pin; so, I perceived, did my cousin, but apparently without better success than I. The chief props of a declining costume could not be sacrificed to superstition, and our fortunes remain undivined to this day.
There was more, much more, to be seen in St. Emilion, and we saw some of it. We trust it may yet be given to us to stay for a clear three days at the hotel of the Russian princess, and to dawdle in a trance of idleness up and down the little streets, unharassed by time, or letter-writing, or newspapers. As it was, we went slowly and gradually round the beautiful ruins of a monastery in the upper part of the town, where the beeches and ashes grew freely in the nave and side aisles, and spread what shelter they could over the defenceless shafts and columns. The remembrance of those still cloisters, with their leafy sunlight flickering year after year on the worn flags and the gentle invasions of the grass, is pleasant in the mind—a possession chief among many gains of that very white day at St. Emilion. The bell-foundry working leisurely in the blackened shell of what had been another monastery was an episode in perfect keeping with the general religious calm of the town; so was the Pilgrim’s-Progress kind of landscape that we viewed from a corner of the fortifications—a delectable land, lying wide and rich in the hot afternoon haze. Indeed, had it not been that in a quiet back street we came upon a group of old women who sat knitting at their vine-hung doors, and discussed with shrill and personal directness the intentions of one of the party with regard to her will, we might have thought it was ‘within in in heaven we were,’ as an Irishman said, with an intensifying wealth of prepositions, in describing a whisky tent.
CHAPTER X.
T happened to one of us—no matter which—in early youth to have a governess who hailed from the parts about Bordeaux. She was a small rigid lady, with a cast-iron black silk skirt, and an environing squint that extended her jurisdiction round illimitable corners, and up and down stairs at the same time. So, at least, her pupils felt, as they trembled in the glare of that erratic green-brown eye, and quavered the regulation early French to one another, even in the fastnesses of their own rooms. Mademoiselle still holds sway among certain outlying members of our family, and on the eve of our departure for France there came a note in the well-known hand, suggestive of nothing so much as a paper of pins, in which she begged us, if our travels took us near St. B., to present the enclosed introduction at the country-house of Monsieur de Q., whose little daughters had been among ‘les plus gentilles de ses élèves.’
We were not near St. B., unless an hour by train can be called near, and our last afternoon in varied French society had not persuaded us that we were likely to shine in that sphere, but the habit of early years of subjection was too strong for us. We posted the letter of introduction, and when the answer came that Madame de Q. would hope to meet us at the station of St. B. at three o’clock on the day following our visit to St. Emilion, we said ‘Kismet,’ and tried to shake the Château Lafite dust from our Sunday hats. The journey to St. B. was hot and uneventful, and we spent the time it occupied mainly in the futile amusement of finding out in Bellows’ Dictionary words that fate was never destined to bring us into contact with.
Outside the St. B. station we were accosted by one of those nondescript, smug, red-faced servants who are met with only in France, and were conducted by him towards a green alley of plane trees, in whose shade was standing a landau with one somnolent black horse in the shafts. A tall lady advanced to meet us, hook-nosed and handsome, dressed with awe-inspiring smartness, and with a chill perfection of manner that awoke in us a simultaneous longing to run away. She neither spoke nor understood English, so she gave us to understand at once; and another point about which she did not long leave us in doubt was that she would have ‘scorned the haction.’ Moreover, the monstrous hearse-horse had not shambled more than a mile or so, at a trot that
was with difficulty maintained by adjurations and whip-crackings from the coachman, before we began to make the further discovery that we had already bored our hostess almost to tears. We cannot be surprised at it; the penetrating regret that we had ever started on the expedition would have paralysed our powers even of English conversation, and Ollendorff’s earliest exercise is a thrilling romance when compared with the remarks that we churned arduously forth for Madame de Q.’s benefit.
It is true that she gave us no assistance. She leaned back and answered our questions without an effort either to appear less ennuyée than she was, or to amplify her replies, while her eyes strayed from time to time to the novel that lay on the seat beside her—‘Les Confessions de some one or other. Par la Comtesse Dash,’ or some very similar title. She would not even discuss Mademoiselle, whom we played as our trump-card early in the game; in fact, she had never even seen her. Mademoiselle had been the governess of her stepdaughters, and had left before Madame’s marriage with Monsieur de Q. The old landau rumbled slowly on, up and down hill, with the interminable vineyards on either hand, and occasional hamlets with houses crowded close to the white dusty road. At one of these, brightly-coloured electioneering posters of some local hero seemed to offer something to talk about.
‘Nous avons à Londres,’ said my cousin very slowly and distinctly, breaking what had been a long and nerve-trying silence, ‘tant de ces—a—postiches.’
‘Pardon?’ said Madame, with a certain languid interest; ‘je ne vous ai pas compris, mademoiselle.’
‘Oh, sur des murs, vous savez,’ said my cousin, wavering a little; ‘des postiches, comme cela,’—she indicated another orange-coloured placard.
‘Ah!’ Madame smiled very faintly. ‘Des affiches, peut-être?’
Then it occurred to us that a postiche was a name for a small pad for the hair, and humiliation almost overbore our usual feeble necessity of laughter.
