In the vine country

bank of the Mississippi in search of the city of Eden. How did we know what sort of stifling den above a restaurant it would be that the sailor called a hotel? How did we know what compôtes of grease and garlic we might have to eat there? We breathed more freely when we were deposited in the narrow hall of a house that had something of the air of a real hotel, and were met by an obsequious garçon and a highly-respectable smell of beefsteak. We were shown our room, a palatially large one, with a light paper that would be an excellent background for mosquito-hunting, and we were told that table d’hôte was nearly over, but that we could have whatever we wished.

We said, ‘Œufs sur le plat,’ as we always feebly do when in doubt, and descended to a very warm and dinnerish little salle-à-manger, full of black-haired fat men, and black bottles of vin ordinaire, and pervaded by the satisfaction of those who have dined largely and well.

Much strange talk buzzed round us in the thick Bordelais accent, while we waited for our eggs on the

plate: excited harangues about vintages and grapes, that bristled with facts so esoteric and so solid that my cousin said she would fetch the note-book at once, and slipped away with the graceful bow to the company that we had observed society at Pauillac demanded. I had embarked on the eggs before she came back, and was thinking how I could best express the curious flavour of the grease in which they were cooked, when I heard a slight scuffle at the door, and saw my cousin dart in with inflated eyes of terror, followed by a black boar-hound of about four feet high, on whose back was clinging a monkey of more than usually human and terrifying aspect. The dog approached with a slow politeness, and, as he came, the monkey leaped to and fro from his back to the tables, the chairs, the handle of the door, anything in fact within reach of his chain that presented a surface of a quarter of an inch, with the swinging bound and rebound of a toy on a piece of indiarubber. We cowered behind our table, and the danger was for the time averted by the intervention of some personal friend of the monkey, who, to our unspeakable thankfulness, took him out of the room.

But that night, when we had forgotten the incident and were going up the dark staircase to our room, my cousin, who was in the rear, uttered suddenly the most vulgar, kitchenmaid’s shriek I have ever heard, and fled past me in a state bordering on convulsions, with a dark object swinging from the skirt of her dress.

It was the monkey.

CHAPTER IV.

HUTTERS in the Médoc are serious affairs, impregnable barriers that are fastened irrevocably outside the windows, and admit neither air nor light. Neither do they admit mosquitoes; but we had so far seen none such, and we resolved to risk them, and sleep with the windows open. The mosquitoes forbore—perhaps we were caviare to their countrified tastes, or perhaps they missed the usual seasoning of garlic; but the sunshine that flamed in our windows at some six of the Waterbury (I have not mentioned before that my cousin is attached to a Waterbury watch by a leather strap) had no scruples in the matter. To slumber with the Médoc sun full on one’s face is an art that takes some learning, and the first angry rift in the delicious sleep that French wool mattresses and spring beds induce was broadened to a wide-awake torture by a series of rasping, whistling screeches from the street below, that made us grind our teeth, and remember every slate pencil that had ever squeaked on a slate. It was a matter that required instant investigation, and it was not a little startling to find a party of stonemasons perched like birds upon a scaffolding exactly opposite our windows, manipulating monster blocks of the creamy stone out of which they build everything in these parts. They were sawing and shaping these symmetrical blocks down in the street as easily as if they were cheese, and in time we became able to bear that iron screech of the saws tearing their way through the gritty stone; indeed, it now lingers in our ears as a memory inseparable from sunshine, blue linen coats, and Pauillac. But the workmen on the scaffolding remained always a difficulty; when we went out on to our private balcony to hang up our sponges, or to throw the tea-leaves into the gutter of an adjacent roof, it was embarrassing to have to lay bare these domestic arrangements to an audience seated, seemingly, in the sky, not fifteen feet away. But they were companionable people, and, if they had not had a habit of walking over chasms on single planks, with blocks of stone two feet square balanced on their heads, we should have got quite fond of them.

When we had finished, with the help of a battalion of flies, our petit déjeuner of excellent café au lait, admirable butter, and sour bread, we were conducted, at our own request, to the kitchen to interview Madame, having while at breakfast made up from Bellows’ Dictionary all the words under the headings of ‘vine’ and ‘grape’ with a view to the conversation. Madame was a solid lady, built much on the lines of a cottage loaf, full of years, of good and greasy living, and possessed of an almost excessive repose of manner. She sat immutably in the kitchen window, and kept a frugal eye on the cook and her handful of wood embers, while she directed her household and read the feuilleton in her five-centimes Bordeaux paper.

All the country was ‘en plein vendange,’ she told us; wherever we went we could see the vintagers, and if we wished to make a ‘jolie petite course à pied’ we could not do better than walk to the little village of St. Lambert. En effet, she herself was propriétaire, and it would give her son great pleasure to show us his cuvier and all else that we might care to see.

‘And peasants?’ we said vaguely; ‘we want to talk to the peasants.’

Madame looked slightly bewildered.

