May 10. Nismes. Lunel. Hills on the right, plains on the left. The soil reddish, a little stony, and of middling quality. The produce, olives, mulberries, vines, corn, St. foin. No wood and few inclosures. Lunel is famous for its vin de muscat blanc, thence called Lunel, or vin muscat de Lunel. It is made from the raisin muscat, without fermenting the grain in the hopper. When fermented it makes a red muscat, taking the tinge from the dissolution of the skin of the grape, which injures the quality. When a red muscat is required, they prefer coloring it with a little Alicant wine. But the white is best. The piece of two hundred and forty bottles, after being properly drawn off from its lees, and ready for bottling, costs from one hundred and twenty to two hundred livres, the first quality and last vintage. It cannot be bought old, the demand being sufficient to take it all the first year. They are not more than from fifty to one hundred pieces a year, made of this first quality. A setterie yields about one piece, and my informer supposes there are about two setteries in an arpent. Portage to Paris by land is fifteen livres the quintal. The best recoltes are these of M. Bouquet and M. Tremoulet. The vines are in rows four feet apart, every way.
May 11. Montpelier. Snow on the Cevennes, still visible from here. With respect to the muscat grape, of which the wine is made, there are two kinds, the red and the white. The first has a red skin, but a white juice. If it be fermented in the cuve, the coloring matter which resides in the skin is imparted to the wine. If not fermented in the cuve, the wine is white. Of the white grape, only a white wine can be made. The species of St. foin cultivated here by the name of sparsette, is the hedysarum onobryches. They cultivate a great deal of madder (garance) rubia tinctorum here, which is said to be immensely profitable. Monsieur de Gouan tells me that the pine, of which they use the burs for fuel, is the pinus sativus, being two leaved. They use for an edging to the borders of their gardens, the santolina, which they call garderobe. I find the yellow clover here, in a garden; and the large pigeon succeeding well, confined in a house.
May 12. Frontignan. Some tolerably good plains in olives, vines, corn, St. foin, and lucerne. A great proportion of the hills are waste. There are some inclosures of stone, and some sheep. The first four years of madder are unproductive; the fifth and sixth yield the whole value of the land. Then it must be renewed. The sparsette is the common or true St. foin. It lasts about five years; in the best land it is cut twice, in May and September, and yields three thousand pounds of dry hay to the setterie, the first cutting, and five hundred pounds the second. The setterie is of seventy-five dextres en tout sens, supposed about two arpents. Lucerne is the best of all forage; it is sowed here in the broadcast, and lasts about twelve or fourteen years. It is cut four times a year, and yields six thousand pounds of dry hay at the four cuttings, to the setterie. The territory in which the vin muscat de Frontignan is made, is about a league of three thousand toises long, and one-fourth of a league broad. The soil is reddish and stony, often as much stone as soil. On the left, it is a plain, on the right, hills. There are made about one thousand pieces (of two hundred and fifty bottles each) annually, of which six hundred are of the first quality, made on the coteaux. Of these, Madame Soubeinan makes two hundred, Monsieur Reboulle, ninety. Monsieur Lambert, médicin de la faculté de Montpelier, sixty, Monsieur Thomas, notaire, fifty, Monsieur Argilliers, fifty, Monsieur Audibert, forty; equal to four hundred and ninety; and there are some small proprietors who make small quantities. The first quality is sold, brut, for one hundred and twenty livres the piece; but it is then thick, and must have a winter and the fouet to render it potable and brilliant. The fouet is like a chocolate mill, the handle of iron, the brush of stiff hair. In bottles, this wine costs twenty-four sous, the bottles, &c., included. It is potable the April after it is made, is best that year, and after ten years begins to have a pitchy taste, resembling it to Malaga. It is not permitted to ferment more than half a day, because it would not be so liquorish. The best color, and its natural one, is the amber. By force of whipping, it is made white, but loses favor. There are but two or three pieces a year of red muscat made; there being but one vineyard of the red grape, which belongs to a baker called Pascal. This sells in bottles at thirty sous, the bottle included. Rondelle, negociant en vin, Porte St. Bernard, fauxbourg St. Germains, Paris, buys three hundred pieces of the first quality every