In the vine country

other that the exercise would at least save us from pleurisy or rheumatic fever.

It was somewhere during an interval of exhausted sleep that we were aware of Suzanne standing at our bedside and asking us in her strong voice if we would like some coffee or some wine. We sleepily said No, but perhaps, plus tard, when our things had come from the hotel, some water. It seemed a very short time before those things made their appearance, but it is obviously impossible to wash one’s self in a toy piano—a fact which we explained as gently as possible to la petite. She retired, and presently we heard a heavy step on the cuvier ladder; something was set down outside, and, rising, we found a very large garden watering-pot full of ice-cold water, and a very small white basin, sitting side by side on our doorstep. They were tedious, and the toy piano was nearly washed away in the flood; but they sufficed.

CHAPTER VII.

‘Blue roses,’ said my cousin ungraciously, as she rubbed her cheeks to free them from the frozen stiffness produced by the contents of the watering-pot, ‘and the coffee is cold,’ putting her hand round the thick cup that had just been filled for her. The discontented British croak was happily overwhelmed in Suzanne’s loud and abundant conversation on things in general; the sourness of the bread was more or less baffled by plastered layers of pear jam; and when we remembered that the coffee had been waiting for us since seven o’clock and that it was now a quarter to eight, we felt that we were not in a position to complain of its tepidity. Strange that a week in France should have so altered our point of view as to make us feel guilty at not having finished our breakfast at eight o’clock.

As we wound up the meal with several bunches of green and purple grapes, grey with dewy bloom, M. Blossier, with his cigarette and his patronising smile, appeared at the doorway, and as he leaned there, with his hands in his pockets, and his straw hat set crooked on his Astrakhan curls, he informed us that a gentleman had called upon us at the hotel the preceding afternoon, and had left word that he would return this morning, so perhaps it would be well if we gave ourselves the trouble to hasten. We looked at each other, conscious of an effect of failure in the morning’s toilet; the tinfoil looking-glass had slurred over defects that we now saw with a quickened perception. This must be the first-fruit of those letters of introduction that had been written about us, and what untold discredit were we now about to heap on our trusting friends! We flung down the unfinished bunches of grapes, and in less than five minutes we had got through the delicate matter of paying our reckoning, and were saying good-bye to Suzanne. It was unexpected under the circumstances that she should have kissed us, but nevertheless she did so. ‘Tiens!’ she cried, as I held out a hand for her to shake, ‘il me faut vous donner une bise! Là! et là!’ She gave us each two resounding kisses that, as far as garlic was concerned, were not lacking in that local flavour of which we were amateurs, and for fervour and sincerity equalled those that the Irish nurse bestows upon the objects of her affections.

We drove away from Suzanne’s household with real regret. We had found in it an excellent cuisine and a perfect hostess—so I remarked to my cousin with the dogmatic solemnity of a tombstone. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and we found a perfect host too, but he was a noun of multitude, and we provided the cuisine.’ She fingered her mosquito bites as she spoke, and we fell to reminiscences of our feeble efforts to

repulse the linked battalions of fleas and mosquitoes the night before.

Very soon, however, we could think of nothing but the extraordinary heat of the wind that was blowing clouds of red dust over us, setting the white sun-bonnets of the vendangeuses flapping, as we drove past them at the best speed to which we could incite M. Blossier, and after an hour of combat with it, we arrived at the hotel with our eyes full of sand, and our hair standing aureole-wise round our faces.

Madame herself came forth to meet us, with a note in her fat hand, and a manner in which some slight admixture of interest, almost of respect, was discernible. We read the note. It was even worse than we had expected; it was a request couched in admirable English that we would be ready to meet the writer at eleven, and he would then give himself the pleasure of conducting us round the vineyards of the neighbourhood, and would finally have the honour of escorting us to his own château, where, he hoped, we would dine. The large commercial face of the hall clock showed that we had just one quarter of an hour before this flight into French society in which to eliminate the traces of an experience that would probably have horrified our host beyond recovery, to cast out the accent that we had acquired with such fatal facility from Suzanne and M. Blossier, and to scour through the all-sufficing pages of Bellows’ Dictionary for phrases that should lubricate our efforts at high-class conversation.

