‘AU BEAU SEXE!’
Naturally, in France as elsewhere, the sparkling vintage of the Marne maintains its claims to be reckoned the wine of beauty and fashion, and more especially in beauty’s gayer hours. A glass of Champagne and a biscuit de Reims has been a refection which, though often verbally declined, was in the end pretty sure to be accepted from the days of the merveilleuses and incroyables, through those of the lionnes, down to the present epoch of the cocodettes de la haute gomme. Neither at ceremonial banquets nor at ordinary dinner-parties among our neighbours does Champagne hold, however, so prominent a place as amongst ourselves, owing to the great variety of other wines—all capable of appreciation by trained palates—entering into the composition of these festive repasts. In fact, a repas de noces is the only occasion on which Champagne flows in France with anything like the freedom to which we are accustomed; and then it is that its exhilarating effect is marked, as some portly old boy rises with twinkling eye to propose the health of the bride, or of that beau sexe to which he feels bound to profess himself deeply devoted. At such open-air gatherings as the races at Longchamps and Chantilly, the buffet will be besieged by a succession of frail fair ones in the most elaborate toilettes de courses, seeking to nerve themselves to witness a coming struggle, or to console themselves for the defeat of the horse backed by their favoured admirer. And, when writing of this wine, it is altogether impossible to omit a reference to those tête-à-tête repasts en cabinet particulier, of which it is the indispensable adjunct. Its mollifying influence on the feminine heart on occasions such as these has been happily hit off by Charles Monselet in his Polichinelle au Restaurant:
‘POLICHINELLE AU RESTAURANT.
I.
In a cabinet of Vachette,
Pomponnette
Listens to the pressing lover;