I mix with the crowd. I inquire who was this Raoul Laval who is starting on his journey to the great Terminus. ‘An employé, monsieur, in the great shop yonder,’ is the answer. ‘So this is the funeral of a little clerk in a big shop,’ I say to myself. ‘Why, then, this big crowd?’ The hearse starts. Then, to my astonishment, I behold this great crowd form behind the hearse—old men and women, young men and maidens, two and two, until the line of procession reaches as far as the eye can see. The hearse is a black dot far away, and still the mourners fall in and follow the little clerk to his grave. There are four gentlemen who hold the tasselled cords of the pall. These are the proprietors of the great emporium. Then come the relatives—Raoul’s mother and his wife—then all the gentlemen in the office, then the gentlemen behind the counter and the smart shopgirls and the humble little workgirls, the porters and the packers, and the needlewomen, and the coachmen who drive out the carts, and the boys who deliver the parcels. Every living soul, great and small, rich and poor, all who earn their daily bread in that big drapery house where Raoul Laval was a humble clerk, have turned out to-day to do him honour and to see him home.
Slowly the long line of mourners (I count 760) passes on its way up the broad street until it is out of sight. I am left alone looking after it. Not quite alone, for an old man, who leans upon a stick and is bent with age, stands beside me, and shades his time-dulled eyes from the fierce sun, and peers through the distance to get the last glimpse of the fast-vanishing cortége. ‘It is an honour to him, poor fellow!’ I say to the patriarch, as we turn away together; ‘a great honour for the whole firm to have followed him like this.’ ‘Yes, monsieur,’ he answers, ‘it is an honour; but he deserves it. He has been a faithful servant to the firm for twenty years, and everybody respected him. We shall all miss him now he is gone.’ ‘Ah! you are of the firm, too?’ ‘Yes, sir; I am the concierge. Poor Monsieur Raoul! Always a kind word for everybody, he had; and always at his post, monsieur—always at his post. The firm has lost a brave fellow—God rest his soul!’
Our ways divided; the old concierge went back to the shop, and I strolled on to the busy quay, teeming with colour and movement and life. But though I looked on the great river with its forest of masts, and listened to the babble of the thousand labourers on the quay as they loaded and unloaded the mighty ships, my thoughts were with the little clerk of the big drapery shop who was having so grand a funeral.
Yes, a grand funeral. The horses were broken-kneed, the coffin was cheap and common, the pall was threadbare and faded; but that great crowd of genuine mourners was something that a monarch might have envied. For every man and woman, every boy and girl in that long line of witnesses to his worth, loved and respected the man. Happy Raoul Laval! Lucky little clerk to have managed your life so well! How many of us whose names are known to fame—how many of us who fret and fume, and wear our hearts out in the battle for renown—would fall back into the ranks, and toil on quietly as you did to gain such love and respect and sympathy when our work is done, and we are put to bed to rest through the long dark night that must be passed ere we awaken to that brighter day which no living eyes may see!
Bordeaux is big and clean, and strikes one as a healthy town. The streets are wide and well kept, and parks and open spaces are plentiful. The people of Bordeaux have a healthy, happy, prosperous look. They walk briskly, instead of slouching about like the people of Marseilles. In fact, Bordeaux is the exact opposite of Marseilles. If you particularly wanted to see what cholera was like, and had to pick out a town where there was a fine chance of getting it, you couldn’t do better than try Marseilles. If you wanted to escape from the epidemic, and get to a town where there was the least probability of its following you, you couldn’t do better than settle in Bordeaux. I can’t put the difference between the two towns in a more striking way than that.
The French equivalent of ‘carrying coals to Newcastle’ is ‘carrying wine to Bordeaux.’ You haven’t been in Bordeaux five minutes before the presence of an enormous wine trade makes itself felt. Wine stares at you and confronts you everywhere. The wine lists in the hotels are huge volumes. Hundreds of varieties of wines, red and white, are elaborately set out. First you have the names of the ‘cru’s,’ then the year, the price, the proprietors, and the place where the wine was bottled. You can read down a whole page of red wines, the cheapest of which is 25 francs a bottle, and the dearest 100 francs. These wine lists, which are handed to you in every hotel and restaurant, are magnificently bound in morocco and lettered in gold, and it is set forth that the ‘cellars’ from which you are drinking belong to a house founded so many years after the Flood, and that it has ‘a speciality for the grand wines of Bordeaux, bottled at the châteaux, with the mark of their authentic origin on the corks, capsules, and labels.’
If ever one drinks genuine ‘Bordeaux,’ it ought to be at Bordeaux. At Yarmouth one does not suspect the freshness of the bloater; in Devonshire one blindly accepts the cream; at Banbury nothing can shake one’s faith in the cake; and at Whitstable one does not say to the waiter at one’s hotel, as he hands you the oysters, ‘Waiter, are these really natives?’ At Bordeaux I was prepared to gulp down even the vin ordinaire with the sublime faith of a Christian martyr; but, lounging on the great quays of Bordeaux, my faith sustained a shock from which it will never recover, and this is how it happened:
I am of a curious and inquiring turn of mind. When I saw great ships being unloaded, and casks of wine being piled high upon the quays, I said to my companion, ‘Albert Edward, mon ami’ (Albert Edward are the Christian names of my travelling companion), ‘tell me is not this strange? Behold, here are vessels which are actually carrying wine to Bordeaux! Go and gather information.’ My companion departed, and presently returned armed—nay, actually bristling—with facts.
The wine which we saw was wine imported from Spain. Enormous quantities of common Spanish wines are brought periodically from Spain to Bordeaux, and are there mixed with the ‘wines of the country.’ This discovery was a great blow to me; but I had a still greater blow when I found tremendous cargoes of all sorts of chemicals being unloaded, and I learnt that these also were imported for the purpose of manufacturing Bordeaux wines. Of course, the high-priced old wines are above suspicion; but I don’t think I shall ever recover my faith in the vin ordinaire, after seeing that tremendous importation of Spanish wines and chemicals.
The fact is that Bordeaux has for a long time past been unable to meet the tremendous demands for its wines. The phylloxera has further increased the difficulty by ravaging the vineyards. So Nature having failed, Art steps in to supply the deficiency.