SHUTTERS 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 manoeuvres 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.