It was not pleasant, either in prospect or accomplishment, but we did it. We were even sitting in the salon as ladies should, putting on tight gloves, when a landau and pair drove to the door, and we were told by the sympathetically excited Louis that a gentleman wished to see us. In another five minutes we were bowling through Pauillac, with parasols up, conversing in free, untrammelled English with the excessively kind and unselfish person who had given a large slice of valuable time to the toil of taking two ignoramuses to see the innermost secrets and perfections of wine-making. Our host told us, in his well-chosen English, that had here and there the pressure and the staccato that an Anglo-Saxon tongue may weary itself in striving to imitate, that we were to partake of déjeuner at a rival Pauillac hotel before going any farther. We did partake.

From oysters, served with hot sausages, to black coffee and fruit, we went hand in hand with the menu, and when we rose to go we felt serene and equal to the occasion.

Again we bowled smoothly along the Promenade de la Marine—a spectacle much enjoyed by the Pauillac monde, and, let us hope, imposing in the eyes of Madame and of her salle-à-manger, now crowded for déjeuner. We were driven into the country, in a direction opposite, we were thankful to observe, to that taken the day before by M. Blossier. Heavens! what would be the consternation of our present host if we were to chance upon one of the cuviers or vintage kitchens of yesterday, and a troop of acquaintances was to burst therefrom, demanding copies of their photographs with a terrible intimacy—they might even slap us on the back!—the contingency did not bear thinking of.

But a fate very different from wayside cuviers and ragged peasant proprietors was in store for us. A couple of undulating miles brought us in sight of a comfortable-looking white stone villa, flanked by long outhouses, and surrounded by a small and phenomenally brilliant flower garden. The vineyards ran like a smoothly swelling sea round the borders of this island that had been preserved from their inroads; the blinds of the villa were drawn down, and it seemed to look with ‘a stony British stare’ upon the vintage operations going forward all day under its eyes. Monsieur Z. told us that it had been built in imitation of an English villa by the Baroness de Rothschild, but we did not dare to ask why she should have chosen the square modern type, dear to the heart of the retired solicitor. We asked instead why it should be called Mouton Rothschild, and found that once in the dark ages the whole of this part of the wine country had been given over to sheep, and that consequently the word mouton had survived here and there; but why it should be tacked on to the name of a family could not be explained. It would be neither kind or clever to call a newly-built house in the neighbourhood of Limerick, Pig Robinson or Pork Murphy; but in France, Sheep Rothschild is a very different affair, and a name held in uninquiring reverence by the négociant en vins.

We left the carriage, and proceeded with all dignity to the cuviers at the rear of the villa, while the hot and tawny vent d’Afrique blew suffocatingly in our faces, and covered our white veils with yellow grit, and turned the most inviting shade to mockery. It was doubtless of such heat as this that the lady’s-maid remarked to her mistress that it quite ‘reminded ‘er of ‘ell!’ But, for all that, we had a kind of glory in it; it made us feel that we were really abroad, and that we should be able to bore our friends about the vent d’Afrique, when we got home, in a manner that would surprise them. At this juncture we were halted in front of a palatial building of two storeys, and following our guide into it, we found ourselves in the twilight aisles of one of the great fermenting houses of the Médoc. Right and left stood the huge barrels on their white stone pedestals, belted monsters, spick and span in their varnished oak and shining black hoops, with a snowy background of white-washed wall to define their generous contour, and a neat little numbered plate on each to heighten their resemblance to police constables. This was an édition de luxe of wine-making—at least, so it seemed to us after what we had seen of dingy sheds, wine-stained barrels, and promiscuous rubbish, with magenta legs splashing about in juice, and spilt dregs as a foreground.

We were taken up a corner staircase to the upper floor, and were there received by the superhumanly well-bred and intelligent official who is invariably found in such places; we were also received and closely examined by the swarm of fat wasps that, in the cuviers, is fully as invariable, and rather more intelligent. No one seems to object to these wasps and their pertinacity; Monsieur Z. and the manager merely gave a pitying glance in the direction of my cousin, when, in the middle of a most creditable question about the phylloxera, her voice broke into a shriek, and after a few seconds of dervish-like insanity, she brought up from the back of her neck the fragments of a wasp, and hurled them to the floor with a dramatic force that was quite unstudied. The wasps congregated most thickly about an arched

opening in the wall, through which a crane poked its long lean arm into the open air, and dangled its chain for the tubs full of grapes that were brought underneath it by the oxen. Up came each purple load, already battered and robbed of its bloom by the crushing and packing, with the bloated yellow wasps hanging on to it, and the long arm of the crane swung it round to the pressoir, which here was a broad truck on wheels. The method then became of the usual repulsive kind. The grapes were churned from their stalks in a machine, the juice ran in a turgid river round the pressoir, and, paddling in this, the bare-legged workmen shovelled the grapes into the cuves, whose open maws gaped through trap-doors in the floor. Other men packed the stalks into a machine like a pair of stays; when it was full, the tight-lacing began by means of a handle and cogged wheels, and when it was over, the stalks were taken out dry and attenuated, and flung from a window, with the cheerless prospect of being utilised at some future time as top-dressing for their yet unborn brethren.

