street, something other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I began
to think of food and wine. I went to the very first small guest-house
I could find, and asked them if they could serve me food. They said
that at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they could give me
nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, and wine. I said that would do
very well, and all these things were set before me, and by a custom of
the country I paid before I ate. (A bad custom. Up in the Limousin,
when I was a boy, in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, I
remember a woman that did not allow me to pay till she had held the
bottle up to the light, measured the veal with her finger, and
estimated the bread with her eye; also she charged me double. God
rest her soul!) I say I paid. And had I had to pay twenty or
twenty-three times as much it would have been worth it for the wine.

I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time to write a georgic. But,
oh! my little friends of the north; my struggling, strenuous,
introspective, self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant
friends, who spout the 'Hue! Pater, oh! Lenae!' without a ghost of an
idea what you are talking about, do you know what is meant by the god?
Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to be ringed in and
kept sacred, I say let these be Brule, and the silent vineyard that
lies under the square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of Heltz
le Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. In these places if I can get
no living friends to help me, I will strike the foot alone on the
genial ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two hundred little
attendant gods by name that will come to the festival.

What a wine!

I was assured it would not travel. 'Nevertheless,' said I, 'give me a