‘Il y en avait bien assez de ces gens-là!’ she said, with a contempt that we afterwards understood, when we heard she had been a peasant herself. ‘I have a peasant of my own; ces dames can go and talk to her as much as they wish.’

The broad esplanade was full of sun, and dogs, and sailors, as we debouched upon it with our note-books, sketch-books, and the Kodak, at some nine o’clock of the morning. A steamer was hooting at the wooden pier over which we had crawled in gloomy fatigue the night before; a boat with a big lug-sail was performing wonderful and strange manœuvres of going about with the help of the current; and a full-rigged ship, with a dazzling green hull, was being towed up to Bordeaux by a black and misshapen tug-boat called Ercule, the family name of all Bordeaux tug-boats. It seemed to be a market or fête day of a minor sort in Pauillac; something connected with a saint, probably, which in Ireland would have meant that every one would have gone to Mass and done no work for the rest of the day; but here every one worked, just as they did on Sunday, and the people who had no work to do went about and enjoyed themselves. We remember once asking a man at home why the people were going to Mass and what holy day it was. He said he didn’t rightly know, but he thought the ‘Blessed Vargin’ was implicated. We did not find out who or what it was that was implicated in the Pauillac fête, but we take this opportunity of thanking them for celebrating themselves on our first day in the Médoc. All manner of unexpected things and people went by on their way to the town that straggled on the hill behind the Boulevard de la

Marine. Donkey-carts, waggons, and charettes, driven by brown-faced, white-capped women, or boys in flat felt caps of scarlet or blue,—the berets that are found up the west of France from Biarritz to Brittany,—a man on stilts, stalking by with the grave composure of a heron; and, creeping through the midst of all these, came now and again a long cart drawn by fawn-coloured oxen, who paced with that swinging saunter that became afterwards so familiar to us, their faces and sleek bodies covered absurdly with a thick netted material to keep the flies off, and their neatly-shod hoofs keeping time like clockwork.

We had been told by Madame the way we should go, and we walked in it with alacrity, especially when it involved leaving the white, sandy high-road, and crossing a vineyard, the property of our amiable hostess. It was the first time that we had been let loose on grapes in this fashion, and we fell upon them with an incredulous delight, that was scarcely checked by the hideous discovery made at this period, that the dog and the monkey had followed us. The monkey was chained to the dog’s collar,—that was always something,—but it was none the less disturbing to see suddenly, while stooping to cut one of the long blue bunches, the little black face with its blinking eyes looking greedily and cunningly through the leaves, and the nimble clammy claw extended imperiously for the grapes that we were afraid to refuse. They were delicious grapes—small and sweet and ‘inconvayniently crowded’ with juice, as a certain Irish wood was reputed to be with woodcock, and so tightly packed on their stalks that it was difficult to pick the first one of the bunch. We, however, overcame this difficulty nobly.

Our arrival at the village of St. Lambert was attended with considerable pomp. The procession was headed by the proprietor, who had overtaken us on his tricycle, and now rode very slowly and majestically before us, eating grapes; next came César, the dog, bestridden by the monkey (also eating grapes), and thereby inspiring the most agonising panic in all other dogs along the road; then we came, carrying the Kodak, and bending under bunches of grapes; and after us an enthusiastic body, composed of the infant population of St. Lambert, announcing in clear tones, to all whom it might concern, that ‘These’—meaning us—were ‘des étrangères.’

The procession was halted about halfway through the straggling village; the tricycle turned up a side street, and the next moment we had our first sight of wine-making.

There was an archway in one of the long white houses, an archway of a shape that we knew very well before we left the Médoc. It was a kind of large window in the wall, about four feet from the ground, with a heap of brown and bare grape stalks outside it, and, looking in, we saw in full swing the working of one of the oldest trades in the world. It must be admitted that we found it startling. In the mouth of the archway was a broad and shallow wooden receptacle, called the pressoir; heaped up in it were mounds of grapes, all black and shining, with their splendid indigo bloom gone for ever, and, splashing about amongst them, barefooted, and ankle-deep in the thick magenta juice, were the treaders of the winepress. It was those bare feet, crimsoned with juice, that took our whole attention for the first few minutes. We had been given uncertain warnings as to what we might or might not see, but we had always hoped against

hope for sabots. I think the proprietor felt for us—not sympathetically, of course, but compassionately. He hastened to explain that the fermenting process purified everything; the old plan had been for the men to join hands and dance round and round the pressoir, trampling the juice out of the grapes, and singing a little sacrificial vintage song, but now nothing like that obtained. All this was very consoling and nice, but it did not in the least mitigate the horror that fate had in store for us.