When we got into the carriage again we were crammed with information, and a silence as of indigestion settled upon us as we whirled along the hog-backed vineyard road to Château Lafite. It is not only in wine that Mouton Rothschild is beaten by its nearest neighbour. In the matter of a château, Lafite scores still more decidedly; of that no one could have any doubt who saw this old country-house, with its pointed towers, its terraced gardens with their ambushed perfumes that took the hot wind by surprise, its view over the soft country to other châteaux, and its delightful wood, where grassy walks wound away into the shadows. After these things, going to see the cuviers and the wine-making was like beginning again on roast beef after dessert; but the appetite came in eating. It was Mouton Rothschild over again, only more so; it could not be more dazzlingly smart than its kinsman, but it was larger; more outhouses and more imposing, a greater number of cuves, a more ambitious manner of regulating the temperature. We were truly and genuinely interested, but none the less were we penetrated by a sense of the gross absurdity of our pose as students of viticulture, while Monsieur Z. and the manager of Château Lafite imparted fact upon fact antiphonally and seriously, without a shadow of distrust of our capabilities. Indeed, in all our vintage experiences we met with this heartfelt devotion to the subject, and this touching belief in our intelligence, and it was both a glory and a humiliation to us.

Enfiladed thus by a cross-fire of what might be called grape-shot, we progressed in fullest importance round the quiet nurseries of the claret for which such an incredible future of dessert-tables is in store, and entered at last the doorway of a long low building. A few steps led downwards to another doorway, where a grave and courteous attendant presented us each with a candle placed in a socket at the end of a long handle, and unlocked a door into profound and pitchy blackness. It was like going to see the mummies at Bordeaux, it was even more like going into the cellar at home to look for rats, and my cousin’s skirts were instinctively gathered up and her candle lowered to the ground as the darkness closed its mouth upon us. It was cool and damp, it smelt of must and wine-barrels, and in some way one could feel that it was immense. Our guides turned to the right without hesitation, into a gallery whose walls, from the sandy floor to the vaulted ceiling, were made of bottles of wine. We walked on, and still on, trying to take it in, while on either side the tiers of bottles looked at us out of their partitions with cold uncountable eyes, eyebrowed sometimes, or bearded, with a fungus as snowy and delicate as crêpe lisse, on which the specks of dew glittered as the candle-light procession passed by.

‘There are here a hundred and fifty thousand bottles of claret,’ said the manager, with prosaic calm. ‘Some of them are a century old. This is the private cellar of Baron de Rothschild.’

‘He will not drink it all,’ said Monsieur Z.; and we laughed a feeble giggle, whose fatuity told that we had become exhausted receivers.

More and yet more aisles followed, catacombs of silence and black heavy air, but full of the strange life of the wine that lay, biding its time

according to its tribe and family, in a ‘monotony of enchanted pride,’ as Ruskin has said about pine trees.

We saw very little more of wine-making, when we got out again into the blustry heat, and crawled back to the carriage, feeling cheaper and more modern than we had done for some time. A new phase of sight-seeing was in store for us, and one with which we were even less fitted to compete. The inner life of a French country-house does not come within the scope of the ordinary tourist; and when, later in the afternoon, we were led up the curving and creeper-wreathed steps of a château, and ushered into an atmosphere of polished floors, still more polished manners, afternoon tea, and a billiard-table, there was only one drawback to perfect enjoyment of the situation. The ladies of the household—there were several of them—did not speak English, and at once that delusive glibness that had been nurtured by talking to Suzanne began to wither in the shadeless glare of drawing-room conversation.

