The last hour or two before Bordeaux would have been much harder to bear but for a display of sheet lightning, the like of which we had never seen before. The sudden beautiful flicker played hide-and-seek like a living creature among the curtains of cloud, flashing about all the points of the compass between south and east, or sometimes thrusting to and fro across an opening, like glimpses of the rapiers in a giants’ fencing bout. It was under this mocking, elfish light that we first sighted Bordeaux and its river, and realised that the time had come for us to strap up our rugs, and say ‘pardon’ in our best French accent to the old gentleman on whose feet we trod as we did so, and to drag our stiff bodies forth into the electric glare of the station. We had reached such a stage of fatigue and demoralisation that we should rather have stayed in the carriage all night, and gone on with the old lady to a place she called ‘Erin,’ in a fine Hammersmith twang. We should not have cared much whether it proved to be the land of our birth, or Irun, on the Spanish frontier, which we now believe to have been her destination.
We had a long quarter of an hour to wait before the Douane could bring itself to give up its dead, and there was another quarter of an hour of driving through deserted and badly-lighted streets before we got to our hotel. We crossed a bridge that must have been half a mile long, we feigned to each other an interest in a half-seen gateway at the end of it, and our hearts were all the time groping in a certain hold-all, where lay a spirit-kettle, a teapot, and half a pound of English tea. The offensively urbane and wide-awake head waiter, with his clean-shaven face and foxy eyes, had some evident difficulty in repressing his scorn when he heard that he was to faire monter to our room a little milk and hot water, but it mounted to our third floor for all that. It was a blow to find a skin on the top of the milk that showed it had once been boiled: we did not know then that French hotels considered milk in its raw, uncooked state to be as baneful as if it were water.
Our room was large, and of a somewhat gloomy magnificence, with towering bed canopies, and darkly-gleaming mahogany; and as our one bougie—valued in the bill at a franc—contended with its surroundings, we felt like a chapter out of almost any of Scott’s novels—the chapter where the hero spends a night in some one’s private and luxurious dungeon, and having obtained writing materials, has heard the last retreating footsteps of an attendant who has unostentatiously locked and double-locked the door. What we heard principally, while we drank our surreptitious midnight cup of tea, was not the howling of the storm or the hoarse baying of a bloodhound in the courtyard, but the snoring of some one in the next room. It was hard to believe that the artist was not doing it on purpose; each snore was so painstaking, so measured, and had such a careful crescendo in its vibrating fortissimo. He had certainly brought the accomplishment to a high degree of perfection, and if he does not die of concussion of the brain in the attempt, he ought, with a little more practice, to be able to empty any hotel in a single night.
It was broad summer in Bordeaux, so we discovered next morning when we escaped from the
OUR SURREPTITIOUS MIDNIGHT CUP OF TEA.
half-light of the coffee-room and walked forth to see the town. We went down to the quays and crawled along them in the shade, looking at the immense river, and the long ‘winter woodland’ of masts of all countries, stretching away seemingly to the Bay of Biscay: it did not matter that the water was the colour of café au lait, churned to dirty froth by innumerable screws and paddles, or that the hoarse screams of steam whistles ascended through black smoke to the brilliant heavens; all was new and delightful, and of a cheerfulness unknown to the British Isles. It was here that we began to realise what the wine country could do when it gave its mind to it. The great quays were packed close with barrels as far as the eye could follow—barrels on whose ends were hieroglyphs that told of aristocratic birth as plainly as the armorial bearings on a carriage; the streets were full of long narrow carts like ladders on wheels, laden also with barrels, one behind the other; and about every five minutes, as it seemed to us, some big ship moved out from the wharf, filled to the brim with claret, and slipped down the yellow current to other climes. As we sat under the chestnut trees and watched the tide of the traffic, we began to notice that there are more grey horses in France than one would have imagined there could have been in the world. The streets of Paris are mottled by them; the streets of Bordeaux are mottled in the opposite way—that is to say, the dark horses are like specks among the white, and in the Médoc the necessary difficulty of providing black horses for funerals can probably be only solved by blacklead.
We carried a map of Bordeaux in our hands, and stopped many times to study it as we strolled along, causing thereby an ecstasy of interest among the sailors and the women sitting at their stalls of strange fruits and fungi. It was disappointing that French wit did not on these occasions elaborate any jest more sparkling than ‘Ah! Les Anglaises!’ though the inhabitants seemed to find the humour of the situation satiatingly expressed in this simple formula. Once, in Paris, a butcher’s boy screamed ‘Angleesh spock-en’ after us, and convulsed the whole street with the sally; but we thought that we could have produced something better any day on Patrick’s Bridge, Cork. We perseveringly ciphered out our route to the church of St. Michel, assisted a good deal, it must be admitted, by the fact that its steeple is the tallest thing in Bordeaux. We were getting very hot indeed as we toiled through the Tour de Cailhau—so hot that, as a Galway woman once remarked, ‘it would have been a pleasure to any one to lie down and die,’ and we longed to sit down and rest on the kerbstone in the shade of the Tour beside a man in a blue blouse who was sharpening a razor in his entirely filthy palm.
This being out of the question, we struggled on towards St. Michel, promising ourselves a bath of coolness and darkness under its lofty roof, and more especially in its underground caverns, where inhabit the celebrated mummies that have been preserved by the soil of the graveyard from dissolution. We crossed the last and sunniest street, and passed through a swing door into a large church, considerably hotter than anything or anywhere outside, and with an atmosphere of an unknown and stifling kind. We walked round it in silence, and, looking at each other, as we fanned ourselves with guide-books, we felt that our last chance of averting heat-apoplexy was to go underground at once and see the mummies.