We had watched the carts unloading the big douilles packed with grapes at the mouth of the archway, and had heard, and straightway forgotten, how many douilles were yielded by an acre. We had seen with considerable repugnance the wiry and handsome little blue-clad workmen scrub the berries from the stems on the grillage, a raised grating that let the bruised grapes fall through, while the stalks remained on the top. We had watched them shovel the grapes in dripping shovelfuls into a small double-handled barrel, which was then snatched up by two of them, who, with it on their shoulders, would trot across the dusty floor of the cuvier, up two ladders that leaned side by side against a tall vat, and, having emptied their load into this immense maw, would trot back, and jump into the pressoir again. Through all these things we clung to the beautiful, purifying thought of the fermentation, and said to each other that when we ordered our bottle of Grand St. Lambert at our English hotel we should see that we got it, and would think fondly as we drank it of that good, comforting process. At this juncture one of the barefooted and blue-clad workmen approached with a small tumbler in his singularly dirty hand.

‘These ladies would like to taste the moût,’ he observed, dipping the tumbler in a tub half full of the muddy juice that was trickling out of the pressoir. He proffered us the tumbler with a bow, and we looked at each other in speechless horror.

We were quite certain we should not like to taste it; but there in front of us was held the tumbler, with behind it a pair of politely observant black eyes, and an unbroken flow of commendation in sing-song Bordelais French. We were assured that the moût was delicious, mild, and sweet, that the vintagers drank it every day by the gallon, and, lastly, that it was very wholesome; and we replied with a ghastly smile that we were not concerned about its wholesomeness, we did not contemplate a surfeit just at first; while all the time we heard the splashing of the feet in the pressoir, and the quiet trickle of the juice into the tub. The inevitable moment came, in spite of temporising, and the glass was put into my hand. The stuff was a sort of turgid magenta, thick and greyish, with little bubbles in it, and the quarter of a teaspoonful that I permitted to ooze between my lips was deadly, deadly sweet, and had a faint and dreadful warmth. That I swallowed it shows partly my good breeding and partly my extreme desire that my second cousin should not be discouraged.

‘C’est bon? Hein?’ said the vigneron. ‘Ça vous fera du bien!’

He said bong and biang in the friendly British way that they pronounce such words in the Médoc. (We had already found that if we could relax the strain, and, obeying our native instincts, talk about vang, and say combiang, we should do well with the Bordelais) I turned to watch the effect on the other victim, but found that she had retreated with extraordinary stealth and swiftness to the far end of the cuvier, and, having mounted one of the ladders that leaned against a giant cuve, was looking down into its pitchy depths. It is one of the most unamiable traits in my cousin’s character that she has neither enterprise nor good fellowship about tasting nasty things, and I immediately led the vigneron to the foot of the cuve with a fresh and brimming tumbler of moût.

The wood of the great barrel was quite warm, and from within came a low humming, like a swarm of bees high up in a chimney. I went up the second ladder, and looked down into a darkness that had black gleams in it like a coal-cellar, showing where was the surface of the sweltering mass of grapes. My cousin hurried into conversation about it, regardless of the sour, heady smell of the fermentation, until we heard a voice below warning us not to stoop so long over the fumes; and then I felt that it was quite worth the disgusting flavour of moût that still haunted my palate to see her come down the ladder and find the man with the tumbler waiting for her at the foot of it. I could never have believed that she would have been so lost to all sense of politeness and policy as to dodge past his extended hand and bolt through an unknown doorway into a dark room that had apparently nothing in it except a great deal of straw and a musty draught.

It was a very long room, so I saw as I followed, lighted principally by an open door at the far end of it, and over half the floor was strewn a thick litter of straw. The open door framed an oblong of glaring white road, and tendrils of vine with the sun shining through their leaves, and the light struck up on the boarded ceiling, and dealt mercifully with the details of a long table with black bottles on it that was disposed beyond the region of the straw.

‘It is here that the vintagers eat and sleep,’ said the vigneron, taking a loving sip from the tumbler for fear it should overflow. ‘Mais voilà!’—with ecstasy—‘mademoiselle is about to walk upon one of them! He has drunk too much of the moût!’

My cousin was plunging her way through the straw with uncertain strides and without her eyeglasses, so that it must have been a considerable shock to her when a crimson face with a white beard reared itself from the straw at her feet, and stared with a petrified terror at this episode in the dreams induced by moût. It was not only at her, however, that the old man thus gazed transfixed. The monkey had escaped, and was advancing, evidently much exhilarated by the straw, with demoniac leaps and cries, and doubtless the vintager was realising that he must have got ‘them’ very badly this time. Whatever he may have thought, the monkey settled the question for my cousin. She fled back to us, and when in safety took her gulp of moût with a heroism that I well knew to be a refinement of spite.

CHAPTER V.