After this reverse we relinquished the unequal contest, and fell into a silence, dappled only by occasional topographical inquiries, until, as we turned in at a gateway, Madame de Q. roused herself sufficiently to tell us that we had arrived at her husband’s house. We drove through the wide old-fashioned yard, surrounded by ivy-covered brick buildings, and round a gravel sweep to the front of an imposing white stone house. The coachman ceased from his admonishments at a flight of stone steps, the black horse discontinued his advance, and we dismounted with the feeling that whatever might be before us, it could not be worse than what we had just gone through. The steps led up to a long stone-paved verandah, with handsome white columns supporting it, giving it a certain air of classic distinction; pots of bright scarlet geraniums were ranged along the balustrade, and there was a group of chairs and a small table at one end of the verandah. From these, as we ascended the steps, two gentlemen rose and came forward to meet us. One, a short stout man, unexpectedly attired in a Norfolk jacket and leather gaiters, with a blind eye, and a strong resemblance to the late John Bright, was introduced to us by Madame de Q. as ‘Mon mari;’ and the other, a spotty young man in a high-crowned straw hat, clicked his heels together, and made a low bow, while we were informed that he was Madame’s cousin, M. le Vicomte de R. John Bright apologised for the temporary absence of his daughters, and then we sat down and began to talk seriously with him about vines and their culture, while Madame and her cousin discussed in rapid undertones, and with suppressed amusement, some topic that our self-consciousness told us was not unconnected with ourselves.
A little apart, and turned away from the table, there stood a thing that looked like a cross between a sentry-box and a sedan-chair; it was made of basket-work, and as we prosed sapiently with Monsieur de Q. of the rival merits of the Malbec, Merlot, and Cabernet-Sauvignan grapes, we were aware of a curious agitation on its part. It was a little behind us, and the creaking of the wicker-work made us look round quickly—just in time to see, to our amazement, a small round female spring out of the chair and run nimbly through a long glass door into the drawing-room, followed by a waddling, wheezing ball of yellow fur which had been lurking with her in the recesses of the sentry-box.
Monsieur de Q. betrayed no surprise. ‘My sister,’ he said explanatorily, and then he added in English, ‘She is vair shy.’
Madame and her Vicomte took no notice of the episode, and we were addressing ourselves again to our discourse on grapes—the only subject on which Monsieur de Q. seemed to care to talk—when a jingling of glasses was heard, and the red-faced servant appeared, bearing a large tray, which he put down on the table. At the same moment a sort of dog-cart drove up, and two young ladies jumped out of it, without waiting for the servant, who hurried down to proffer his help. Madame’s brow had contracted beneath her admirably curled and netted fringe, and we at once knew that we were about to meet les plus gentilles of the pupils of Mademoiselle.
It is superfluous to give our preconceived ideas of these young ladies, unless, indeed, for the sake of saying that they reversed them all. They were dressed in shirts and short skirts and jackets, and wore thick boots and sailor hats, and their manner had a cheerful unconcern and want of stiffness that was as reassuring to us as it was evidently detestable to their stepmother. One of them addressed herself promptly to the table, whereon was the tray with tumblers, two carafes of cold water, a sugar-basin, and a tall bottle of what we afterwards found to be rum. The other sat down in the chair vacated by her father, and began to talk to us in broken English, that was so immeasurably bad that my cousin, partly from politeness, partly from some theory of making herself understood, began to answer her in as near an imitation of the same lingo as she could arrive at, speaking loudly and very slowly, and using, as far as possible, words of no more than three letters. In the meantime I watched the movements of the other sister with a fascinated horror. She first put two lumps of sugar in each glass, then about two teaspoonfuls of rum, and then the tumblers were filled with water, and were handed round, along with biscuits, to the company. Through the glass doors into the drawing-room I could see the aunt, waiting, apparently, in hopes that her share would be brought to her; but as this did not occur, she presently crept back, and, with a flying bow to the party, immured herself again in her sedan-chair, with a heavily-sugared tumbler of the same dreadful eau sucrée au rhum with which my cousin and I were toying. The sugar rose through the pale liquid in oily curls; the sickly smell of the rum ‘curdled under our noses,’ as a Cork carman said, in affected reprobation of a glass of whisky. It was as disagreeable a drink as I have ever had to undertake for convivial purposes, not even excepting moût or ‘fresh’ poteen; and as we slowly sipped our way towards the two half-melted lumps in the bottom of the tumbler, not even the vanille biscuits could reconcile us to this too-concentrated nectar. But release from the necessity of drinking came unexpectedly. The yellow dog had returned with his mistress, and, finding the seclusion of the sentry-box unremunerative, he went round from chair to chair, staring at the biscuits of the revellers with filmy, greedy eyes, and when he came to me, rearing up on his hind legs and clawing importunately at my dress. I fed him, being weak-minded in such matters, and then I tried to pat his head. He immediately gave a shrill yelp and snapped at my hand, and, in the uncontrollable jump with which I saved my fingers, the remainder of the rum and water was spilled over my last clean skirt.
