AVENAY AS SEEN FROM THE RAILWAY.
The vineyards of Avenay also date prior to the thirteenth century, mention being frequently made of them in the charters of that epoch.[385] Their best wine, which Saint Evremond extolled so highly, is vintaged to-day up the slopes of Mont Hurlé. Avenay itself is a tumbledown little village situated in the direction of Reims, and the year of our visit we found the yield from its vineyards had been scarcely more than the third of an average one, and that the wine produced at the first pressure of the grapes had been sold for 500 francs the pièce. We tasted there some very fair still red wine, made from the same grapes as Champagne, remarkably deep in colour, full of body, and possessing that slight sweet bitterish flavour which characterises certain of the better-class growths of the South of France.
Although at Avenay vineyards cover the slopes as of yore, when Marmontel used to wander amongst them in company with his inamorata Mademoiselle Hévin de Navarre, no traces remain of the ancient royal abbey—founded by St. Bertha in 660, on the martyrdom of her husband, St. Gombert, one of the early Christian missionaries to Scotland—where Charles V. took up his quarters when invading Champagne in 1544, and where the deputies of the Leaguers of Reims and of the Royalists of Châlons met in October 1592 to settle the terms of the ‘Traité des Vendanges,’ securing to both parties liberty to gather in the vintage unmolested.[386] The villagers still point out the house where Henri Quatre slept, and the window from which he harangued the populace during the visit paid by him to Madame Françoise de la Marck, the Abbess of Avenay,[387] in August of the same year. This, by the way, does not seem to have been the only occasion when the spot was honoured by the presence of Royalty; for a tradition, which, although unsupported by any documentary evidence, appears to be worthy of credence, is current to the effect that Marie Antoinette paid a visit to the Abbey of Avenay during her sojourn at Louvois as the guest of Madame Adelaïde in 1786. The spring which, according to the legend, gushed forth when St. Bertha, in imitation of Moses, struck the rock with her distaff, is still shown to travellers; and scandal has gone so far as to say that recourse is sometimes had to it to eke out the native vintage.
On leaving Avenay we ascended the hills to Mutigny, and wound round thence to Cumières, on the banks of the Marne, finding the vintage in full operation all throughout the route. The vineyards of Cumières—classed as a second cru—yield a wine which, though celebrated in the verses of Eustache Deschamps, a famous and prolific Champenois poet of the fourteenth century, varies to-day considerably in quality, the best coming from the ‘Côtes-à-bras,’ the property of the Abbey of Hautvillers in Dom Perignon’s day. The Cumières vineyards join those of Hautvillers on the one side and Damery on the other, the latter a cosy little river-side village, where the bon Roi Henri sought relaxation from the turmoils of war in the society of the fair Anne du Pay, sa belle hôtesse, as the gallant Béarnais was wont to style her. Damery also claims to be the birthplace of Adrienne Lecouvreur, the celebrated actress of the Regency, and mistress of the Maréchal de Saxe, who coaxed her out of her 30,000 l. of savings to enable him to prosecute his suit with the obese Anna Iwanowna, niece of Peter the Great, which, had he only been successful, would have secured the future hero of Fontenoy the coveted dukedom of Courland. From Cumières can be distinguished far away on the horizon the ruined tower of the bourg of Châtillon, the birthplace of Pope Urban II., preacher of the first Crusade, and a devotee of the wine of Ay.[388]
It was during the budding spring-time when we made our formal pilgrimage to Hautvillers across the swollen waters of the Marne at Epernay. Our way lay for a time along a straight level poplar-bordered road, with verdant meadows on either hand; then diverged sharply to the left, and we commenced ascending the vine-clad hills, on a narrow plateau of which the church and abbey remains are picturesquely perched. The closely-planted vines extend along the undulating slopes to the summit of the plateau, and wooded heights rise up beyond, affording shelter from the bleak winds that sweep over here from the north. Spite of the reputation which the wine of Hautvillers enjoyed a couple of centuries ago, and its association with the origin of vin mousseux, the vineyards to-day appear to have been relegated to the rank of a second cru, their produce ordinarily commanding less than two-thirds of the price obtained for the Ay and Verzenay growths.[389]
The church of Hautvillers and the remains of the abbey are situated at the farther extremity of the village, at the end of its one long street, named, pertinently enough, the Rue de Bacchus. Time, the iconoclasts of the great Revolution, and the quieter, yet far more destructive, labours of the Bande Noire, have spared but little of the royal abbey of St. Peter, where Dom Perignon lighted upon his happy discovery of the effervescent quality of Champagne. The quaint old church, scraps of which date back to the twelfth century, the remnants of the cloisters, and one of the abbey’s ancient gateways, are all that remain to testify to the grandeur of its past, when it was the proud boast of the brotherhood that it had given nine archbishops to the see of Reims, and two-and-twenty abbots to various celebrated monasteries.