year. The coteaux yield about half a piece to the setterie, the plains a whole piece. The inferior quality is not at all esteemed. It is bought by the merchants of Cette, as is also the wine of Bezieres, and sold by them for Frontignan of the first quality. They sell thirty thousand pieces a year under that name. The town of Frontignan marks its casks with a hot iron: an individual of that place having two casks emptied, was offered forty livres for the empty cask by a merchant of Cette. The town of Frontignan contains about two thousand inhabitants; it is almost on the level of the ocean. Transportation to Paris is fifteen livres the quintal, and takes fifteen days. The price of packages is about eight livres eight sous the one hundred bottles. A setterie of good vineyard sells for from three hundred and fifty to five hundred livres, and rents for fifty livres. A laboring man hires at one hundred and fifty livres the year, and is fed and lodged; a woman at half as much. Wheat sells at ten livres the settier, which weighs one hundred pounds, poids de table. They make some Indian corn here, which is eaten by the poor. The olives do not extend northward of this into the country, above twelve or fifteen leagues. In general, the olive country in Languedoc is about fifteen leagues broad. More of the waste lands between Frontignan and Mirval are capable of culture; but it is a marshy country, very subject to fever and ague, and generally unhealthy. Thence arises, as is said, a want of hands.
Cette. There are in this town about ten thousand inhabitants. Its principal commerce is wine; it furnishes great quantities of grape pomice for making verdigrise. They have a very growing commerce; but it is kept under by the privileges of Marseilles.
May 13. Agde. On the right of the Etang de Tau, are plains of some width, then hills, in olives, vines, mulberry, corn and pasture. On the left, a narrow sand bar separating the Etang from the sea, along which it is proposed to make a road from Cette to Agde. In this case, the post would lead from Montpelier, by Cette and Agde, to Bezieres, being leveller, and an hour, or an hour and a half nearer. Agde contains six or eight thousand inhabitants.
May 14. Bezieres. Rich plains in corn, St. foin and pasture; hills at a little distance to the right, in olives; the soil both of hill and plain is red, going from Agde to Bezieres. But at Bezieres the country becomes hilly, and is in olives, St. foin, pasture, some vines and mulberries.
May 15. Bezieres. Argilies. Le Saumal. From Argilies to Saumal are considerable plantations of vines. Those on the red hills to the right, are said to produce good wine. No wood, no inclosures. There are sheep and good cattle. The Pyrenees are covered with snow. I am told they are so in certain parts all the year. The canal of Languedoc, along which I now travel, is six toises wide at bottom, and ten toises at the surface of the water, which is one toise deep. The barks which navigate it are seventy and eighty feet long, and seventeen or eighteen feet wide. They are drawn by one horse, and worked by two hands, one of which is generally a woman. The locks are mostly kept by women, but the necessary operations are much too laborious for them. The encroachments by the men, on the offices proper for the women, is a great derangement in the order of things. Men are shoemakers, tailors, upholsterers, stay-makers, mantua-makers, cooks, housekeepers, house-cleaners, bed-makers, they coeffe the ladies, and bring them to bed: the women, therefore, to live, are obliged to undertake the offices which they abandon. They become porters, carters, reapers, sailors, lock-keepers, smiters on the anvil, cultivators of the earth, &c. Can we wonder, if such of them as have a little beauty, prefer easier courses to get their livelihood, as long as that beauty lasts? Ladies who employ men in the offices which should be reserved for their sex, are they not bawds in effect? For every man whom they thus employ, some girl, whose place he has thus taken, is driven to whoredom. The passage of the eight locks at Bezieres, that is, from the opening of the first to the last gate, took one hour and thirty-three minutes. The bark in which I go, is about thirty-five feet long, drawn by one horse, and goes from two to three geographical miles an hour. The canal yields abundance of carp and eel. I see also small fish resembling our perch and chub. Some plants of white clover and some of yellow, on the banks of the canal near Capestan; santolina also, and a great deal of yellow iris. Met a raft of about three hundred and fifty beams, forty feet long, and twelve or thirteen inches in diameter, formed into fourteen rafts, tacked together. The extensive and numerous fields of St. foin in general bloom, are beautiful.
