Claret and Olives, from the Garonne to the Rhone. Angus B. ReachЧитать онлайн книгу.

      BORDEAUX.

      When I got to Bordeaux, the vintage time had just commenced, and having ever had a special notion that vintages were very beautiful and poetic affairs, and a still more confirmed taste and reverence for claret, it was my object to see as much of the vintage as I could—to see the juice rush from the grape, which makes so good a figure in the bottle. Letters of introduction I had none. But there is a knack of making one's own way—of making one's own friends as you go—in which I have tolerable confidence, and which did not fail me in the present conjuncture. First, to settle and make up my notions, I strolled vaguely about the city, buying local maps and little local guide-books. Bordeaux is emphatically what the French call a riant town, with plenty of air, and such pure, soft, bright, sunny air. In the centre of a broad grand Place,—dotted with very respectable trees for French specimens, emblazoned with gay parterres, sprinkled with orange shrubs in bloom, and holed with no end of round stone basins, in which dolphins and Neptunes spout from their bronze mouths the live-long day, and urns, and pillars, and Dianas, and Apollos stand all around—there rises upon his massive pedestal the graven image of a fat comfortable gentleman in the ample cloak and doublet of Louis Quatorze, knots of carven ribbons decorating his shoulders, and flowing locks descending from under his broad-brimmed, looped-up hat. This is the statue of a M. de Tournay, an ancient intendant of the province, who was almost the creator of modern Bordeaux. Under his auspices the whole tribe of dolphins and heathen gods and goddesses were invoked to decorate the city. He reared great sweeps of pillared and porticoed buildings, and laid out broad streets and squares, on that enormous scale so characteristic of the grand monarque. He made Bordeaux, indeed, at once vast, prim, and massively magnificent. The mercantile town got quite a courtly air; and when the tricolor no longer floated in St. Domingo, and the commerce of the Gironde declined, so that not much was left over and above the wine trade, which, as all the world knows, is the genteelest of all the traffics, Bordeaux became what it is—a sort of retired city, having declined business—quiet, and clean, and prim, and aristocratic. Such, at least, is the new town. With old Bordeaux, M. de Tournay meddled not; and when you plunge into its streets you leap at once from eighteenth century terraces into fourteenth century lanes and tortuous by-ways. Below you, rough, ill-paved, unclean, narrow thoroughfares; above, the hanging old houses of five ages ago, peaked gables, and long projecting eaves, and hanging balconies; quaint carvings in blackened wood and mouldering stone;—the true middle-age tenements, dreadfully ricketty, but gloriously picturesque—charming to look at, but woful to live in; deep black ravines of courts plunging down into the masses of piled up, jammed together dwellings; squalid, slatternly people buzzing about like bees; bad smells permeating every street, lane, and alley; and now and then the agglomeration of darksome dwellings clustering round a great old church, with its vast Gothic portals, and, high up, its carven pinnacles and grinning goutieres, catching the sunshine far above the highest of these high-peaked roofs. This is the Bordeaux of the English and the Gascons—the Bordeaux which has rung to the clash of armour—the Bordeaux which was governed by a seneschal—the Bordeaux through whose streets defiled,

      "With many a cross-bearer before, And many a spear behind,"

      the christening procession of King Richard the Second.

      We shall step into one church, and only one, that of the Feuillans. There, upon a dark and massive pedestal, lies stretched the effigy of an armed man. His hands are clasped, his vizor up shows his peaked beard, and he is clad cap-à-pied in steel. Who was the doughty warrior, thus resting in his mail? Strange to say, no warrior at all; but the quietest and most peaceable of God's beings. He had an odd, pedantic father, who brought him up in strange Paganwise. The boy was never addressed but in Latin. He never had a mother-tongue. He was surrounded with a blockade of Latin speakers to keep afar off the profanation of French; he was mentally fed upon the philosophers and the poets of old Rome, and taught to weep for Seneca in the tub, as the nearest catastrophe which could touch his sympathies. Furthermore, his father, out of respect for his nerves, had him awakened every morning by the sound of soft music. Happily, even this sublimity of pedantry and pedagoguism was insufficient to ruin the native genius of Michael, Seigneur of Montaigne, whose "essays ought to lie in every cottage window."

      I have said that I was in search of some one to introduce me to the vineyards and the vintagers. In a day or two I had pitched upon my landlord as my protector. His hotel was a very modest one, where never before, I do believe, had Englishmen come to make everything dear and disagreeable. The red boards of the aristocratic Murray were unknown in his salle à manger. He hadn't an ounce of tea in his house, and very probably, if he had, he would have fried it with butter, and served it à la something or other. When I say he, however, I mean madame, not monsieur. The latter would have made a capital English innkeeper, but he was a very bad French one. My gentleman, who was more than six feet high, and a stately personage, was cut out for a "mine host." He would have presided in a bar—which means drinking a continued succession of glasses of ale—with uncommon effect, for his temperament was convivial and gossippy; but he had no vocation for the kitchen, which is the common sphere of a French innkeeper not of the first class, and where, under the proud denomination of the chef, and clad in white like a grimly ghost, he bustles among pipkins and stew-pans and skillets, and lifts little trap-doors in his smoky range, and peers down them at blue charcoal furnaces—over which the plats are simmering. Now my good landlord never troubled himself about these domestic matters; but he was very clever at standing on the outer steps of his door, smoking cigars; and, indeed, would stay very willingly there all day—at least, until he heard his wife's voice, upon which he would make a precipitate retreat to a neighbouring café, where he would drink eau sucreé and rattle dominoes on a marble table till dinner-time. With this worthy I formed a