that admirable dictionary.
Our sentiments were far from religious after a tour of that church, during which we had seen some hundreds of names, addresses, ages, birthdays, engagements, and other data inscribed in the soft stone by tourists. Only those who have seen the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey gashed with vile initials, could believe the ravages of vulgarity at St. Emilion. The pillars and tombs were fully garnished with these hall marks of the barbarian. That was only to be expected, as even the bones in the tombs had been carried away bit by bit as agreeable souvenirs, but one would have imagined that the altar might have been spared. It was here, however, and on the old bas-relief above the altar, that a gentleman called Merritt had achieved his deadliest triumphs; we tracked him subsequently through the grotto of St. Emilion and the monastery cloisters, but this was his highest effort, and probably the one that he recounts with most pride to his envious acquaintances. May the milkman and butcher’s boy scribble his name upon the imitation granite of his suburban door-posts, and may it be wiped out from the will of his father-in-law!
We went on into a sort of annexe of the church, into which they used to shoot people through oubliettes when they became superfluous, and thence we scrambled out into the street again, and across to the grotto of St. Emilion. Apparently the saint had not been able to find anything above ground that combined privacy with excruciating discomfort, and accordingly scratched out this rabbit hole a dozen feet below the rest of the community, and lived there in damp and darkness for twenty or thirty years. His furniture was limited. The light of a match showed a bed cut in the wall, with a bolster of the same sympathetic description, a stone block for a table, another for a chair, and a holy well in an alcove. The old woman who had charge of the grotto struck another match, and held it low in the alcove of the sacred well for us to see the dark gleam of the water. It was more like a shallow pool than a well, and the water lay still and perfectly transparent upon its yellow bed. Its ancient nymph scooped up a tumblerful with the assurance that it was the best in the world, and when we had satisfactorily tasted it, she lowered her match and said archly, ‘Et les épingles. Regardez les épingles, mesdemoiselles.’
We regarded as desired, and saw lying at the bottom of the pool a small collection of pins, some old and rusty enough to have fastened up St. Emilion’s gown on wet days, others new and glittering. These, it was explained by the old lady with many knowing side-glances at our companions, were a means of fortune-telling peculiar to the sacred well. Gentlemen and ladies who visited it were accustomed to drop two pins into it, and if these fell so as to form a cross, then the thrower would be married before the year was out; this was asseverated with chapter and verse, and the testimony of brides and bridegrooms who had returned there on their honeymoons. I searched silently and secretly in my inner economy for a