A chorus of horror arose. The pallid face and weak saucer eyes of the timid aunt appeared furtively round the straw rim of the chair, and she murmured, ‘Mees! Mees!’ in tones of faint reproof. (I had forgotten to say that as the dog was supposed to be an English terrier, he was called ‘Miss,’ a generic term in France for the British dog, irrespective of size or sex.) Madame de Q. and the spotty cousin offered polite condolences; Monsieur de Q. aimed some opprobrious epithets at the offender instead of the kick that he so richly deserved; and Mdlle. Hortense in an instant whirled me out of my chair, through the drawing-room, and into a bedroom, there to take off my own skirt and endue one of hers, while mine was sent to the kitchen to be washed and dried. It took a fair amount of philosophic calm to walk back to the verandah in a full white calico skirt some four inches too short for me, and it was a relief to find that a number of fresh visitors had arrived, and that my entrance was consequently unobserved. Almost immediately afterwards, it was suggested that we should be taken to see the park, and I crouched down the verandah behind the crowd, trying to decrease my height by those uncompromising four inches, and painfully conscious that all the gentlemen of the party had remained behind, and were watching our exit with some interest. ‘Now ces messieurs are content,’ said Mdlle. Rosalie, dropping behind to talk to me. ‘They will be able to talk of nothing but the vintage till we return—ça m’agace!’
We crossed the yard, and went on past the inevitable cuvier, through a garden full of all-coloured dahlias and wall-fruit, and under the arch of a gateway into a wide shrubbery with elm and chestnut trees shading close-shorn expanses of grass, and a serpentine piece of water, on the farther side of which the largest meadow that we had seen in the much-cultivated Médoc stretched away to a pine wood.
‘In winter they chase the woodcock there,’ remarked Mdlle. Rosalie.
‘We chase him also in Ireland,’ we said, ‘but he is a difficult bird to catch.’
It then transpired that our hostesses were sportswomen, and had shot almost every bird that there was to be shot in their district, from sparrows to quails. ‘Nous chassons de race,’ they said; ‘our grandmother was a noted shot in her day.’
We felt an incongruity about a French grandmother being bon tireur that was probably derived from a confused belief that the period of grandmothers in France was coincident with the costumes on a Watteau fan; but the descendants of this sporting lady assured us that it had been, and was, quite comme il faut in the Médoc for ladies to shoot, and they further imparted to us in confidence that their stepmother disapproved deeply of their sporting proclivities—a fact that did not take us by surprise. They were altogether a revelation, these Mdlles. de Q., with English manners and tastes, and even clothes, while Great Britain’s language and literature were a sealed book to them, except for a few absurd phrases they had picked up at their convent school at Lyons from a ‘demoiselle écossaise, je crois, qui s’appelait Haut-Brion.’ We wondered why a Scotch young lady should have been named after one of the classified clarets, and it was only in subsequent conversation that it transpired that the demoiselle lived in Dublin and was called O’Brien.
As we wandered back through the beautifully laid-out grounds, with such tropical plants as are usually associated with Kew Gardens meeting us on every hand, we heard how our hostesses loved riding, and hoped to get an amazone made by an English tailor, and inquiry elucidated the fact that the amazones in which they rode at present were made with long full skirts, and were generally as absurd as their name.
The party of men whom we had left in the verandah were still seated there when we returned, Monsieur de Q. looking more than ever like John Bright as he held forth in eloquent periods on the treatment of influenza, which, it appeared, was raging among his vintagers. Madame de Q. had not accompanied the walking expedition, and had retired, so her husband informed us, with a bad headache, the result of driving in the sun. We guiltily murmured condolences, but as a few minutes later we all sat down round the polished oak table in the dining-room, it appeared to us that the party seemed in no way to suffer from the absence of its hostess. Tea was served in a rather peculiar manner. Empty teacups were placed in front of the guests; one sister went round with the teapot, and the other followed with liqueurs and cold boiled milk, while a variety of little cakes and piled-up dishes of fruit circulated in her wake. The tea was hot and bitter with strength; the certain prospect of indigestion depressed us, and unfitted us to cope with the not unreasonable curiosity of the other visitors as to us and our, to them, astonishing mission in the Médoc. We felt that our vocabulary was being tried rather too high, and on the whole we were glad that we had to catch a train back to Libourne at six, and had to decline the hospitable invitation of the daughters of the house to stay to dinner.
While the carriage was coming round, I made haste to change into my own skirt. I have no bump of locality for the interior of strange houses, and when I had left the room in which the change was effected, I found myself confronted by three doors all equally likely to lead into the hall. I selected the most likely one, and rashly advanced. It was the boudoir of Madame,—Madame who had retired with a bad headache, and was now seated over a bright wood fire, with her yellow-covered book of ‘Confessions’ in her hand, and a cigarette between her lips. Sympathy for her, thus cornered in her last stronghold, was my first emotion as I fled, but sympathy for myself has been a more lasting feeling as I think how I have established myself in the mind of Madame de Q. as a crowning example of the gaucherie and stupidity of Les Anglais pour rire.
CHAPTER XI.
AMILIAR ground, but with what a difference! While the early train from Libourne neared the Bastide Station at Bordeaux, we sat serene and languid in our carriage, reading London papers, and talking English politics to Monsieur A. with an assurance which, we hope, concealed our ignorance; luggage, cabmen, and porters were remote appendages of travel, interesting only to Monsieur A’s. servant, a few carriages off. The dog from whose tail the tin kettle has been newly removed could hardly feel a more pleasing sense of undress than did we when we drove out of the yard of the station and saw our portmanteaus squatting sullenly side by side on the pavement, and knew that we should see their detested faces no more till our journey’s end.