The sitting-room in our hotel at Pauillac was discovered and annexed by us on the afternoon of our first day in the Médoc. It was a large room and a pleasant, and, so far as we were aware, had never before been trodden by the foot of man; certainly none trod it once we had taken possession. The sandy bootmarks that we distributed about its polished red floor remained there during the whole of our stay at Pauillac undisturbed by a brush, and unmingled with the footprint of the négociant en vins. The two big plaited maize-straw arm-chairs stood at attention by the table just as they were left; and, most wonderful of all, we could open the windows and know they would not be shut the moment our backs were turned. Apparently the other people in the hotel had no time to spend in the sitting-room. The wine merchants went forth in loud companies every morning, but—like the Irish lady who was said to be ‘the most thronging woman ever you seen; sure, she’d go out o’ the house twenty times for the once she’d come in’—they never seemed to return, and, whatever may have happened to them, the salon remained undisturbedly ours.

It was while sitting at tea at the large admirable table belonging to this room, on the afternoon of our first experience in the cuviers, that we became conscious of the eye of the Kodak regarding us from behind our eighteenpenny teapot with a cold reproach. As yet the gardens on the Thames Embankment reigned in lonely beauty in the recesses of the machinery; nothing French had been given to the mysterious custody of the black box, though we had carried it, at considerable inconvenience, to the cuvier of St. Lambert in the morning. The right moment never seemed to come; the sun was where it ought not to be, or we were afraid that the suitable peasant might be offended, and we had besides a latent disbelief in the Kodak’s willingness to deal with southern sunshine and a foreign sky tingling with light.

‘It has the surly English turn in it somewhere,’ my cousin had said, with Galway arrogance. But it was now saying ‘Ici on parle Français’ with all the power of its sunken eye; and as soon as we had thrown the tea-leaves out of the window, and hidden the jug of cold boiled milk behind the stuffed fox on the side-table, we went down and ordered a wagonette for the next morning from a livery stable, and felt that we were going to do our duty seriously by the Kodak.

The weather certainly did its part of the business to perfection. The sun blazed upon our departure, as we emerged from the hotel in the morning, and the heat came through the cool wind in streaks, as the vanille biscuit intersects the aching monotony of the lemon ice. Under the awning outside the coffee-room windows sat Madame, filling out her straw chair in magnificent meditation. Ours had been the last of the petits déjeuners, so that there was no longer any need for her to watch over the expenditure of red embers and café au lait in the kitchen, and she could now exhibit her elegant leisure and her blue cloth slippers to the loungers of Pauillac for an hour or so. We wished, for her sake, that the wagonette was larger and had two horses, and that the Kodak’s resemblance to a box of ‘samples’ had not given us so much the effect of commercial travellers; but she gave us a ‘bonne promenade,’ and a wave of the hand, that showed she had a heart that did not despise the humble.

Before we had got clear of the town, our cocher had begun to betray symptoms of intelligence. Our directions as to where we wished to go had been but vague, and, twisting himself round on his seat, he cross-questioned us until he had grasped the situation. ‘These demoiselles wished to see vineyards and vintagers at work in them, voyons!’—he twisted up the ends of his little black moustache, and grinned at us with unutterable comprehension, till his fat cheeks must have impeded his vision. ‘And they wish to make the photographie? Eh, bien! It is I who know where to conduct them. Allons, I will make them to see Château Latour!’ His black eyes beamed delightedly upon us, and his horse crawled unmolested down the hill, while a series of apparently agreeable ideas displayed themselves on its driver’s face. He resumed his usual position on the box, cracked his whip, and frightened the horse into a canter by saying ‘Huë!’ in a soprano voice.

It was very satisfactory. We told each other that we had indeed lighted upon a treasure—a man who understood what photography was, and who seemed to know the sort of things we wanted to photograph. We did not know that his mind was occupied in mapping out conveniently those of his friends whom he wished to visit, to photograph, to impress generally with his position of ‘Cicero’ (as a county Cork paper has classically expressed this office); but we realised all these things afterwards.

We drove for a while through the broad stretches

of the vineyards, where the myriad low vines stood with their octopus arms drooping untidily over the supporting wire, and the grapes hung heavy and ripe, taking their last look of the sun before their plunge into the seething night of the cuves. No one but the ardent négociant en vins could, we think, call the Médoc a beautiful land. Even at its gayest and greenest time these long slopes require all the romance and richness and mystery of the grapes to give them an interest, and the much-vaunted fact that the land was annually worth anything from £250 to £800 per acre cannot give it the sympathy that lies in an Irish hillside of furze and rock, whose price is adjusted in shillings and pence by Sub-Commissioners of the Land Court.

The vintage had hardly begun. We had to drive for some distance before we saw the first group of vendangeurs, standing waist-deep in the vines, snipping off the bunches and putting them into square wooden baskets, eating grapes by handfuls, and talking in a penetrating, incessant gabble that was as strident on the quiet vineyard slope as were the dazzling white sun-bonnets and kerchiefs and blue blouses in the toneless expanse of green. The Treasure pulled up, informing us that here was a suitable subject for photography, and we docilely got the Kodak into position. The vintagers turned as one man to stare at us, and we tried to isolate some half-dozen in the little focussing mirror, while the Treasure leaped from his box, and, circulating among the crowd, explained to them his position of proprietor of the entertainment with a sense of its humour that was only kept within bounds by the still stronger sense of self-importance. My cousin balanced the Kodak on her arm with all care, and said, ‘Maintenant très tranquille, s’il vous plaît!’ to the mirrored half-dozen, who with one accord shrieked with delight, put their arms round each other, did their hair, and otherwise prepared themselves for the ordeal.

