Ventilating shafts pass from one tier of cellars to the other, enabling the temperature in a certain measure to be regulated, and thereby obviate an excess of breakage. M. Werlé estimates that the loss in this respect during the first eighteen months of a cuvée amounts to 7 per cent, but subsequently is considerably less. In 1862 one Champagne manufacturer lost as much as 45 per cent of his wine by breakages. The Clicquot cuvée is made in the cave of St. William, where 120 hogsheads of wine are hauled up by means of a crane, and discharged into the vat daily as long as the operation lasts. The tirage, or bottling of the wine, ordinarily commences in the middle of May, and occupies fully a month.
M. Werlé’s private residence is close to the establishment in the Rue du Temple, and here he has collected a small gallery of high-class modern paintings by French and other artists, including Meissonier’s ‘Card-players,’ Delaroche’s ‘Beatrice Cenci on her way to Execution,’ Fleury’s ‘Charles V. picking up the brush of Titian,’ various works by the brothers Scheffer, Knaus’s highly-characteristic genre picture, ‘His Highness on a Journey,’ and several fine portraits, among which is one of Madame Clicquot, painted by Léon Coignet, when she was eighty years of age, and another of M. Werlé by the same artist, regarded as a chef-d’œuvre. Before her father’s death Madame Clicquot used to reside in the Rue de Marc, some short distance from the cellars in which her whole existence centred, in a handsome Renaissance house, said to have had some connection with the row of palaces that at one time lined the neighbouring and then fashionable Rue du Tambour. This, however, is extremely doubtful. A number of interesting and well-preserved bas-reliefs decorate one of the façades of the house looking on to the court. The figures are of the period of François Premier and his son Henri II., who inaugurated his reign with a comforting edict for the Protestants, ordaining that blasphemers were to have their tongues pierced with red-hot irons, and heretics to be burnt alive, and who had the ill-luck to lose his eye and life through a lance-thrust of the Comte de Montgomerie, captain of his Scotch guards, whilst jousting with him at a tournament held in honour of the marriage of his daughter Isabelle with the gloomy widower of Queen Mary of England, of sanguinary fame.
The first of these bas-reliefs represents two soldiers of the Swiss guard, the next a Turk and Slav tilting at each other, and then comes a scroll entwined round a thistle, and inscribed with this enigmatical motto: ‘Giane le sur ou rien.’ In the third bas-relief a couple of passionate Italians are winding up a gambling dispute with a hand-to-hand combat, in the course of which table and cards have got canted over; the fourth presents us with two French knights, armed cap-à-pie, engaged in a tourney; while in the fifth and last a couple of German lansquenets essay their gladiatorial skill with their long and dangerous weapons. Several years back a tablet was discovered in one of the cellars of the house, inscribed ‘Ci-gist vénérable religieux maistre Pierre Derclé, docteur en théologie, jadis prieur de céans. Priez Dieu pour luy. 1486,’ which would almost indicate that the house had originally a religious character, although the warlike spirit of the bas-reliefs decorating it renders any such supposition with regard to the existing building untenable. We should mention that the spaces above the porte cochère, and the window by its side, are occupied by four medallions, which present that curious mingling of classic and contemporary styles for which the epoch of the Renaissance was remarkable.