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At the crossway in the Rue des Halles cabbages were piled up in mountains; there were white ones, hard and compact as metal balls, curly savoys, whose great leaves made them look like basins of green bronze, and red cabbages, which the dawn seemed to transform into superb masses of bloom with the hue of wine-lees, splotched with dark purple and carmine.
In his hands it is neither subtle nor ingenuous; it is opaque, of the colour of blood thinned with water, or of pink sticking-plaister, excepting when it trends on the hue of wine-lees, like that of the Saviour's sleeves. And it is heaviest of all in the saints' cheeks. It looks glazed, like the surface of pie-crust; it has the quality of raspberry syrup drowned in white of egg.
Somehow at the very thought of a Campanian vintage with its long hot dusty days, its bare-legged brown-skinned peasants treading the pulp, and its all-pervading aroma of wine-lees, there rise to memory the truly inspired lines of John Keats: “O for a draught of vintage, that hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country-green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth!
It is a masquerade, and one whose men and women must, I think, be imagined in a kind of artistic fancy costume: a mixture of the Renaissance dress and of the antique, as we see it in the prints of contemporary pageants, and in Venetian and Ferrarese pictures; that Circe of Dosso's, in the Borghese gallery of Rome, seated in her stately wine-lees and gold half-heraldically and half-cabalistically patterned brocade, before the rose-bushes of the little mysterious wood, is the very ideal of the Falerinas and Alcinas, of the enchantresses of Boiardo and Ariosto.
No; I dare not An old calesh, belonging to the abbesse, lined with green frize, was ordered to be drawn out into the sun the gardener of the convent being chosen muleteer, led out the two old mules, to clip the hair from the rump-ends of their tails, whilst a couple of lay-sisters were busied, the one in darning the lining, and the other in sewing on the shreds of yellow binding, which the teeth of time had unravelled the under-gardener dress'd the muleteer's hat in hot wine-lees and a taylor sat musically at it, in a shed over-against the convent, in assorting four dozen of bells for the harness, whistling to each bell, as he tied it on with a thong.
His affection for her he frittered away with fast girls and abandoned women, strangled it in the foul musk-laden air of disreputable houses, dragged and defiled it in the wine-lees of the Imperial. In the end he had quite destroyed it, wilfully, wantonly killed it.
Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees BLOOD.
Our till-then-envied couple fell suddenly up to the middle of the leg in the wine-lees left in the cask, by which they were bespattered up to their very eyes. Nor was this all: being too eager to extricate themselves, they overset the cask, and came to the ground, rolling in it and its offensive contents.
One was obese, and had a fat, triple chin; the other was spare, nervous, with a sharp aquiline nose; both wore embossed bronze cuirasses; their legs were covered with metal greaves, and over their protuberant thighs hung skirts the color of wine-lees, trimmed with loose strips of gold which quivered at the slightest movement of their steeds.
Little by little it had exhaled away, wilting in the air of unrestrained debauches, perishing in the warm musk-laden atmosphere of disreputable houses, defiled by the breath of abandoned women, trampled into the spilt wine-lees of the Imperial, dragged all fouled and polluted through the lowest mire of the great city's vice.
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