‘How fortunate it is that they don’t object to being photographed!’ said my cousin. ‘Now, you pull the bobbin—I mean the button—and I will press the other thing.’

There followed a disintegrating click from the heart of the Kodak.

‘The photograph is taken,’ said my cousin, not as confidently as could have been wished. ‘What did the book say we were to do next?’

‘Put a penny in the slot,’ I suggested.

‘Idiot!’ replied my cousin, searching in my sketching wallet on the earthquake principle—that is, to go at once to the lowest depths, and then to burst upwards and outwards through all resisting elements. ‘Here is the book! It says we are now to turn this handle and replace the cap.’

The handle was turned, and it was then discovered that the cap was irretrievably lost. It was not on the floor of the wagonette, it was not in our pockets, it was not in the hood of my cousin’s cloak, or in her hand, or anywhere that it might reasonably have been. We said that we would hold a hat over the thing instead, and on going to the front for this purpose I became aware that the black cap was nestling in its usual place in front of the lens. It was one of the bitterest points of the incident that at this moment the group at whom the Kodak’s sightless eye had been directed, advanced upon us to see results, doubtless expecting that each of its six members would receive on the spot a picture on glass with a brass frame.

It was so surpassingly difficult to explain the accident and the general peculiarities of the Kodak, and the disappointment and scorn were so unconcealed when the faltering photographers finally made themselves understood, that as a possible, though doubtful method of consolation, I plunged among the vines and began a pencil sketch of the disappointed ones. In an instant the cocher was at my shoulder, summoning all the others with a wave of his hand to come and see the show. It is scarcely necessary to add that they came, and for the next five minutes I and my models were the centre of a hollow square, which was, so to speak, lined and canopied with billowy vapours of garlic.

The sketch was finished with unexampled speed, and in the teeth of the most scathing criticism, the critics showing an artistic intelligence that was almost unearthly, and for which an experience of the Irish peasant was no sort of preparation. I broke my way forth from the square, amidst shrill bursts of laughter and shrieks of ‘Ciel! Que je suis vilaine!’ ‘Mais regarde moi un peu le chapeau de Jeanne!’ ‘Eh! Dieu! C’est pas moi ça! Ouf! C’est vilaine!’ and, having collected my cousin from red-handed gluttony in the background, we succeeded in driving away in time to prevent the sketch-book being torn bodily out of my hand.

We ventured after a few minutes to ask the Treasure where he was now taking us, and after a long and meditative grin at each of us in turn, he condescended to tell us that we were going to see the vintagers at their dinner. Almost as he spoke we whirled in at the gate of a big yard, and saw, under a penthouse at the end of it, a kind of school feast going on: rows of tables covered with platters and jugs, and rows of vintagers devouring untold quantities of vintage soup. Our cocher drove straight up to these, and, having whirled showily round, drew up with the air of Napoleon confronting his army, and addressed the meeting. As he progressed with his explanation of our mission we gloomily produced the Kodak, and waited for the outward rush of those who wished to be immortalised: we were becoming alive to the fact that the Médoc peasant had not that shrinking from publicity that we had believed. But providentially the succulent soup, with the meat and cabbage and bread floating in it, was too good to be left in a hurry, and at the end of our driver’s address one candidate only came forward, an extremely plump young lady, with an expression of placid self-contentment, and an apron of an infuriated Scotch plaid. The Treasure leaped from his box like an antelope, and, leading her forth to a convenient spot, proceeded to pose her according to his own ideas. After a few experimental positions the inspiration came, and we had the privilege of focussing the fair vendangeuse, standing

placidly heedless of the fact that the Treasure, with his moustache twisted up to his eyes, from the very extremity of gallantry, was posed beside her, with his fat arm round her neck. Thus they were photographed, and as the words ‘C’est fait’ were uttered, the Treasure’s hat was raised with a flourish, and a ponderous kiss was deposited upon the cheek of beauty. There was a roar of delight from the luncheon party under the penthouse; even the photographers so far forgot themselves as to titter sympathetically, and as our cocher whipped up his horse, and swung out of the yard on two wheels, he turned to us and winked with an intimacy that made my cousin take out her most unbecoming pair of spectacles and put them on, in order to sustain the character of the expedition.

