All the world and his wife retired early. This one learns from the Burgundian proverb already old in the time of Louis XII.
“Lever à cinq, diner à neuf
Souper à cinq, coucher à neuf
Fait vivre d’ans nonante et neuf.”
This is probably as true to-day as it was then if one had the courage to live up to it and find out.
The ancient reputation of the wine of Burgundy dates back centuries and centuries before the juice of the grape became the common drink of the French. During the famous schism which divided the Church in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Duc de Bourgogne, Philippe-le-Hardi, was deputed, in 1395, to present to Pope Benoit XIII, then living at Avignon in the Comtat, “rich presents and twenty queues of the wine of Beaune.”
History and romance have been loud in their praises of the rich red wines of Burgundy ever since the dawn of gormandizing. Petrarch has said that his best inspirations and sentiments came from the wine of Beaune, and the Avignon Popes lengthened their sojourn in their Papal City on the banks of the Rhone because of the easy transport and the low price of the fine wines of Beaune. “There is not in Italy,” they said, “the wine of Beaune nor the means of getting it.”
The heart of old Burgundy, that is, the Côte d’Or of to-day, is the region of France the most densely wooded after the Vosges. Great forests exploited for their wood are everywhere, oak and beech predominating. Only the coteaux, the low-lying hillsides, where the vines are chiefly grown, are bare of forest growth.
Two great rivers cross the province from north to south, and two from east to west, the Aube, the Dheune, the Saône and the Vingeanne, and the Seine itself takes birth between Saint Seine and Chanceaux, this last, like most of the great rivers of Europe, being but a humble rivulet at the commencement. Two canals furnish an economical means of communication, and are really remarkable waterways. The Canal de Bourgogne joins up the Saône and the Seine, and more important still is that which joins the Rhône and Rhine.
Eight “Routes Royales” crossed the province in old monarchical days, and where once rolled princely corteges now whiz automobiles without count.
In the seventeenth century from Paris to Dijon was a journey of eight days in winter and seven in summer, by the malle-poste. One departure a week served what traffic there was, and the price was twenty-four livres (francs) a head, with baggage charged at three sols a pound. The departure from Paris was from the old auberge “Aux Quatre Fils Aymon,” and more frequently than not the announcements read that the coach would leave “as soon as possible” after the appointed hour.
Whatever feudal reminiscence may linger in the minds of the readers of old chronicles let no one forget that France in general, and Burgundy in particular, is no longer a land of poverty where everybody but the capitalist has to pick up fagots for fires. Far from it; the peasant hereabouts, the worker in the fields, may lack many of the commonly accepted luxuries of life, but he eats and drinks as abundantly as the seemingly more prosperous dweller in the towns, and if not of meat three times a day (the worn-out, threadbare argument of the English and American traveller who looks not below the surface in continental Europe) it is because he doesn’t crave it. That he is the better in mind and body for the lack of it goes without saying.