Bordeaux itself became a different town under this chaperonage. In the restaurant at which we lunched we were treated as old and distinguished friends, not merely of Monsieur A., but of the proprietor, and shops where we should have been ignored became gushing in their attentions. In the full glow of this borrowed radiance we travelled that afternoon along the sluggish railway line that traverses the Médoc, and saw at intervals, with a sense of old acquaintance, the sails of the ships and the smoke of the steamers on the Gironde appear above the vineyards on our right. We passed Pauillac with almost a pang of recognition. There was the church where we had seen acolytes with short cassocks and long boots with tassels; there was the road along which the inexorable Blossier had driven us,—Blossier, who now would lick the dust before us could our cortége but meet him; there—most painful thought of all—was my largest sponge, that had been blown out of my bedroom window by the vent d’Afrique and never reappeared.
It was half-past three before, at the station of St. Yzans, we clambered down the steep side of the carriage, and up the still steeper side of a smart English omnibus that was waiting for us. Two strong horses took us fast along the level roads, and the soft breeze cooled us as we sat on high and admired the perfect propriety with which Madame A.’s poodle sat erect beside the coachman and looked down with a sovereign severity upon the cur-dogs at the cottage doors. We had driven for seven miles, and the Gironde, from which the railway had strayed to meet the village of St. Yzans, was in sight again, when the horses were pulled up at a neat new gate-lodge; we drove in over a bridge, and bowled up an avenue with vines spreading far on each side, then through a wood, and finally under a high arched gateway up to the door of a long pink château with pointed towers at either end. We were shown into a large drawing-room, with windows opening on to an old stone terrace, beyond which were brilliant flower-beds, and, in the distance, a blue strip of river; afternoon tea of the English kind stood ready, with a pile of letters and papers waiting beside it; a billiard-room opened on one side, a library on the other, all empty, and luxuriously expectant of our occupation. It was our good fortune to be the guests of Mr. Gilbey at Château Loudenne, and though by a fortune less kind we had been deprived of the presence of our host, he had provided for us the pleasantest of deputies to dispense his hospitalities.
The few days that we spent there with Monsieur and Madame A. were like no other part of our lives, and retained to the last the ease and enjoyment and the pervading sense of welcome that came so soothingly to us that first afternoon. English management and comforts were not made incongruous by the aromatic flavour of French surroundings and the vivid pageant of the vintage; each accented the other, and retired into the background with unfailing fitness. It was near the end of the vintage when we arrived. The handsome red and white buildings which held the cuvier, the long line of stables and farm-buildings, the immense storehouses full of wine and wine barrels, were at their busiest, and on the slopes below the château the vintagers were working at top speed to finish by the end of the week. As we walked through the long vineyards by the river, the grapeless rows of vines looked forlorn and elderly, like mothers who have married off their daughters and have no occupation left. It was far more inspiriting to move farther on, and watch the sight that was now so familiar and yet always so fresh, the women’s figures moving waist-high in the green,—the men carrying the heavy hottes of fruit on their necks, the overseer with his eight-foot pole pointing fatefully to the bunch of grapes left behind by the careless vendangeuses, the hurry and bustle of everything, and the creamy oxen stepping slowly and imperturbably through it all, with their seventeen hands of height shrouded in grey draperies to preserve them from the flies, sentient apparently of nothing except the driver’s voice and the guiding
touch of his stick. There is a stable full of great English cart-horses at Loudenne, such as had not been seen in France since the days of Agincourt, but these descendants of the mediæval warhorse are used only for the rougher farm-work; it is said that the oxen, from their clockwork slowness and placidity, do not break and injure the vines as a horse might, and though this is contradicted, and the days of oxen are said to be numbered in the Médoc, they still pace in couples from vineyard to cuvier, setting their hoofs down together with the grave accuracy of a minuet, neither slackening nor straining, whether the two tall tubs on the cart behind them are full or empty.
The clack of conversation died down a little while we stood with Monsieur A. and looked on at the work, but one could feel that it was a seething repression, as of soda-water behind its cork. We felt bound, however, to combat the justice of giving the women less wages than the men on the grounds that they talked more; it seemed to us that no created being could talk in such volumes as the male Médoc peasant, unless it be a Galway beggar, or a Skibbereen fishwoman before the Bench. The next piece of information seemed, from previous observation, more likely. It is calculated that the vintagers on this estate eat during the vintage an amount of grapes equal to a hogshead of claret—a creditable performance for people who are forbidden to eat any, and are under constant strict surveillance. ‘We cannot enforce the rule,’ said Monsieur A., beckoning to us two girls from the end of a row; ‘we can only prove when it is broken. Put out your tongues!’
This direction was to the two grinning vendangeuses; and, in response, two large tongues, as purple-black as a parrot’s, were presented to us, while the eyes of their owners goggled above them with guilty deprecation and an inextinguishable sense of the absurdity of the situation. They had the full sympathy of the jury, and the judge only held up his hands and laughed too.
