[206] ] Louis Perrier’s Mémoire sur le Vin de Champagne. The pretended secret of Dom Perignon, quoted from the Mémoire of 1718, and mentioning the addition of sugar to the wine of Hautvillers, is flatly contradicted by Dom Grossart’s letter to M. Dherbès (see page [41] ante). But it is probable that the suggestion thus made public was acted upon, though at first only timidly.
[207] ] Chaptal’s Art de faire du Vin. As Minister of the Interior, he forwarded the results of his experiments to the préfets, with the recommendation to spread them throughout their departments.
[208] ] Louis Perrier’s Mémoire sur le Vin de Champagne.
[209] ] Letter of M. Nicolas Perrier to M. Cadet-Devaux, dated August 1801.
[210] ] As bourru, tocane, and en nouveau.
[211] ] Louis Perrier’s Mémoire sur le Vin de Champagne.
[212] ] The letter in which he mentions this is extant, but the secret which was enclosed in it is missing.
[213] ] Dom Grossart, who had retired to Montier-en-Der in 1790, was unacquainted with this plan when he wrote to M. Dherbès in 1821, although it had been practised for twenty years past.
[214] ] In a MS. quoted in Varin’s Archives Administratives de Reims.
[215] ] The gifts presented by the municipality on this occasion included flowers, pears, and gingerbread, Reims being as famed for the latter as for its wines. The guild of gingerbread-makers at Reims was established in the sixteenth century, and from that time forward was engaged in continual squabbles with the bakers and pastrycooks of the city, who could not be brought to understand that they had not the right to make gingerbread. Countless reams of paper were scribbled over by the lawyers of the two contending interests; but though the Bailli of Reims on several occasions pronounced a formal verdict, to the effect that no one but a sworn and accepted gingerbread-maker should have act or part in the making of the indigestible delicacy, the contumacious bakers continued to treat his edicts as naught. Eventually a royal edict of 1776, which suppressed the privileges of the majority of the guilds in France, deprived the Reims gingerbread-makers for ever of the right of figuring with swords by their sides and three-cornered hats on their heads at all local ceremonies, civil or religious, and threw their trade open to all.