After this the events of the day became blended into a monotony of hot green vineyards, with pink and white houses on the hazy horizon; narrow roads, without a fence between their warm yellow gravel and the yellow gravel in which the vines grow; gangs of

vintagers stooping among the plants; fawn-coloured oxen pacing at ease with their loads; the clack and twang of Bordelais tongues; and, most prominent of all ingredients, the heat and the Kodak. Every friend of the cocher was found and photographed, the sketch-book was utilised for those who insisted on an immediate result, and, as the afternoon sun began to drop towards the western uplands, we hoped that we might, in the fulness of time, be permitted to go home. But the Treasure had yet another friend, one who lived still farther away from Pauillac, and it was not till we had driven for half an hour that we saw in front of us the now familiar chai, with its arched opening into the cuvier, and its magenta-legged proprietor standing inside in the juice, shovel in hand. It was becoming too late in the day for the Kodak, and the cocher desired that a sketch should be made of this most particular friend, and also of the friend’s wife, whom, in the twinkling of an eye, he had fetched from her house and placed on the edge of the pressoir in utter absurdity and incongruity. But the artist was too completely subjugated to remonstrate; even when the sketch-book was snatched from her by the cocher and deposited in the vinous fingers of the grape treader with long and loud explanation of every page, she merely sank back in voiceless despair.

We heard without interest or emotion that we were to be driven home by a different and longer way. Our only articulate longing was for tea, but that being a mere vision, as impossible as beautiful, we gradually took refuge in fatalism, telling ourselves that if we got home that night, well and good; if not, we could sleep in the wagonette, waking up obediently at intervals to make moonlight sketches of such of the cocher’s friends as he chose to summon from their beds for the purpose. We were in the act of dividing our last gingerbread, while the cool breath of the Médoc evening gave us its first nip, and the vines became fragrant in the dew, and the chorus of cigales in the roadside grass sounded like the rhythmic reeling of line off innumerable trout-rods, when I was thrown violently against my cousin by the collapse of the wagonette on one side, and after an instant of extreme anxiety and discomfort, we found ourselves rolled out in a heap into the vines, with the cigales’ note at our very ears, and the hind wheel of the wagonette finding a bed for itself in the shallow ditch beside us.

CHAPTER VI.

The cocher made light of it. There was a blacksmith quite close—en effet, a cousin of his own, and a man of great intelligence, and all would be arranged in a little quarter of an hour. My cousin with some trouble disinterred the Waterbury—she was in the habit of saying that she had no wish to display it as jewellery, but it seemed to me she might have struck a mean between a châtelaine or a wristlet, and a lair so profoundly situated that I hesitated to ask her the hour unless I knew she was going to bed. It was half-past six o’clock; the blacksmith, however intelligent, could not come without being fetched, the re-fixing of the wheel would take some time, getting back to Pauillac would take some more, and the evening was becoming chilly, as October evenings even in the Médoc have a knack of doing. Our driver had by this time untackled the tired white horse, and we were all pacing along toward nothing more definite than the setting sun, while hunger and ill-temper ran neck and neck in our bosoms. The road stretched implacably on to the horizon, its yellow reaches turning grey as the warmth slowly went out of the sky; the vintagers had all gone home to their dinners, and there was nothing moving except the topsails of a ship that glided spectrally along behind the shoulder of a low hill on our left, and told us of the nearness of the great river highway where the steamers and sailing vessels were going on their way, sublimely independent of such things as linch-pins or table d’hôte at Pauillac.

Two stone pillars, a small clump of trees, and a railed-in track connecting these, broke at length the blue-green monotony of the vines; and a low gate, with a little black-pinafored girl sitting on it, seemed to suggest a house somewhere near. It also suggested a possibility of repose till such time as the carriage should be repaired, and we stopped the cocher and his flow of conversation to ask if there was a house là-bas. Perfectly, there was a house. Did he think its proprietor would permit us to rest there till, etc. etc.? Perfectly, again; in fact, the lady to whom it belonged was yet another of his cousins, a person altogether charming, Madame Suzanne Marcault, and behold one of her children. The little girl was here imported into the conversation, and after some interchange of patois, we found ourselves following the black pinafore up the narrow lane, to demand hospitality from Madame Marcault in the name of M. Joseph Blossier.

It had become almost dark, and presently the last of the light was lost under a thick trellis of vines; then our noses were smitten by a smell of almost painful deliciousness, and our small guide, who had demurely stepped along in front of us, suddenly ran round the corner of a wall that half closed the end of the lane, and we heard ourselves announced—

‘Maman! V’là deux Anglaises!’

We followed upon the heels of this introduction, and found ourselves at the wide-open door of a cottage kitchen, wherein a broad-backed peasant woman was stacking logs on a blazing wood fire, and was thereby stimulating a couple of cauldrons to a state of bubbling perfumed ecstasy. This was Madame Suzanne Marcault.

We decided afterwards that we had never met any one with quite such good manners as Madame Suzanne. Hers was one of the many cuisines de vendanges, and we had stumbled in upon her at the critical moment known to the Irish cook as ‘dishing-in the dinner,’ but not for a second did she let us realise how intensely inconvenient our visit must have been. Her politeness was as sincere as the

smell of her potage, and the fulness of her sympathy as we recounted our adventure was not in the least daunted by the fact that my cousin alternately referred to the wheel as the boue or the rue. Her heart was so kind that she felt what we meant.