It was already late in the day, and sunset and its signal to leave off work came soon. The crowd flocked out of the vines—men, women, and children, talking and laughing with unexhausted zest, and grouping themselves in the sandy cart-track in unerring harmonies of blue and white and grey, flecked here and there with the flash of a red kerchief or cap. The movement towards home gradually assumed the aspect of a religious procession. Headed by the sacrificial oxen and their load of grapes, it passed slowly through the vineyards in the dewy spell of the evening, till, as it moved distantly up the slopes and breasted the afterglow, it seemed that a Samian glade and a temple to Ceres must be its destination. It was the last of the vintage, and the first feeling of coming farewell touched us while we came back among the stripped vines; the metallic whirr of the cigales and the loud interjections of the bullfrogs were the only voices left to replace the shrill babble that had penetrated every square yard of the green landscape. A suspicion of frost was in the air, touching the tender evening like a spur, to remind it of the tyranny that was to come, when the vines would shrink to brown skeletons, and the winter day would darken above them to its setting, in the chilly silence of the snow.
Dinner was scarcely over that evening when the scraping of a fiddle and the husky note of a flute were audible in the hall, and as we came into the drawing-room there entered by the other door a group of people who might have come straight out of Arcadia or an Italian opera. In front were the two musicians, playing a gay little tune, while behind them two peasant girls advanced, carrying each an enormous bouquet of flowers, with a party of the vintagers bringing up the rear. The music finished with a flourish, and one of the bearers of the bouquets brought her offering forward and presented it to Monsieur A. with a few eulogistic sentences, followed by the second bearer, who performed the like office for Madame A. How in this position would an English country gentleman have stiffened, stammered, and assumed a galvanic gratification; how his wife would have murmured inane thanks with uneasy condescension; and how totally different in all particulars was the demeanour of Monsieur and Madame A.! Each in turn made a speech of a few sentences, with perfect graciousness, point, and fluency; they even looked as if they thoroughly enjoyed doing it, and we gaped from the background with respectful admiration. The fiddle and flute struck up again, and to their music the deputation withdrew, leaving just enough flavour of garlic behind to blend quaintly with the heliotrope and rose perfumes of the two bouquets.
This ceremonial was the prelude of the dance that celebrated the fin de vendange, and a little later we wrapped ourselves in shawls and went out to join in the revels. The room in which the vintagers dine at the Château Loudenne is an extremely large one, with a musicians’ gallery running across one end of it—an accessory that showed that dancing was as recognised a part of the programme as dinner. The dance had hardly begun when we came in; a few of the smaller kind were plodding round in a kind of polka with only three steps to the bar, but the men were for the most part grouped near the door, and the ladies lined the benches, calm in the certainty that they were in the minority. We took our seats at the top of the room under the musicians’ gallery, prepared to observe with the intelligent interest of the tourist this splash of local colour that good luck had thrown in our way. The music ceased, and there was a pause, during which the men filed into the room and partners were chosen, while an incredible clang of talk filled the air. Presently a hoot from the long horn announced the beginning of the dance, and each man grasped his partner by the waist and led her forth. It was called a contre-danse, and by the time that a tune of the most furious friskiness had been played through once, ten or twelve couples were standing, not only ready, but prancing in their impatience to start. The men were mostly small, agile creatures of comparatively tender years; the women, on the contrary, were tall and stout, seemingly of a different race, and not by any means distressingly young. In fact, the pretty girls whom we had picked out as the probable belles of the entertainment were sitting neglected round the room, talking apparently to their fathers and mothers.
As soon, however, as the signal to go had been given, we realised that, in the practical Médoc, ‘handsome is that handsome does.’ The tall person whom we had lightly compared to a bolster, went away down the room as if there were a spiral spring inside the bolster-case, and her matronly vis-à-vis advanced to meet her in a manner only comparable to ‘the way the divil went through Athlone, in standing leps,’ to quote Sergeant Mulvaney. We watched these gambols in undisturbed enjoyment for about a minute, and then suddenly my cousin was aware of a man standing in front of her, bowing, and silently holding out both hands.
‘He wants you to dance with him, and you will have to do it,’ whispered Madame A. to her, with unsympathetic ecstasy; ‘it is the custom of the vintage.’
In another moment my cousin was swept into the line of the top couples, and her partner, a pallid, oily youth of Jewish aspect, was whirling her down the room with such a coruscation of capers as would have done credit to a catherine-wheel. What exactly she looked like as, hopelessly conspicuous in
her white dress, she floundered, hopped, and jigged through the mêlée, time was not given to me to determine. A blue-clad figure was already bowing in front of me, and, as two warm, ungloved hands took mine, the only balm left in Gilead was the sight of Madame A. cleaving the flood of dancers in the arms of a little creature whom I took for a stout child of ten years old, till I subsequently saw his moustache.
