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Baltic and Venetian trade- routes crossed in the Netherlands, and during the fourteenth century Bruges became the trade-metropolis of western Europe, where met the raw wool from England and Spain, the manufactured woolen cloth of Flanders, clarets from France, sherry and port wines from the Iberian peninsula, pitch from Sweden, tallow from Norway, grain from France and Germany, and English tin, not to mention Eastern luxuries, Venetian manufactures, and the cunning carved-work of south-German artificers.
He handed Jude an advertisement list of several pages in booklet shape, ornamentally margined with a red line, in which were set forth the various clarets, champagnes, ports, sherries, and other wines with which he purposed to initiate his new venture. It took Jude more than by surprise that the man with the soul was thus and thus; and he felt that he could not open up his confidences.
He hissed "Idiot!" and "Imbecile!" and "Jackass!" as many times as there are knives and forks and spoons at a course dinner. It was when they came to the wines that Pierre became mollified. He was forced to acknowledge that the new groom needed no instructions as to the varying temperatures of clarets and burgundies. Warburton longed to get out into the open and yell. It was very funny.
Beginning with the unsurpassed products of Burgundy, he continued with the clarets of Medoc, Bordeaux, and Sauterne; then to the champagnes of Ay, Hautvilliers, and Pierry; then to the hocks and moselles of Germany, and the brilliant imitation champagnes of Main, Neckar, and Naumburg; then to the famous and adorable Tokay of Hungary, and all the Austrian varieties of French wines, including Carlowitz and Somlauer; then to the dry sherries of Spain, including purest Manzanilla, and Amontillado, and Vino de Pasto; then to the wines of Malaga, both sweet and dry, and all the 'Spanish reds' from Catalonia, including the dark 'Tent' so often used sacramentally; then to the renowned port of Oporto.
"Hola!" cried the Marquis, "thou art not generally so coy with thy kisses, petite." Cigarette tossed her head. "I don't like bad clarets after good! I've just been with your Corporal, 'Bel-a-faire-peur'; you are no beauty after him, M. le Colonel."
When you have just dined well, and there has been no fault in the clarets, and the scene is pretty, if it be not the Nile in the afterglow, the Arno in the moonlight, or the Loire in vintage-time, but only the Thames above Richmond, it is the easiest thing in the world to feel a touch of sentiment when you have a beautiful woman beside you who expects you to feel it.
Yet when the king in one of his dark moods had withdrawn from the gaieties of the capital to the religious gloom of the convent of Franciscans at Stirling, we find the poet inditing a parody on the machinery of the Church, calling on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and on all the saints of the calendar, to transport the princely penitent from Stirling, "where ale is thin and small," to Edinburgh, where there is abundance of swans, cranes, and plovers, and the fragrant clarets of France.
'Ah, sighed the priest plaintively, 'how rarely one meets these old full-bodied clarets nowadays. The free admission of French wines has corrupted taste and impaired palate. Our cheap Gladstones have come upon us like universal suffrage. 'The masses, however, benefit, remarked Miller.
And then again the woods would shred suddenly away in front of them, and they would skirt marshes, overgrown with wild rice and dotted with little dark clumps of alder bushes, or make their way past silent woodland lakes, all streaked and barred with the tree shadows which threw their crimsons and clarets and bronzes upon the fringe of the deep blue sheet of water.
But he is no gourmet. French cooks and French prices are not the rule at his restaurant. His beer or his inexpensive native white wine he prefers to the most costly clarets or champagnes. And, indeed, it is well for him he does; for one is inclined to think that every time a French grower sells a bottle of wine to a German hotel- or shop-keeper, Sedan is rankling in his mind.
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