May 16th. Le Saumal. Marseillette. May 17th. Marseillette. Carcassonne. From Saumal to Carcassonne, we have always the river Aube close on our left. This river runs in the valley between the Cevennes and Pyrenees, serving as the common receptacle for both their waters. It is from fifty to one hundred and fifty yards wide, always rapid, rocky, and insusceptible of navigation. The canal passes in the side of hills made by that river, overlooks the river itself, and its plains, and has its prospect ultimately terminated, on one side, by mountains of rock overtopped by the Pyrenees, on the other, by small mountains, sometimes of rock, sometimes of soil, overtopped by the Cevennes. Marseillette is on a ridge, which separates the river Aube from the Etang de Marseillette. The canal, in its approach to this village, passes the ridge, and rides along the front, overlooking the Etang, and the plains on its border; and having passed the village, re-crosses the ridge, and resumes its general ground in front of the Aube. The land is in corn, St. foin, pasture, vines, mulberries, willows, and olives.
May 18th. Carcassonne. Castelnaudari. Opposite to Carcassonne, the canal receives the river Fresquel, about thirty yards wide, which is its substantial supply of water from hence to Bezieres. From Bezieres to Agde, the river Orb furnishes it, and the Eraut, from Agde to the Etang de Thau. By means of ecluse ronde at Agde, the waters of the Eraut can be thrown towards Bezieres, to aid those of the Orb, as far as the ecluse de Porcaraigne, nine geometrical miles. Where the Fresquel enters the canal, there is, on the opposite side, a waste, to let off the superfluous waters. The horseway is continued over this waste, by a bridge of stone of eighteen arches. I observe them fishing in the canal, with a skimming net of about fifteen feet diameter, with which they tell me they catch carp. Flax in blossom. Neither strawberries nor peas yet at Carcassonne. The Windsor bean just come to table. From the ecluse de la Lande we see the last olive trees near a metairée, or farm house, called la Lande. On a review of what I have seen and heard of this tree, the following seem to be its northern limits. Beginning on the Atlantic, at the Pyrenees, and along them to the meridian of la Lande, or of Carcassonne; up that meridian to the Cevennes, as they begin just there to raise themselves high enough to afford it shelter. Along the Cevennes, to the parallel of forty-five degrees of latitude, and along that parallel (crossing the Rhone near the mouth of the Isere) to the Alps; thence along the Alps and Apennines, to what parallel of latitude I know not. Yet here the tracing of the line becomes the most interesting. For from the Atlantic, so far, we see this production the effect of shelter and latitude combined. But where does it venture to launch forth unprotected by shelter, and by the mere force of latitude alone? Where for instance does its northern limits cross the Adriatic? I learn that the olive tree resists cold to eight degrees of Reaumur below the freezing point, which corresponds to fourteen above zero of Farenheit; and that the orange resists to four degrees below freezing of Reaumur, which is twenty-three degrees above zero of Farenheit.
May 19th. Castelnaudari. St. Feriol. Escamaze. Lampy. Some sheep and cattle; no inclosures. St. Feriol, Escamaze, and Lampy are in the montagnes noires. The country almost entirely waste. Some of it in shrubbery. The voute d'Escamaze is of one hundred and thirty-five yards. Round about Castelnaudari, the country is hilly, as it has been constantly from Bezieres; it is very rich. Where it is plain, or nearly plain, the soil is black; in general, however, it is hilly and reddish, and in corn. They cultivate a great deal of Indian corn here, which they call millet; it is planted but not yet up.