We shall never know what absurdities we said, or what bêtises we committed; we can only feel satisfied that in a general way we said and did the wrong thing, and we can but ‘faintly trust the larger hope’ that our kind hosts made due allowance for insular imbecility. Whatever they may have thought of the strangers so unexpectedly brought within their gates, they kept alike their countenances and their counsel; and when the guests had faltered and smirked through their difficult farewells, and hidden their hot faces in the shelter of the landau, they were aware, as they drove away in the clear southern starlight, of two great fragrant bouquets of roses and heliotrope on the seat opposite, the last charming expression of the hospitality of the Médoc.

CHAPTER VIII.

But a week—and we were the best part of a week at Pauillac—gives ample time for the forming of those ill-fated foreign friendships which are destined never, as Rossetti says, ‘to find an earthly close.’ I do not know from how many hotels in various parts of France we have gone forth sorrowing, and asseverating our intention of returning there directly our affairs in Ireland could be wound up so as to permit of our leaving that country for life. To their melancholy number must now be added the Grand Hôtel du Commerce, Pauillac. On the last sad day we had to start early,—a proceeding that is a strain upon the constitution of any hotel,—but never, on our laziest mornings, had we such lavish cans of eau bouillante, nor such hot coffee, nor such a foaming jug of freshly boiled milk. Léonie the chambermaid, Louis the garçon, Jeanne the cook, all vied with each other in fond efforts to enhance the poignancy of parting; even the bill, usually a styptic to the tender pain of farewell, was affectingly moderate.

‘Black,’ the big dog, paced beside us to the curious little vehicle, not unlike a county Cork inside car, that was to take us to the station; he was bestridden

as usual by the monkey, and in her softened mood my cousin endured the clammy clutch of ‘Bamboo’ upon her finger with scarcely a shudder. Jeanne’s little girl had given us a flaming bouquet of scarlet geraniums and heliotrope; two bunches of grapes had been pressed upon us by Madame, to sustain us on our journey; and, at the last moment, our friend who had been the first to introduce us to the secrets of wine-making darted forward with a card addressed to the proprietor of a restaurant in Bordeaux, on which that gentleman was prayed to serve to ‘ces demoiselles’ a bottle of Grand St. Lambert, ‘85, at the expense of its original producer. Of course we left vowing to return for the vendange next year, and trying to believe that we should be as good as our word. It seemed the only way given to us of marking our sense of their kindness.

We had to wait at the station, seated on our luggage in default of benches, before the train—the tallest we had ever seen—came in, towering over the platformless station after the arrogant fashion of French trains; and having scaled its precipitous sides, and struggled up into what we expected to be its lofty saloons, our hats were knocked over our eyes by the ceiling. We then found that the unusual height of the train was caused by the third-classes being mounted on top, above our more honourable heads, and that, in moving about the carriage, it was safer to go on all-fours.

It was a long hot drive across Bordeaux to the Gare de la Bastide, and it gave a fine sense of freedom to leave all luggage there, and set forth again on foot, unhampered by anything except a small cherished hand-basket. We took the ferry-boat across to the other side of the river—a little strenuous black steamer that fretted and panted across the wide stream like a broken-winded pony trying to bolt. We did not know our way, and asked advice on the subject from as many people as possible, only taking care to wait till our most recent informant was round a corner. I once omitted this precaution in Cork, and while I was blandly putting further inquiries to a postman, an awful voice cried after me—

‘I suppose you think I’m a liar!’

A thing that has made me circumspect in such matters ever since.

Our way led through the market—a great iron tent, filled with the most variegated colours, voices, and smells. We roamed through damp, brilliant aisles, with vivid splendours of fruit and flowers mounting high over our heads on either hand; we explored the remarkable collections of birds, beasts, and herbs that were being confidently purchased by the housewives of Bordeaux for family consumption; and, with a bow of recognition to a poisonous barrowload of fungi, we pursued our way into the sunny street wherein was the restaurant which had been indicated to us by our late host. We presented the card entitling us to the bottle of Grand St. Lambert without delay, and it was presently borne in in state by the proprietor himself—a civility obviously owing to the curiosity that was displayed on his red and round-eyed countenance. It was a large bottle, with a beautiful white-and-gold label, and after we had scientifically smelt its bouquet, and slowly absorbed as much as we thought becoming, morally and physically, there was still two-thirds of the bottle left, far too much either to squander upon the waiter or to finish ourselves. The waiter had left a mound of grapes in front of us, and had decorously retired; on a buffet behind us were a number of old newspapers; the hand-basket was on the floor at our feet; all was as perfect as if it had occurred in a romance of detective life. My second cousin stealthily abstracted an Intransigéant of a responsible age from the buffet, wrapped up the bottle in its woolly folds, and forced it diagonally into the basket, while the various matters it dispossessed were forced, diagonally or otherwise, into our pockets, so that when I came to pay the bill, the expeditionary purse lay as deep as the coins at the base of a public building.