While we were still labouring with our story, wheels were heard on the road, and a whip exploded into a coruscation of crackings at the door.

‘Ah, Dieu! Les voilà pour le dîner! Dépêche-toi, voyons!’ A long row of quaint brown and yellow earthen vessels was set out on a table along one wall of the kitchen; there must have been two or three dozen of them, but in a few whirling minutes our hostess and the little girl had not only filled them with the savoury contents of the cauldrons, but had somehow or other stacked them all in the gig that had just driven up to the door.

‘Nous n’avons pas du monde ce soir,’ explained Madame Suzanne, when she had ladled out the last potful of soup, and had settled down into a sort of steaming tranquillity. ‘Ils sont tous là-bas, près St. Estéphe.’ ‘They’ meant the vintagers to whom she was temporary cook, and while the wheels, or rather the wheel, of our chariot still tarried, we fell into discourse with her about them.

‘Le patron feeds them well, pardi,’ she said. ‘Tiens, would ces dames like to taste the soupe de vendange?’

We tasted it, and it was perhaps the noble flavour of that vintage soup that inspired the scheme that simultaneously occurred to us both. Should we ask this nice woman, with her Irish friendliness, and her sympathetic comprehension of bad French, and her excellent cookery, to put us up for the night? We discussed it hurriedly between scalding, inelegant mouthfuls of soup, sopped bread, and tresses of cabbage, interspersed with flatteries on its quality. We wanted to see the Médoc au fond,—what more than this could show us its nethermost profundities? If we had lived out a night in a Connemara cottage, could we not stand one in a French ferme? So clean, so convenient, so glowing with local colour. Was it not almost a duty to accept such an opportunity?

It is a useful thing to be pronounced eccentricities. As we diffidently unfolded the suggestion to Suzanne, she put her hands on her hips and smiled at us with that smile of lenient amusement with which our sojourn in the Médoc was making us familiar. It was droll, pardi! She had never before had pensionnaires, but she had once been servant in a hotel, and if we feared the long drive in the cold—this was how we had put it—she would know how to make us comfortable. Voyons!

Delightful creature! so practical, so unconventional, so Irish in fact, we said to each other, as we listened to her explaining our scheme, with bursts of laughter, to M. Joseph Blossier, who had come to tell us that the carriage would be ready tout-à-l’heure. We had left her to deal with him; he required a more masterful treatment than our French would rise to, and it was with sincere thankfulness that we finally saw him depart, with promises to return for us in the morning with sundry essentials enumerated in a note to Léonie, our femme de chambre.

We sat hungrily in a corner of the kitchen while the little girl spread a surprisingly clean cloth on the table, and Madame Suzanne stirred the ragoût, and delicately added to it some further finishings which we trusted were not garlic. The yellowish walls and the smoke-stained wooden ceiling took the firelight with warm good fellowship; the blue china-tiled stove, hard-working aide-de-camp to the big open fireplace, sent an upward glow from its red charcoal upon the glittering array of pots and pans and glazed earthen vessels upon the wall above it; and round the open door the vine leaves and bunches of grapes were emphasised theatrically by the firelight, and the last light of the evening and the whirring of the cigales came strangely through them from without. The master of the house was late, and feeling, no doubt, like other hostesses, that the interval before dinner required alleviation, Madame Suzanne offered to show us over the rest of her house.

She began paradoxically by leading us out of it, and then took her way round the corner of the house under the grape trellis. She stopped at what was apparently a coach-house door, and after some difference of opinion between a large key and its keyhole, pushed it open. A blast of cold air nearly extinguished the flame of the little chimneyless lamp that she carried, as we followed her into a lofty barn, with giant barrels looming round its walls, and permeated with the sour, unforgetable, indescribable smell of a Médoc cuvier. This place was about forty feet long, and at the end of it we dimly descried a ladder, with a hand-rail, mounting to a door high up in the wall. Towards this we incredulously followed our hostess, and having stumbled up it after her, found ourselves in a musty loft; and then, saying something, whose import we did not quite catch, about her eldest daughter, Suzanne unlocked another door, and told us that this was where we were to sleep. Our courage receded to the toes of our boots; were we to share the room with that eldest daughter, or could it be that we were to join in an even more general family party? It was a long bare room, with nothing in it except a very large bed, swathed and canopied all over with heavy brown draperies, a chair, and a small table in the middle of the room, on which was a toy piano, a manual of devotion, and a little mirror made of something resembling tinfoil.

‘It seems we need not have sent for our washing-gear,’ observed my cousin. ‘I wish we were well out of this.’

