‘He wants you to dance with him, and you will have to do it,’ whispered Madame A. to her, with unsympathetic ecstasy; ‘it is the custom of the vintage.’
In another moment my cousin was swept into the line of the top couples, and her partner, a pallid, oily youth of Jewish aspect, was whirling her down the room with such a coruscation of capers as would have done credit to a catherine-wheel. What exactly she looked like as, hopelessly conspicuous in
‘HE WANTS YOU TO DANCE WITH HIM, AND YOU WILL HAVE TO DO IT; IT IS THE CUSTOM OF THE VINTAGE.’
her white dress, she floundered, hopped, and jigged through the mêlée, time was not given to me to determine. A blue-clad figure was already bowing in front of me, and, as two warm, ungloved hands took mine, the only balm left in Gilead was the sight of Madame A. cleaving the flood of dancers in the arms of a little creature whom I took for a stout child of ten years old, till I subsequently saw his moustache.
The contre-danse in which we were thus embroiled stormed on with conversational intervals between the figures for about twenty minutes. It was an inflamed variety of kitchen Lancers, danced with a rhythmic fury, and larded with impromptu flourishes on the part of the gentlemen. We envied the bolster as she bobbed serenely past us, riding the waves of the contre-danse like a bottle in a chopping sea, while we were struggling in its depths and trying with slides and springs to overtake its impossible rhythm. A reel at a tenants’ dance in Galway, the ‘D’Alberts’ at a sergeants’ ball at the Curragh, the ‘barn-dance’ on a carpet after dinner on New Year’s night,—in all these violent amusements we have competed with a measure of success, but candour compels us to state that our début in the contre-danse at Château Loudenne was somewhat of a failure. Sorry spectacles as we were by the time its five or six figures were over, we should have been still more dilapidated had it not been for those intervals wherein we were talked to by our respective vinedressers as agreeably, as politely, and with as easy a selection of topics as if they were daily in the habit of discoursing to English ladies. In this connection we may say that not one of these peasants of the most wine-making district in the world owed any of their hilarity to the claret in which they lived, moved, and had their being; in fact, not once during our fortnight in the Médoc did we see any man who had taken more than was good for him.
More and more dances followed, till our legs ached, and the cement floor wore holes in our shoes, and then, as we were preparing to go back to the house, it was said that ces dames ought absolutely to see the ‘Bignou.’ The ‘Bignou’ sounded like the name of some monster of the middle ages, and might have been the local name for a werewolf for all we knew; but we stayed, nevertheless, and presently saw entering by another door nothing more alarming than four little old women. It was explained to us that the ‘Bignou’ was an ancient dance, almost obsolete in that part of the country, and that these four were the only worthy exponents of it, and had been actually awakened out of their first sleep to dance it for us. A rough-looking boy was hoisted on to a barrel at the end of the room—a boy who had come all the way from Brittany for the vintage (if, as is highly probable, I did not misunderstand my partner), bringing with him the little wooden instrument upon which he now set up a shrill piping that sounded like a penny whistle with a bluebottle in it. This archaic flute was itself the ‘Bignou’ from which the dance took its name, and the extraordinary tune which it buzzed forth might have been composed by Tubal Cain. The four old danseuses, in their white caps and full black skirts, took their positions in the middle of the room with a prim consciousness of their own importance, and all that we had yet seen was child’s play compared with the intricate measure
THE LITTLE FIGURES FLEW IN DARTING CIRCLES, LIKE FLIES IN A POOL.
that followed. The little figures flew in darting circles, like flies on a pool, to the mad squeals of the ‘Bignou,’ their list-shod feet slapping the floor in absolute accord, and their full skirts and white cap-strings leaping out behind them in time to each angular twist of the tune. As we watched them we no longer wondered at their age. Steps such as those could not be learned in less than seventy years.