Libourne is only half an hour by train from Bordeaux,—a chequered half-hour of bursts in and out of tunnels, and of consequently intermittent amenities on the part of a resplendently-dressed newly-married pair, who faced us all the way there,—and the bridge that spans a placid curve of the Dordogne, under the town of Libourne, came into view so unexpectedly that we had hardly time to gather our things together before the train stopped in the station. We had been fortunate enough to have been given an introduction to a gentleman and his wife who spend each vintage season in their charming little old-fashioned country-house near Libourne, and we found that their kindness had even gone to the length of waiting for us outside the barrier that in France so relentlessly separates the travelling public from the rest of mankind. It was humiliating to discover that Monsieur and Madame A. (I suppose the time-honoured formula must again be employed) both spoke English so many thousand times better than we could speak French, that our acquaintance with that language became wholly superfluous; but it was also refreshing. It was a wonderful thing to feel that we need no more take thought to our luggage, or to the reproving or instruction of porters in a foreign tongue. Monsieur A. had a wholesome belief in female incapacity, and in an instant we found that we were no longer mere literary tramps, but had been raised to the serene and almost forgotten position of ladies of quality.

In a very short time we found ourselves being whirled off in a carriage to Quinault, the country-house aforesaid, and were being told all manner of strange things. We had not looked at a newspaper since we left Paris, and it was hard to believe that the most notable figure in Irish politics should have left them for ever, and no echo of such a thing come to us, even in the quiet, far-away vineyards of the Médoc. We were now in the St. Emilion district, and without wishing to insult the Médoc, it must be said that it cannot compare in beauty with the opposite side of the Gironde. There was an air of generous luxuriance about the vines themselves that began to realise for us the vineyards of our more poetical visions. The stunted little shrubs on which we had been forming our eye were no more to be seen. Tall bushes, trained to spread like fans on espaliers, had taken their place, and pictorially, at any rate, there can be no comparison between the two systems. There was a sunset that evening that made the first sight of the St. Emilion vines a thing greatly to be remembered. Quinault is a scientific vineyard, and the charm of colour conferred by the blue-green sulphate of copper that stains all the leaves, is a fine confirmation of the theory that the useful is necessarily the beautiful. These blue-green leaves had turned to a mysterious metallic grey in the evening light; up the middle aisle came a cart drawn by a big white horse, a scarlet-capped man was standing up in it between the barrels of grapes, his figure showing ‘dark against day’s golden death;’ after it followed a procession of vintagers, women and boys mostly, the yellow light behind them giving to the long row of figures the effect of being a company of saints on an early Italian background; and, last of all, came a little, incredibly bowed woman, who had been vintaging here at Quinault for the last eighty years—La Mère Mémé, the oldest and the most conscientious vendangeuse of the district.

‘She is always the first at the end of the row,’ we were told, ‘and she never leaves a bunch behind her, and she has eighty-seven years; n’est-ce pas, ma Mère?’

Mère Mémé admitted the eighty-seven years with an almost bored acquiescence. She had been very old for so long that she was less proud of it than she had

probably been when she was eighty. She sat down on a barrel, and a sketch of her was made as speedily as might be, while the sky faded from gold to red, and the rest of the vintagers slowly tore themselves from the charms of looking over the sketcher’s shoulder to go to the excellent dinner that was waiting for them in a long vine-covered barn. Once more we tasted the vintage soup, and smacked our lips, and said, with facetious under-statement of the case, that it was pas mal, and once more we prodded at the cauldron of ragoût, and felt the hunger of gluttony rise within us as we smelt its rich and composite fragrance. We were connoisseurs in vintage cookery by this time, and had been shown the mysteries of many vintage kitchens, but as the exhibition always took place a long time after tea and a short time before dinner, it never failed to make us regret that we also were not vintagers.