The contre-danse in which we were thus embroiled stormed on with conversational intervals between the figures for about twenty minutes. It was an inflamed variety of kitchen Lancers, danced with a rhythmic fury, and larded with impromptu flourishes on the part of the gentlemen. We envied the bolster as she bobbed serenely past us, riding the waves of the contre-danse like a bottle in a chopping sea, while we were struggling in its depths and trying with slides and springs to overtake its impossible rhythm. A reel at a tenants’ dance in Galway, the ‘D’Alberts’ at a sergeants’ ball at the Curragh, the ‘barn-dance’ on a carpet after dinner on New Year’s night,—in all these violent amusements we have competed with a measure of success, but candour compels us to state that our début in the contre-danse at Château Loudenne was somewhat of a failure. Sorry spectacles as we were by the time its five or six figures were over, we should have been still more dilapidated had it not been for those intervals wherein we were talked to by our respective vinedressers as agreeably, as politely, and with as easy a selection of topics as if they were daily in the habit of discoursing to English ladies. In this connection we may say that not one of these peasants of the most wine-making district in the world owed any of their hilarity to the claret in which they lived, moved, and had their being; in fact, not once during our fortnight in the Médoc did we see any man who had taken more than was good for him.
More and more dances followed, till our legs ached, and the cement floor wore holes in our shoes, and then, as we were preparing to go back to the house, it was said that ces dames ought absolutely to see the ‘Bignou.’ The ‘Bignou’ sounded like the name of some monster of the middle ages, and might have been the local name for a werewolf for all we knew; but we stayed, nevertheless, and presently saw entering by another door nothing more alarming than four little old women. It was explained to us that the ‘Bignou’ was an ancient dance, almost obsolete in that part of the country, and that these four were the only worthy exponents of it, and had been actually awakened out of their first sleep to dance it for us. A rough-looking boy was hoisted on to a barrel at the end of the room—a boy who had come all the way from Brittany for the vintage (if, as is highly probable, I did not misunderstand my partner), bringing with him the little wooden instrument upon which he now set up a shrill piping that sounded like a penny whistle with a bluebottle in it. This archaic flute was itself the ‘Bignou’ from which the dance took its name, and the extraordinary tune which it buzzed forth might have been composed by Tubal Cain. The four old danseuses, in their white caps and full black skirts, took their positions in the middle of the room with a prim consciousness of their own importance, and all that we had yet seen was child’s play compared with the intricate measure
that followed. The little figures flew in darting circles, like flies on a pool, to the mad squeals of the ‘Bignou,’ their list-shod feet slapping the floor in absolute accord, and their full skirts and white cap-strings leaping out behind them in time to each angular twist of the tune. As we watched them we no longer wondered at their age. Steps such as those could not be learned in less than seventy years.
The onlookers stamped and clapped, the ‘Bignou’ player blew with a possessed frenzy, and the little old women circled tirelessly, like witches on the Brocken. I do not know how long the dance lasted, but as we went back in the darkness to the château we felt as if the music had gone to our heads; and when I lay down under my mosquito curtains, the dark figures whirled and swung giddily before me, as if the spirit of the Médoc had been expressed in them as intoxicatingly as in its wine.
CHAPTER XII.
HE lamps were all lighted on the long bridge over the Garonne; the lights quivered and lengthened in the sleek broad ripples; other lights twinkled on the masts and in the rigging of the half-seen shipping, and but for the trams and the traffic all things were as they had been at our midnight arrival in Bordeaux. It was only 6.30 o’clock, but autumn was catching up to us even in the Médoc, robbing us daily of more and more light, and blunting our regret for a portmanteauful of soiled white skirts by impressing the melancholy fact that this year we should have no further need of them. We had said good-bye to the Médoc and its kind people, and our faces were turned for the bleak North.
There were four large dark hours to be disposed of before the departure of the Paris train, and, as we stood in the blue electric glare of the station, the question of what we were going to do with ourselves rose solemnly and awfully before us. Shopping in the dark was intolerable, even if we had known one shop from another, and there had been anything we wanted to buy; the conventional resource of going to see a church was obviously out of the question; the rather unconventional one of going to see ‘La Femme à Papa’ at the big colonnaded theatre was tempting, but would either impose in the future an exhausting burden of secrecy upon us, or would finally overthrow whatever confidence our relations might still retain in our discretion. There remained dinner as an occupation, and, leaving the arid brilliance of the station, we prowled forth along the quays in search of a suitable restaurant. We were ready to endure much for the sake of interest or picturesqueness, but there is neither one nor the other to be found in a room with a sawdusted floor, a block tin bar, and a contiguous billiard-table; and these features discounted successively the charms of the restaurants of ‘The Antilles,’ ‘The Brazil,’ ‘The Spain and Portugal,’ the ‘Hôtel à la Renommée de l’Omelette,’ and the ‘Café au Bon Diable,’ outside all of whose flaring windows we paused and surveyed with exceeding disfavour the company within.
We reached again the long bridge, with the trams going to and fro upon it like fireflies, and with the power of fulfilling it came the desire for respectable comfort at the Hôtel de Bayonne, where we had lunched with the A.’s on our way to Loudenne. We stopped a tram and confided our wishes to the conductor. His tram did not go there, but we could ‘correspond;’ it would be quite simple—The end of the explanation was lost in the jerk with which we were hoisted on to the step, and in the blatant braying of the driver’s signal-horn as the tram plunged forward again. We began our journey by standing in a throng on the platform of the tram, and though a light rain had begun, the samples of the atmosphere of the interior that from time to time were wafted to us prevented us from being specially grateful when two gorgeous red-and-blue soldiers politely gave us their seats. After ten or fifteen minutes, however, there was no lack of room; the tram, having taken its way through promising thoroughfares, shook itself free of all passengers saving ourselves, and headed for the open country at a round pace. Before the conductor permitted us to part from him it seemed to us that we might have corresponded not only with every other line in Bordeaux, but with our relatives in Galway as well; and when, somewhere in a dark and silent suburb, we changed to the rival tram, there was a further half-hour before we sank exhausted on our chairs in the Hôtel de Bayonne.
