All this was altered when ‘the King enjoyed his own again;’ for the Restoration made Champagne—that is, the still red wine of the province—the most fashionable, if not the most popular, wine in England. At the Court of Louis XIV. the future Merry Monarch and his faithful followers had acquired a taste for the wines of France, and they brought back this taste,[264] together with sundry others of a far more reprehensible character, with them to England. One of the first and most acceptable gifts of Louis to his brother-sovereign on the latter’s recall was ‘two hundred hogsheads of excellent wine—Champagne, Burgundy, and Hermitage.’[265] Returning home more French than the French themselves, the late exiles ruminated on the flesh-pots of Egypt, and sighed; and we can readily picture a gallant who had seen hot service under Condé or Turenne exclaiming to his friend and fellow-soldier:
‘Ah, Courtine, must we be always idle? Must we never see our glorious days again? When shall we be rolling in the lands of milk and honey, encamped in large luxuriant vineyards, where the loaded vines cluster about our tents, drink the rich juice just pressed from the plump grape?’[266]
And that friend replying:
‘Ah, Beaugard, those days have been; but now we must resolve to content ourselves at an humble rate. Methinks it is not unpleasant to consider how I have seen thee in a large pavilion drowning the heat of the day in Champagne wines—sparkling sweet as those charming beauties whose dear remembrance every glass recorded—with half a dozen honest fellows more.’[267]
Demand created supply, until, in 1667, a few years after the Restoration, France furnished two-fifths of the amount of wine consumed in the kingdom;[268] and the taste of the royal sybarite for the light-coloured wines of the Marne seems to be hinted at in Malagene’s exclamation:
‘I have discovered a treasure of pale wine.... I assure you ’tis the same the King drinks of.’[269]
St. Evremond, who, though not precisely cast by Nature from ‘the mould of form,’ fulfilled for many years the duties of arbiter elegantiarum at Charles’s graceless Court, decidedly did his best to render the Champagne flûte ‘the glass of fashion.’ Ever ready to speak in praise of the wines of Ay, Avenay, and Reims,[270] the mentor of the Count de Grammont strove by example as well as by precept to win converts to his creed. In verse he declares that the beauties of the country fail to console him for the absence of Champagne; regrets that the season of the wines of the Marne is over, and that the yield of those of the Mountain had failed; and shudders at the prospect of being obliged to have recourse to the Loire, to Bordeaux, or to Cahors for the wine he will have to drink.[271]