We wandered back to the house through the rose-garden, and though we pretend to no horticultural knowledge, by dint of recognising ‘La France’s’ timid flush, and the orange glow of that poetically-named flower, ‘William Allan Richardson,’ we took a higher place in the estimation of their proprietor, and were encouraged to adventurous remarks on their culture as practised in Ireland, which, we fear, must have hopelessly degraded the gardeners of that country in the eyes of Monsieur A. It was hard to talk of anything else but roses and fruit at dinner, when the centre of the table was a masterpiece of both one and the other; but we were beginning to feel less restricted now in our choice of subjects. During our last flight into polite society our ideas were to us much as the creatures in the Ark must have been to Noah. Our brains were full of interesting things which we wished to plant out on the world, but when we thrust them forth, they could find no rest for the soles of their feet in the strange sea of French conversation, and they returned to sit lamentably upon the shelf, with all the other agreeable but untranslatable notions.

Now, however, we had not only enlarged our vocabulary, but we had also lost a good deal of the decent diffidence that had at first prompted us to hold our tongues, and we found ourselves conversing gaily, with a hideous disregard of the trammels of verbs and the pitfalls of gender. I had nearly finished my dinner before I realised that in asking my neighbour to pass la selle, I was unreasonably demanding a saddle, and it was almost dreadful that that neighbour gave no sign of what he felt, and merely told me that to eat du sel in such quantities as is my wont was an habitude Anglaise. It would have been consolatory to have been laughed at openly on such occasions, but I suppose such altruistic politeness would be beyond the power of most people; certainly no one we ever met soared to such heights, and I am sure we are not capable of it ourselves.

We had an expedition before us the next day, and the evening had to be short. However, after dinner we strolled out into the darkness, mellowed by the scent of many roses, and went to have a look at the vendangeuses. The ladies had a dining-room apart from the gentlemen, and when we looked in at them, were still sitting over their wine with a fine indifference to the charms of general society in the barn. Mère Mémé, at the end of the long table, with the lamplight deepening her wrinkles into trenches, and sinking her eyes into wells of ink, might have been an over-printed engraving of Rembrandt’s mother. Gathered round her were three or four hardly less ancient ladies, equally suggestive of Rembrandt’s relations, and a long array of dark-haired, white-coifed women and girls were to be seen, more or less dimly in the indifferent light, finishing their jugs of vin ordinaire, all talking at the tops of their voices, and all, after the first stare, comporting themselves as if no curious foreign eyes were observing them from the doorway.

The evening closed with one dramatic episode. A long low dark room; at one end a bare table; on one side of it an excited group of women; on the wall behind, a smoky lamp, throwing a lurid light on two resolute-looking men, who stood behind the table on which a swarthy victim lay trembling, held tightly by one, while the other hurriedly divested him of all clothing save a fur boa and two pair of boots.

Madame A. was having her black poodle clipped.

CHAPTER IX.

T was market day at Libourne. We were aware of that from a very early hour of the morning, as the complaining utterances of every class of rickety waggon and ungreased wheel were wafted in at the windows of our hotel, blended with the solid, carpet-like whacking of donkeys’ backs, and the screams of their drivers, all ladies of advanced age and leathern lung power. Monsieur and Madame A. called for us at nine, and before setting forth on the legitimate expedition allotted to the day, we drove round the market square.

A helpless depression comes over us at the thought of attempting to describe a foreign market-place. It has been so often done, and from such an exhaustive number of points of view, that there seems nothing in the least original left to be said. I do not suppose that any account of journeyings in France is really perfect without a semi-humorous description of an old woman under a great blue or a great red umbrella. It should be dashed with a pathetic brilliancy, and there should, as a rule, be something smouldering and suggestive of ancient coquetry about the eyes of the old woman. We both felt this, and my cousin ran about feverishly, snapping off Kodak plates in the most extravagant way, but failing to find quite the old lady we wanted.

Another disappointment was the peasant straw hat upon which she had set her heart, such a hat as I had bought in Brittany—conical, broad-brimmed, many-coloured. We shouldered round the sunny, noisy square, finding everything imaginable for sale except straw hats; finally we left the open-air merchants, and in a bonnet shop, whose only claim to romance was its position in the arcades that—like the ‘Rows’ at Chester—surrounded the square, she bought for twenty sous a hat that might easily have been worn in Bond Street.

We were to be shown St. Emilion this delicious mid-June day,—by the calendar it was about the

8th or 9th of October, but it was evident that there was a mistake somewhere,—and the drive to that small but remarkable town was one of most brilliant and fragrant pleasantness. We were mounting up out of the levels about Libourne, rising higher and higher into the bright morning, till we could see some of the silver coils of the Dordogne beginning to reveal themselves, and red-roofed villages broke through the vines on the slopes below us, giving unexpected suggestions of Arcadia.

