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Updated: June 5, 2025
It was moreover a principle with the officers of the excise that wine was never given away; and as a tax was due on every sale the poor vine-dresser could not give a part of the produce of his vineyard to his married children, or even bestow a few bottles in alms on a poor, sick woman without getting into trouble, and all this notwithstanding the fact that in France in the eighteenth century, when tea and coffee were unknown to the rural classes, and when drinking water was often taken from polluted wells, wine or cider was generally considered necessary to health and to life.
It was the hour of rest, and Beppo, the vine-dresser, sat at the gate, strumming an old, dilapidated lute; his red jacket and white shirt making the only bits of bright color in the sombre picture. As the rude carriage stopped before the gate, Beppo arose and put aside his lute, and stood with a look of expectancy on his dark face.
With a hay band tied round him, one would think he had just come from turning over the grass. Sometimes he would have an ox-goad in his hand, and you would have said he had just unyoked his weary oxen. Now he bore a pruning-hook, and personated a vine-dresser; and again, with a ladder on his shoulder, he seemed as if he was going to gather apples.
But the vine-dresser could tell the monks no more than this that the young man and young woman had come as strangers to the village, were married by the good Father Pietro in the church of San Vito, and had come to lodge in his cottage.
At once you grow transcendental, and suppose that some German vine-dresser in Catawba-land by the way, Gerritt Smith's gardener is a nephew of Schiller! was dreaming of the marriage of the Sun with the Vine, his darling plant, in whose juice linger and sparkle the light and joy of many faded days. But no, it was named from a real Golden Wedding.
He must have taken another route and got his train at San Stephano," humbly replied the host. "Ah! yes! the vine-dresser did tell me he had driven the man over to San Stephano. Well, then, hurry up my supper," said the duke, passing on to his room.
He swept his hand toward the wine, but the priests and the Iroquois respectfully declined. "Proceed." "Once upon a time," began Chaumonot, his eyes directed toward the bronze console which supported the mantel, "there lived a lad whose father was a humble vine-dresser. At the age of ten he was sent to Châtillon, where he lived with his uncle, a priest, who taught him Latin and Holy history.
Bonaparte, it seems, took the trouble to hate a mere peasant; the vine-dresser was torn from his vine, the laborer from his furrow, the mason from his scaffold, the weaver from his loom. Men accepted this mission of causing the immense public calamity to fall, morsel by morsel, upon the humblest walks of life. Detestable task! To crumble a catastrophe upon the little and on the weak.
Later in life I saw the republics of Italy, and I asked why they were so glorious in all the arts and craft of civil life, while the braver men of France and England seemed as savages by the side of the Florentine burgess, nay, of the Lombard vine-dresser.
At the foot of the mountains of Beaujolais, in the large basin of the Sâone, in face of the Alps, there is a series of small hills scattered like the sea sands, which the patient vine-dresser has planted with vines, and which form amongst themselves, at their base, oblique valleys, narrow and sinuous ravines, interspersed with small verdant meads.
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