A History of Champagne, with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France. Henry Vizetelly
of her fear of lightning, on dining in the cellars, where, ‘in the midst of fifty thousand bottles of Champagne, it was difficult not to lose one’s head;’ and how he was accustomed to read to her the verses thus jointly inspired when seated together on a wooded hillock, rising amidst the vineyards of Avenay.[185]
The foregoing in some degree recalls the circumstances under which Gluck, whose fame began to be established about this epoch, was accustomed to seek his musical inspirations. The celebrated composer of Orpheus and Iphegenia in Aulis was wont, when desirous of a visit from the ‘divine afflatus,’ to seat himself in the midst of a flowery meadow with a couple of bottles of Champagne by his side. By the time these were emptied, the air he was in search of was discovered and written down.
The lively and good-humoured Abbé de l’Attaignant, whose occupations as a canon of Reims Cathedral seem to have allowed him an infinite quantity of spare time to devote to versifying, addressed some rather indifferent rhymes to Madame de Blagny on the cork of a bottle of Champagne exploding in her hand;[186] and in some lines to Madame de Boulogne, on her pouring out Champagne for him at table, he maintains that the nectar poured out by Ganymede to Jupiter at his repasts must yield to this vintage.[187]
That boon convivialist Panard—who flourished at the same epoch, and was one of the chief songsters of the original Caveau, and a man of whom it was said that, ‘when set running, the tide of song flowed on till the cask was empty’—has not neglected sparkling Champagne in his Bacchanalian compositions. The ‘La Fontaine of Vaudeville,’ as Marmontel dubbed him, does not hesitate to admit that he preferred the popping of Champagne corks to the martial strains of drum and trumpet.[188] The wine, moreover, furnishes him with frequent illustrations for his code of careless philosophy.
‘Doctor for vintner vials fills
Most carefully, with lymph of wells.
Champagne, that grew on Nanterre’s hills,
Vintner in turn to doctor sells.
So still we find, as on we jog
Throughout the world, ’tis dog bite dog.’[189]
Elsewhere Panard gives expression to the Bacchanalian sentiment, which he seems to have made his rule of life, in the following terms:
‘Let’s quit this vain world, with its pleasures that cloy,
A destiny tranquil and sweet to enjoy:
Descend to my cellar, and there taste the charms
Of Champagne and Beaune;
Our pleasure will there be without the alarms
Of any joy queller;
For the ennui that often mounts up to the throne
Will never descend to the cellar.’[190]
The poet appears to have rivalled one of the characters in his piece, Les Festes Sincères (represented on the 5th October 1744 on the occasion of the King’s convalescence), who, after describing how wine was freely proffered to all comers, said that he had contented himself with thirty glasses, ‘half Burgundy and half Champagne.’
In a piece of verse entitled ‘La Charme du Vaudeville à Table,’ Panard sketches in glowing colours the inspiriting effect of sparkling Champagne upon such a joyous company of periwigged beaux and patched and powdered beauties as we may imagine to be assembled at the hospitable board of some rich financier of the epoch.
‘’Tis then some joyous guest
A flask, filled with the best
Of Reims or Ay, securely sealed, holds up;
He deftly cuts the string,
Aloft the cork takes wing;
The rest with eager eyes
Thrust glasses t’wards the prize,
And watch the nectar foaming o’er the cup.
They sip, they drink, they laugh,
And then anew they quaff
Their bumpers, crowned above the brim with foam
That gives to laughter birth,
And makes fresh bursts of mirth.
Its spirit and its fire
Unto the brain aspire,
And rouse the wit of which this is the home.’[191]
To its praise he also devotes a poetic tour de force, the concluding verses of which may thus be rendered:
‘Thanks to the bowl
That cheers my soul,
No care can make me shrink.
The foam divine
Of this gray wine,[192]
I think,
When it I drain,
Gives to each vein
A link.
Source of pure joy,
Without alloy,
Come, dear one, fain I’d drink!
Divine Champagne,
All grief and pain
In thee I gladly sink.
All ills agree
Away from thee
To slink.
Sweet to the nose
As new-blown rose
Or pink.
With gifts that ease
And charms that please,
Come, dear one, fain I’d drink!’[193]
Despite the success achieved by the vin mousseux, merchants, owing to the excessive breakage of the bottles—of the cause of which and of the means of stopping it they were equally ignorant—often saw their hopes of fortune fly away with the splintered fragments of the shattered glass.[194] The following passages from the MS. notes of the founder of one of the first houses of Reims, written in 1770, would imply some knowledge of the fact that a liquoreux wine was likely to lead to a destructive casse, and also that the importance of the trade in sparkling Champagne was far greater during the first half of the eighteenth century than is usually supposed.[195] The MS. in question says: ‘In 1746 I bottled 6000 bottles of a very liquoreux wine; I had only 120 bottles of it left. In 1747 there was less liqueur; the breakage amounted to one-third of the whole. In 1748 it was more vinous and less liquoreux; the breakage was only a sixth. In 1759 it was more rond, and the breakage was only a tenth. In 1766 the wine of Jacquelet was very rond; the breakage was only a twentieth.’[196]
The writer then proceeds to recommend, as a means of preventing breakage, that the wine should not be bottled till the liqueur had almost disappeared, and that, if necessary, fermentation should be checked by well beating the wine. But as at that epoch there was really no means of effectually testing this disappearance, and as the beating theory was an utterly fallacious one, the followers of his precepts remained with the sad alternative of producing in too many instances either mousses folles and their inevitable accompaniment of disastrous breakage, or wine so mature as to be incapable of continuing its fermentation in bottle, and producing mousse at all.[197]
It is therefore evident that much of the sparkling wine drunk at the commencement of the last century was what we should call crémant, or, as it was then styled, sablant,[198] as otherwise the breakage would have been something frightful. Bertin du Rocheret plainly indicates after 1730 a difference between the fiercely frothing kinds, to which the term saute bouchon or pop-cork was applied, and wine that was merely mousseux.[199] The