Presently above the coachman’s hat a yellow crocketed spire thrust itself into the blue of the sky; there came crowding after it towers and roofs, and finally a tall crumbling wall, standing quite alone outside old fortifications, with nothing but the Gothic window-openings left to show that it had once been part of a great church. We drove in through a towered gateway, and over the cobble-stones dear to the writers of mediæval romance and the makers of carriage springs, and, squeezing our way along a street narrow enough to allow us to shake hands simultaneously with the occupants of the houses on both sides, we pulled up at the opening of a street too steep for a carriage. Down this we went on foot, reminded a good deal of Clovelly, and yet glad that it was not Clovelly, but a walled town in the heart of the vineyard country, with a saint and a shrine, and a history as gorgeous as an illuminated missal. Level ground was granted at last to our aching knees, a little plateau where was a shading chestnut tree, a railing, and behind these the unassuming front of an inn,—the Hôtel Dussaut, if our memories are correct,—with its doors opening straight in upon a room where a cleanly-laid table glimmered in the cool obscurity.

As we stood under the chestnut tree a sound as of the beating of eggs rose to us presently from a flagged yard about fifteen feet below our plateau, and, looking over the edge, we had an excellent bird’s-eye view of two young ladies engaged respectively in beating a yellow compound with a fork, and in shaking some other yellow compound in a frying-pan over a charcoal fire. One of them wore pince-nez, both had early Florentine shocks of hair, and a general appearance

of such æsthetic culture that we refused at first to believe that they were preparing our déjeuner; and when later we seated ourselves at the table within the French window, and received from the hands of the wearer of the pince-nez the delicious omelette that had been cooked in the open air, we felt embarrassed by a sense of the favour conferred. Our hostesses must, we fear, have been taken at a slight disadvantage by us; we felt rather than saw some want of completeness in their attire during the first stages of déjeuner,—a bareness as to neck, a skimpiness as to skirt; but as the meal progressed, so did the toilettes. By the time that we had finished our dish of smelts, with their wonderful wood-sorrel sauce, the wearer of the pince-nez was glowing in a scarlet smocked silk jersey; and when the roast chicken was placed on the table, her sister had endued a flowing skirt, and wreathed her throat with some ten or twelve yards of amber beads. We could not swear that the pince-nez themselves had been changed, but certainly it was only when dessert was arrived at that we noticed for the first time that they were gold-rimmed, and were attached by a slim gold chain to a brooch of barbaric splendour.

It was a dessert greatly to be remembered that we had at the Hôtel Dussaut: the monster pears and grapes, the rich velvety wine of the district, and finally, the spécialité of the town, ordered expressly for us by Monsieur A., the macaroons made at the convent according to an ancient recipe known to the nuns. Certainly the ecclesiastical macaroon transcends the secular variety; these come in warm and palpitating, still cleaving to the white square of paper on which they had been baked, looking like lumps of yellow foam at the foot of a waterfall, melting in the mouth as foam itself might melt, and suggesting the idea that the conventual life has its alleviations.

A small salon opened out of the little verandah room in which our lunch was served, a sitting-room replete with photograph frames, crochet antimacassars, oil paintings, and green velvet furniture, and blocked in one corner by the altogether astonishing circumstances of a bed, whose sumptuous draperies suggested the proscenium of a puppet show. The window looked down into a precipitous street at the back of the hotel, and, craning out, the pointed arch of an old gateway was visible at the top of the hill between the crooked lines of houses, the Porte de la Cadène, so a little old-fashioned guide-book to St. Emilion informed us. There was a long explanation of the name, from which we gathered that it had something to say to the bar that once fastened the gate, but what exactly it was not given to our poor intelligence to discover. Whenever the guide-book felt that it was becoming unbefittingly lucid, it threw in a few words of patois, or early French in inverted commas, and went full speed ahead again, secure from pursuit. The photographs that thronged the room, like Ruskin’s pine trees elsewhere referred to, ‘on barren heights and inaccessible ledges, in quiet multitudes,’ proved a more attractive study than the guide-book, and we travelled slowly round the collection till we came upon a cabinet-sized head of a young lady with disordered hair, pince-nez, a swan-like length of throat, and an evening dress of which only a single row of Valenciennes trimming showed above the lower edge of the photograph. We sat down before it with a gasp, as we recognised in this ethereal being one of our late cooks, and at the same instant Madame A. made the discovery of a dwarf easel on the floor at the foot of the bed, on which a still larger portrait of a lady, in the dress of a Russian princess, with an inscription to the effect that she was Madame Dussaut herself, owner of the hotel, and mother of the two peeresses who had served for us our admirable déjeuner. We retired after this, and said that it would be better to go away and see the town before we found out that these people were closely related to the Bourbons, which seemed the next thing to expect.

