A History of Champagne, with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France. Henry Vizetelly

      UN PETIT SOUPER OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

       (From the collection of the ‘Chansons de Laborde’).

      When, in 1741, the ‘Well-Beloved’ passed through Reims, Dom Chatelain, after rejoicing over the year’s vintage having been a very fine one, adds that it was drunk to a considerable extent and with the greatest joy in the world during the ten days that the King remained in the city. ‘It was no longer a question,’ he exclaims exultingly, ‘of sending for Burgundy or Laon wine.’ Three years later, when traversing the Champagne, on his way to Metz, he again halted at Reims; and after hearing mass, ‘retired to the Archevêché, where the Corps de la Ville presented his Majesty with the wines of the town, which he ordered to be taken to his apartments.’[175] Wine was also presented to the Prince de Soubise, Governor of the Champagne; the Duke de Villeroy, M. d’Argenson, and the Count de Joyeuse; whilst, for the benefit of the populace, four fountains of the same fluid flowed at the corners of the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville.[176] In like manner, at the inauguration of that ‘brazen lie,’ the statue of this same Louis XV., in 1767, wine flowed in rivers from the different fountains of the city.[177]

      The satyr-like sovereign of France was by no means the only monarch of his time who appreciated sparkling Champagne. Frederick the Great has praised its consoling powers in the doggerel which Voltaire was engaged to turn into poetry; and George II. of England at St. James’s, and Stanislas Leczinski of Poland at Nancy, both quaffed of the same vintage of Ay despatched in 1754 from the cellars of Bertin du Rocheret. Marshal Saxe, during his sojourn in 1745 at Brussels, where he held a quasi-royal court, of which Mademoiselle de Navarre was the bright particular star, drew an ample supply of Champagne from the cellars of that lady’s father, Claude Hevin de Navarre of Avenay, who had established himself as a wine merchant in the Belgian capital.[178] Despite, too, the continued outcry of some connoisseurs,[179] the vin mousseux became the universal source of inspiration for the cabaret-haunting poets of that graceless witty epoch.[180] Voltaire, all unmoved by the excellent still Champagne with which he and the Duke de Richelieu had been regaled at Epernay by Bertin du Rocheret in May 1735, persisted in singing the praises of the effervescing wine of Ay, in the sparkling foam of which he professed to find the type of the French nation:[181]

      ‘Chloris and Eglé, with their snowy hands,

      Pour out a wine of Ay, whose prisoned foam,

      Tightly compressed within its crystal home,

      Drives out the cork; ’midst laughter’s joyous sound

      It flies, against the ceiling to rebound.

      The sparkling foam of this refreshing wine

      The brilliant image of us French does shine.’

      The Commander Descartes seems not to have been afraid to extol the charms of the sparkling wine to the younger Bertin du Rocheret, as stern a decrier of its merits as his father had previously been. In a letter dated December 1735, asking for ‘one or two dozen bottles of sparkling white wine, neither vert nor liquoreux, “I should like,” he says, “some

      Of that delectable white wine

      Which foams and sparkles in the glass,

      And seldom mortal lips does pass;

      But cheers, at festivals divine,

      The gods to whom it owes its birth,

      Or else the great, our gods on earth.” ’[182]

      Amongst other versifiers of this epoch enamoured with the merits of the wine may be cited Charles Lebatteux, professor of rhetoric at Reims University, who in 1739 composed an ode, ‘In Civitatem Remensam,’ containing the following invocation to Bacchus:

      ‘’Tis not on the icy-topped mountains of Thrace,

      Or those of Rhodope, thy favours I trace—

      Not there to invoke thee I’d roam.

      No! Reims sees thee reign sovereign lord o’er her hills;

      There I offer my vows, and the nectar that thrills

      To my soul I will seek close at home.

      Whether Venus-like rising midst foam sparkling white,

      Or wrapped in a mantle of rose rich and bright,

      Thou seekest my senses to fire,

      Come aid me to sing, for my Muse is full fain

      To owe on this day each melodious strain

      To the fervour ’tis thine to inspire.’[183]

      Bertin du Rocheret, who by no means shared his friend Voltaire’s admiration for the sparkling vintage of Ay, sang the praises of the still wine of the Champagne after the following fashion in 1741:

      ‘No, such blockheads do not sip

      Of that most delicious wine;

      Soul of love and fellowship,

      Sweet as truly ’tis benign.

      No, their palate, spoilt and worn,

      Craves adult’rate juice to drain;

      Poison raw which we should scorn,

      Beverage fit for frantic brain.

      Let us, therefore, hold as fools

      Such as now feign to despise

      Those balsamic molecules

      Horace used to sing and prize.

      No, such blockheads do not sip

      Of that most delicious wine;

      Soul of joy and fellowship,

      Sweet as truly ’tis benign.

      Of that wine, so purely white,

      Which the sternest mood makes pass,

      And which sparkles yet more bright

      In your eyes than in my glass.

      Drink, then, drink; I pledge you, dear,

      In the nectar old we prize;

      Sparkling in our glasses clear,

      But more brightly in your eyes.’[184]

      Marmontel, the author of Bélisaire and editor of the Mercure de France, found inspiration in his youthful days in the sparkling wine of Champagne. He describes, in somewhat fatuous style, the results of an invitation he received from Mademoiselle de Navarre to pass some months with her in 1746 at Avenay, where her father owned several vineyards, and where, she added, ‘It will be very unfortunate if with me and some excellent vin de Champagne you do

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