continued, rather helplessly; "and Josephine my cook is there this afternoon boiling the mutton-hams."
"Fine arguments, truly! You shall sleep to-night in Paris, or even at Marly, if you see fit. I have often heard you argue against railroads—a fine argument for a geographer to uphold against an engineer! Now is the instant to bury your prejudice. Do you see that soft ringlet of smoke off yonder? It is the message of the locomotive, offering to reconcile your engagements with Grandstone and Hohenfels. Come, get your ticket!"
And his hand ceased squeezing my shoulder like a pincer to beat it like a mallet. A rapid sketch of the situation was mapped out in my head. I could reach Épernay by five o'clock, returning at eight, and, notwithstanding this little lasso flung over the champagne-country, I could resume my promenade and modify in no respect my original plan; and I could say to Hohenfels, "My boy, I have popped a few corks with the widow Cliquot."
Such was my vision. The gnomes of the railway, having once got me in their grasp, disposed of me as they liked, and quite unexpectedly.
From the car-window, as in a panorama of Banvard's, the landscape spun out before my eyes. Le Raincy, which I had intended to visit at all events on the same day, but afoot, offered me the roofs of its ancient château, a pile built in the most pompous spirit of the Renaissance, and whose alternately round and square pavilions, tipped with steep mansards, I was fain to people with throngs of gay visitors in the costume of the grand siècle. Then came the cathedral of Meaux, before which I reverently took off my cap to salute the great Bossuet—"Eagle of Meaux," as they justly called him, and on the whole a noble bird, notwithstanding that he sang his Te Deum over some exceedingly questionable battle-grounds. Then there presented itself a monument at which my engineering friend clapped his hands. It was a crown of buildings with extinguisher roofs encircling the brow of a hill, and presenting the antique appearance of some chastel of the Middle Ages.
"Do you see those round, pot-bellied towers, like tuns of wine stood upon end?" he said—"those donjons at the corners, tapering at the top, and presenting the very image of noble bottles? There needs nothing but that palace to convince you that you have arrived in the champagne region."
"I do not know the building," I confessed.
"Can you not guess? Ah, but you should see it in a summer storm, when the rain foams and spirts down those huge bottles of mason-work, and the thunder pops among the roofs like the corks of a whole basket of champagne! That fine castle, Flemming, is the château of Boursault, apparently built in the era of the Crusades, but really a marvel of yesterday. It rose into being, not to the sound of a lyre, like the towers of Troy, but at the bursting of innumerable bottles, causing to resound all over the world the name of the widow Cliquot."
At length we entered the station of Épernay. There I received my first shock in learning that the only return-train stopping at Noisy was one which left at midnight, and would land me in the extreme suburbs of Paris at three o'clock in the morning.
Our friend Grandstone, whom we found amazing the streets of Épernay with a light American buggy drawn by a colossal Morman horse, received us with still more surprise than delight. He had relapsed into plain James, and had never dreamed that his second baptism would bear fruit. Besides, he proved to us that we were in error as to the date. The feast of Saint Athanasius, as he showed from a calendar shoved beneath a quantity of vintners' cards on his study-table, fell on the second of May, and could not be celebrated before the evening of the first. It was now the thirtieth of April. He invited us, then, for the next day at dinner, warning us at the same time that the evening of that same morrow would see him on his way to the Falls of Schaffhausen. This idea of dining with an absentee puzzled me.
We both laughed heartily at the engineer's mistake of twenty-four hours, and he for his part made me his excuses.
Athanasius—whose name I obstinately keep, because it gives him, as I maintain, a more distinct individuality,—Athanasius happened to be driving out for the purpose of collecting some friends whom he was about to accompany to Schaffhausen, and whom he had invited to dinner. He contrived to stow away two in his buggy, and the rest assembled in his chambers. We dined gayly and voraciously, and I hardly regretted even that old hotel-dinner at Interlaken, when the landlord waited on us in his green coat, and when Mary Ashburton was by my side, and when I praised hotel-dinners because one can say so much there without being overheard.
Dinner over, we went out for a stroll through the town. The city of Épernay offers little remarkable except its Rue du Commerce, flanked with enormous buildings, and its church, conspicuous only for a flourishing portal in the style of Louis XIV., in perfect contradiction to the general architecture of the old sanctuary. The environs were little note worthy at the season, for a vineyard-land has this peculiarity—its veritable spring, its pride of May, arrives in the autumn.
One very vinous trait we found, however, in the person of a beggar. He was sitting on Grandstone's steps as we emerged. Aged hardly fourteen, he had turned his young nose toward the rich fumes coming up from the kitchen with a look of sensuality and indulgence that amused me. The maid, on a hint of mine, gave him a biscuit and the remainders of our bottles emptied into a bowl. A smile of extreme breadth and intelligence spread over his face. Opening his bag, he laid by the biscuit, and extracted a morsel of iced cake: at the same time he produced an old-fashioned, long-waisted champagne-glass, nicked at the rim and quite without a stand. Filling this from his bowl, he drank to the health of the waitress with the easiest politeness it was ever my lot to see. Ragged as a beggar of Murillo's, courteous as a hidalgo by Velasquez, he added a grace and an epicurism completely French. I thought him the best possible figure-head for that opulent spot, cradle of the hilarity of the world. I gave him five francs.
We proceeded to admire the town. The great curiosities of Épernay, its glory and pomp, are not permitted to see the daylight. They are subterranean and introverted. They are the cellars. Those rich colonnades of Commerce street, all those porticoes surmounted with Greek or Roman triangles in the nature of pediments, of what antique religion are they the representations? They are cellar-doors.
It was impossible to quit the city without visiting its cellars, said Grandstone, and we betook ourselves under his guidance to one of the most renowned.
I only thought of seeing a battle-field of bottles, but I found the Eleusinian mysteries.
In the temple-porch of Eleusis was fixed a large pale face, in the middle parts of which a red nose was glowing like a fuse. Several other personages, in company with this visage, received us on our approach with a world of solemn and terrifying signals.
Directly a man in a cloak and slouched hat, and holding in his hands a wire fencing-mask, extinguished with it the red nose. The latter met his fate with stolid fortitude. All were perfectly still, but the twitching cheeks of most of the spectators betrayed a laugh retained with difficulty. The cloak then advanced, like a less beautiful Norma, to a bell in the portico, and struck three tragical strokes. A strong, pealing bass voice came from the interior: "Who dares knock at this door?"
"A night-bird," said the man in the cloak, who took the part of spokesman. "What has the night-bird to do with the eagle?" replied the strong voice. "What can there be in common between the heathen in his blindness and the Ancient of the Mountain throned in power and splendor?"
"Grand Master, it is in that splendor the new-comer wishes to plunge." After this imitation of some Masonic mystery the red-nosed man was quickly taken by the shoulders and hurtled in at the door, where a flare of red theatrical fire illuminated his sudden plunge.
"What nonsense is this?" I said to Athanasius.
"The man in the iron mask," he explained, "is in that respect what we shall all be in a minute. Without such a protector, in passing amongst the first year's bottles we might receive a few hits in the face."
"And do you know the new apprentice?"
"No: some stranger, evidently."
"It is not hard to guess his extraction," said one of our dinner-party. "In the East there are sorcerers with two pupils in each eye. For his part, he seems to be braced with two pans in each knee. He is long in the stilts like a heron, square—headed and square-shouldered: I give you my word he is a Scotchman. For certain," he added, "I have seen his likeness somewhere—Ah