The streets had the noonday heat and silence about them when we emerged from beneath the chestnut tree, and went downhill to where a lofty yellow cliff towered sheer in the hollow of the town, carrying on its crest the crocketed spire that we had seen lifting its long throat above its retainers like a serene highness, as we drove through the vineyards to St. Emilion. Low down on the cliff, below the reach of the swinging arms of a huge old fig tree that had rooted itself on the verge of the yellow rock, were carvings like the façade of a church, and finally a door disclosed itself, through which we plunged after our guides, much as we had plunged into the private cellar of the Rothschilds. We were in the famous monolith church, hewn and dug in the living cliff by monks, headed by the industrious St. Emilion, in the eighth century, and going down a few steps to the level of the floor, we looked about us in the extremely moderate light that came through sloping shafts in the thickness of the cliffs sixty feet above. The fig tree roots had burrowed through the cliff, and hung in loops and knots from the roof, intersecting the cold and dusty streaks of light, and the flicker of a sun-lit green spray at the mouth of one of the shafts gave the solitary touch of colour to the sombre vault. It was a bare, immense place, with two rows of square pillars of solid rock supporting the arched roof, black with age, empty of everything save a stone altar or two, and a few tombs, dead silent, and abounding in dark hiding-places for rats and bats. ‘All this makes you experience I know not what sentiment of religious terror,’ exclaims the guide-book at this juncture, in discreet rhapsody, having cantered through a page of architectural French, that had almost resulted in a case of ‘Bellows to mend’ for the owner of that admirable dictionary.

Our sentiments were far from religious after a tour of that church, during which we had seen some hundreds of names, addresses, ages, birthdays, engagements, and other data inscribed in the soft stone by tourists. Only those who have seen the coronation chair in Westminster Abbey gashed with vile initials, could believe the ravages of vulgarity at St. Emilion. The pillars and tombs were fully garnished with these hall marks of the barbarian. That was only to be expected, as even the bones in the tombs had been carried away bit by bit as agreeable souvenirs, but one would have imagined that the altar might have been spared. It was here, however, and on the old bas-relief above the altar, that a gentleman called Merritt had achieved his deadliest triumphs; we tracked him subsequently through the grotto of St. Emilion and the monastery cloisters, but this was his highest effort, and probably the one that he recounts with most pride to his envious acquaintances. May the milkman and butcher’s boy scribble his name upon the imitation granite of his suburban door-posts, and may it be wiped out from the will of his father-in-law!

We went on into a sort of annexe of the church, into which they used to shoot people through oubliettes when they became superfluous, and thence we scrambled out into the street again, and across to the grotto of St. Emilion. Apparently the saint had not been able to find anything above ground that combined privacy with excruciating discomfort, and accordingly scratched out this rabbit hole a dozen feet below the rest of the community, and lived there in damp and darkness for twenty or thirty years. His furniture was limited. The light of a match showed a bed cut in the wall, with a bolster of the same sympathetic description, a stone block for a table, another for a chair, and a holy well in an alcove. The old woman who had charge of the grotto struck another match, and held it low in the alcove of the sacred well for us to see the dark gleam of the water. It was more like a shallow pool than a well, and the water lay still and perfectly transparent upon its yellow bed. Its ancient nymph scooped up a tumblerful with the assurance that it was the best in the world, and when we had satisfactorily tasted it, she lowered her match and said archly, ‘Et les épingles. Regardez les épingles, mesdemoiselles.’

We regarded as desired, and saw lying at the bottom of the pool a small collection of pins, some old and rusty enough to have fastened up St. Emilion’s gown on wet days, others new and glittering. These, it was explained by the old lady with many knowing side-glances at our companions, were a means of fortune-telling peculiar to the sacred well. Gentlemen and ladies who visited it were accustomed to drop two pins into it, and if these fell so as to form a cross, then the thrower would be married before the year was out; this was asseverated with chapter and verse, and the testimony of brides and bridegrooms who had returned there on their honeymoons. I searched silently and secretly in my inner economy for a