" "Bring your porringer." "Then I am not
hungry." Is it to the joys of the vineyard and the harmonious
loveliness of this garden land of France, is it to the peace and
tranquillity of a region where the step of an invader has never
trodden, that we owe the soft compliance of these unconstrained and
easy manners? To such questions no answer. Enter this Turkey of sunny
France, and you will stay there,--lazy, idle, happy. You may be as
ambitious as Napoleon, as poetic as Lord Byron, and yet a power
unknown, invisible, will compel you to bury your poetry within your
soul and turn your projects into dreams.
The illustrious Gaudissart was fated to encounter here in Vouvray one
of those indigenous jesters whose jests are not intolerable solely
because they have reached the perfection of the mocking art. Right or
wrong, the Tourangians are fond of inheriting from their parents.
Consequently the doctrines of Saint-Simon were especially hated and
villified among them. In Touraine hatred and villification take the
form of superb disdain and witty maliciousness worthy of the land of
good stories and practical jokes,--a spirit which, alas! is yielding,
day by day, to that other spirit which Lord Byron has characterized as
"English cant."
For his sins, after getting down at the Soleil d'Or, an inn kept by a
former grenadier of the imperial guard named Mitouflet, married to a
rich widow, the illustrious traveller, after a brief consultation with
the landlord, betook himself to the knave of Vouvray, the jovial
merry-maker, the comic man of the neighborhood, compelled by fame and
nature to supply the town with merriment.
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