The advantages of an introduction were shown in the effusion of the proprietor’s greeting, and under the ministrations of Alphonse, the head waiter, we revived. We were late for the ordinary dinner, and for some time the clean, electric-lighted dining-room had us for its only occupants, as we sat in a trance of repose and quietness, while Alphonse, with his decorous hooked nose and clerical black whiskers, gave us his serious and undivided attention. It was not until after the delicious omelette au rhum had come in, in its winding-sheet of spectral blue flame, that a party entered and took possession of a table near us. From the unhurried way in which they
came in and seated themselves it was easy to guess that to dine was the only amusement they proposed to themselves for the evening, and as we drank our coffee and watched their dinner through its stately and solid progress, we began to think that there are few greater fallacies than the general belief that the French middle-classes are small eaters as compared with the English. That the shopkeeper-like man and the fuzzy-headed woman were the givers of the feast, and the parents of the frightful and gluttonous child, was apparent from their disparaging criticisms of the soup and their indulgence of their offspring, but it was necessary for the guest to endure from the child a kiss that, as some one says, was also a baptism, for us to feel that she was no relation to it, unless one of the very poorest kind. The whole party, as it went steadily through their menu of ten courses, without omitting the nethermost leek in the salad, opened our eyes, as we have said, to the staying qualities of the French appetite, and it was privileged to demonstrate for us that the mysterious little tumblers of water and peppermint that had been brought in with our finger-glasses were for the fell purpose of rinsing out the mouth before proceeding to coffee and liqueurs. It was a solace to us during our long wait at the hotel; and monsieur’s dexterity with the macaroni cheese and his knife, and madame’s gesticulations with a bitten peach, were each in their way agreeable and instructive.
The dame seule is an unusual feature in French travelling, especially at night, and it seemed to us, while we wandered down the long platform of the Bastide, with twenty minutes to spare, that we could not do better than get into the carriage reserved for ladies only. But one glance into that fastness was enough. A mamma, a white-capped ‘nou-nou,’ an underling, an infant, and three children (two of them in tears) were already in possession, and beginning the first of the meals that experience had taught us would continue through the night. The next carriage was empty; better the maniac or the inebriate, better even the Government cigar—these things were among the possibilities, but we chanced them. They none of them happened. We adopted the tried stratagem of pulling down the blinds and holding the handle from inside, and had the satisfaction of hearing the possible maniacs, drunkards, and smokers of French tobacco remark to each other, after they had tried the handle, that it was either a mail-van or a reserved carriage.
We had hired two pillows at a franc each, according to the convenient custom on the Paris-Orléans railway, and thanks to them, the worst part of the eleven hours was spent in sleep that was just pleasantly conscious of the stops at the stations, and was lulled into blander repose by an occasional muffled squall from the pandemonium next door. At Blois the daylight began, and it was then, in the cold dawn, while the train shuffled uneasily to and fro on meaningless sidings, and the green-grey mass of a great castle deepened each time we looked from behind the blinds, that we drew forth the half bottle of Grand St. Lambert that had for the last few days been carried perilously about in a bonnet-box, and with grapes and croissants began a repast that continued through stages of bovril, tea, and gingerbread biscuits till we neared Paris. The water for the tea was near proving a difficulty. To get it, it was necessary to shuffle in ‘night’s disarray’ to the buffet, and a fair amount of nerve was required to advance through the crowd of sleepily devouring men and fill a disreputable tin kettle from a carafe of water under the very eyes of an indignant waiter. We flatter ourselves that the most courageous man of our acquaintance would have been afraid to do it.
There is on the south side of the Seine, not far from the Gare Montparnasse, a hotel beloved of art students. It is clean and cheap, and is bounded on all sides by the tram lines that cleave Paris through and through, and put the whole town in the hollow of one’s hand for six sous (avec correspondance). The Quartier Latin looked as fresh and clean and respectable on this October morning as if it had not a world-wide reputation for opposite qualities, and as mademoiselle of the hotel rushed out and greeted us in such strange English as is learnt from American art students, and with the effusion that is reserved by her for old friends, a serene assurance settled down upon us that here, at least, our appearance, manners, and accents would excite no surprise. We had our luncheon at a crêmerie, a place known of yore, where a beefsteak (saignant, according to French custom, unless specially forbidden), confiture, a saucerful of curd known as fromage à la crême, and a cup of black coffee could be obtained in sufficient cleanliness for a franc or less. It was rather too early in the season for the art student to be in full bloom; the two hot little rooms that were so like the cabins of an inferior steamer were almost empty, instead of being stuffed to their utmost capacity and resounding with as many languages as the Tower of Babel, and when we went on to the studio, and, with pleasurable anticipation, climbed the long staircase and knocked at the door, no voice responded. There was no one there. The easels were heaped up in one corner, the stools in another, the clock had stopped, the model stand was covered with dust, and desponding sketches of undressed deformities dangled from the walls, each by a single drawing-pin. Angelo, the hoary and picturesque attendant, followed us into this desolation, and said that such monde as there was, with a contemptuous shrug, was là-bas. A glance into the lower studio, where half-a-dozen unknown Englishwomen were fighting over the position of a sulky model in the dress of a cardinal, was enough for us. We felt that ‘superfluous lags the veteran on the stage.’