‘It is a pretty bed, hein?’ said the amiable Suzanne, thumping the awful brown swaddlings of our couch. ‘And you need fear nothing; my husband and I and la petite sleep in there.’ She pointed to another door. ‘If you are ill, anything, you have but to knock’—

‘And mademoiselle, votre fille aînée?’ we faltered.

Ouf! We need not trouble ourselves about her. It was but last week that she had had a fever in that very bed—a fever scarcely worth mentioning; but she was now in Bordeaux for change of air: ‘et maintenant, mes demoiselles, descendons!’

We did not dare to inquire further as to Mademoiselle Marcault’s fever, but we felt that it gave the finishing touch of horror to those dusky draperies. It was too late now, however, to draw back, and, expressing a lying satisfaction in all that we had seen, we followed our hostess’s devious course to the kitchen. M. Marcault was there with another man, who, it was explained, was a friend who had come to dine. Both were dressed in blue linen blouses, and were of the sharp-nosed, long-moustached type common in Médoc and both rose and bowed solemnly as Madame Suzanne introduced us.

‘Deux demoiselles Irlandaises,’ she explained, with an up-and-down flourish of the lamp, in order that no details of the appearance of the maniacs might be lost, ‘who are anxious to become acquainted with an intérieur paysan.’ At this juncture we were far more anxious that la nourriture paysanne should become acquainted with our interior, but we made reply in fitting terms, and beguiled the remaining interval before dinner with political conversation. We always found it advisable in France to announce our true nationality as soon as convenient. We found ourselves at once on a different and more friendly footing, and talk had a pleasant tendency to drift into confidential calumny of our mutual neighbour, perfidious Albion, and all things ran smoother and more gaily. Dinner was ready at last, and we all sat down very close to each other round the narrow table. Suzanne fetched the soup and the ragoût off the stove, and helped us all out of the pot. Our glasses were filled with excellent ordinaire, and we began to think it was a charming party. The two men were most agreeable and instructive, talking with astonishing ease and well-bred self-possession on any subject that was started, and giving us much useful information on the subject of vines and vine-growing.

We were most careful to copy our hosts in all things. We put salt in our soup with the blades of our knives; we absorbed the rich sauce of our delicious ragoût with pieces of bread, being indeed pressed to do so by M. Marcault; we cleaned our knives on rinds of leathery crust; in fact, we conformed, as we thought, admirably. Everything was going on velvet, when, after the ragoût, the smell of fried oil became apparent, and from a covered-in pan Suzanne helped us each to a large piece of something that resembled sweet-bread, and cut rather like a tough custard pudding. It was fried bright brown, but the inside was yellowish white, and the whole thing was swimming in hot oil. We asked nervously what it was.

‘Mais, mangez le donc,’ responded Suzanne, as she reversed the frying-pan to let the last drops of oil run on to our plates. ‘C’est biang bong! C’est du cépe—du champignong, vous savez,’ seeing that we did not seem much enlightened. Here was local colour with a vengeance! There rose before us in a moment the brown, contorted visages of La Famille Empoisonnée among the mummies of St. Michel, and the dusty bits of fungus that they still retained in their jaws. The situation, however, did not admit of retreat. And we attempted none. The mushroom, or fungus, whatever it was, had a dreadful taste, as though rotten leaves and a rusty knife had been fried together in fat. Moreover, it was patent to the meanest intelligence that, whatever its taste might be, no digestion save that of a native or an ostrich could hope to compete with it. We each swallowed two lumps of it whole, and then my cousin looked wanly at me and said, ‘One more, and I shall be sick.’

It was hard and humiliating to explain that we both disliked and feared this crowning treat of a Médoc repast, but we did it; and though we sank in Suzanne’s estimation, it was more in pity than in anger that she removed the horror from before us, and replaced it with a delicious compôte of pears of her own making. We spent an agreeable evening, in conversation so instructive that we fear to reproduce it here, mingled with confidences as to Suzanne’s winter clothes, and criticisms of the sketch I was making of la petite. Ten o’clock struck, and Madame Suzanne gave a final tidying-up to her kitchen, and then, opening the great chestnut wood wardrobe that stood near the door, she selected from its layers of coarse brownish linen a pair of sheets, clammy with damp and cleanliness, and led the way once more to our barn.

It was a curious feeling when, after we had helped our hostess to make our bed, and said our good-nights, we found ourselves alone in the depths of peasant France without so much as a toothbrush to remind us of our connection with British effeteness, while the huge empty cuves in the barn beneath us roared and sang like organ-pipes in the rising wind. Under ordinary circumstances I do not think we should have survived the dampness of those sheets, but they were not given a fair chance. That night in the Widow Joyce’s cabin in Connemara was recalled to us by many things,—things that, though small in themselves, recurred with a persistence quite disproportioned to their bulk,—and often, while the mosquitoes piped their drinking-songs beneath the canopy, and the fleas came steeplechasing from the boards to the bed, and the candle burnt lower and lower, and the slaughter waxed grimmer and greater, we said to each