We wandered on by familiar ways to the Luxembourg galleries—there, at least, we should find old friends; and we looked at Rosa Bonheur’s oxen with the eye of knowledge, and found them by no means up to the standard of Château Loudenne. When we got out into the gardens again, with their linked battalions of perambulators, and their thousand children courting sea-sickness on the zoological merry-go-rounds, the afternoon was still young. The tops of the tall horse-chestnuts were yellow in the sunshine, and above them, in the blue sky, the Eiffel Tower looked down on us, suggesting absurdly the elongated neck of Alice in Wonderland, when the pigeon accuses her of being a serpent. Its insistent challenge could no longer be resisted; in spite of the needle-cases, yard-measures, and paper-weights that had horridly familiarised us with its outlines, it was decidedly a thing to be done. People who would go to sleep if we talked to them about the vineyards, would wake to active contempt if they heard we had not been to the Eiffel Tower.
We were deluded into getting off our tram too soon, and consequently had a long crawl through the empty Exhibition buildings and grounds before we reached our destination. To this, however, we owed the sight of the strange row of variety entertainments which we passed en route. A cup of coffee at forty-five centimes, or even a glass of beer at thirty centimes, would have entitled us to a chair or a marble table at any of these spectacles; but having taken a cursory view, from outside the crowd at the barriers, of the man in evening clothes mournfully bellowing something that sounded like a funeral ode to his mother, of the young lady with long yellow hair and short yellow petticoats giving a comic recitation flavoured with dancing, and of the infant phenomenon, whose performance on the piano was unfortunately reduced to dumb show by the success of the funny man next door, we were disposed to think that the coffee would be dear at the price.
We found ourselves at last under the four arching dachshund legs from which the Tower tapers improbably into space, and strayed round on the gravel underneath it, lavishing upon each other truisms appropriate to the occasion, and expressing artificial regrets that we had apparently come too late in the afternoon for the lift. While we spoke, a clicking sound dropped to us from the sky; we looked up, and saw amidst the cobwebs of iron a large square fly descending. I hardly know how we came to find ourselves at the entrance of the ascenseur. We both dislike lifts; and my cousin can repeat many rousing tales of lift-accidents, in which the point is usually the apparent identity of the attendant with the leading character in a thrice-repeated nightmare; but some form of false shame impelled us to the first stage. We held our breaths as we slid upwards through the girders that looked like all the propositions in Euclid run mad, and it was not till the horrible hiccough came, that told us we had stopped at the first platform, that we ventured to glance at the lift-man.
We walked round the long galleries, my cousin making herself both conspicuous and absurd by her determination to find out how many dragoon-like strides went to each side. It will doubtless be a blow to the designer to hear that the four faces of the Tower vary in length, two of them measuring ninety-seven yards, another a hundred, and the fourth ninety-nine and a hop. We had thought of going to the top—thought of it vaguely and valiantly for some little time after the lift had shaken us out on the first étage, and before we had looked over the edge. One glance, however, down at the black specks crawling on the strips of tape that represented the gravel paths of the Exhibition grounds satisfied us that we were as high as we wished to go. Even here the height was making my fingers tingle, and my cousin had retired unsteadily from the verge under the pretext of buying a photograph at a neighbouring stall; while as to the view, all Paris was already far below us, a marvellous gray and green toy, with the afternoon sun striking flame out of the tiny gilded domes and spires, and the pale thread of a river winding from one microscopic bridge to another, all showing clear in the smokeless air with a magical precision of detail.
There is a staircase that circles dizzily down the Tower, a Jacob’s ladder that would make an angel giddy, and rather than enter again the lift that was even now sliding down to us on its steel cable through the iron network, my cousin said she would walk down. It was the final dispute of the expedition, and, after affording much amusement to the bystanders, it ended in my leading my cousin, with her eyes tightly shut, and the expression of Lady Jane Grey on her way to execution, into the box with the sloping floor, in whose safety it was so impossible to believe. We sit safely now in the ground floor of a two-storeyed house, and as we look back to that experience, it seems to us that no dentist’s chair can have cradled more suffering than the lift of the Eiffel Tower.
We left Paris by a late train that night. Summer and its habiliments had alike been crushed out of sight by dint of a final war-dance upon our portmanteaus. Everything connected with the Médoc was put away; the Kodak, with its hidden store of vintage pictures, the apparatus of afternoon tea, even the well-thumbed and invaluable copy of Bellows’ Dictionary that had up to this abided immutably in our pockets, was laid sorrowing to rest in the crown of the Libourne straw hat. What use was it to us on a degraded line of railway on which all the porters spoke English?