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Updated: June 27, 2025
Here the light seems to gain a deeper feeling, and the small vineyard by the side holds it too. It is one of the very few old vineyards which, after being stricken nearly unto death by the phylloxera, have revived, and by some unknown virtue have recovered the sap and spirit of life.
Sterne must have been thinking of Burgundy when he penned that line, or the phylloxera has brought about a transformation, vineyards here being changed into pastures. The scenery of the Allier, like that around Autun, recalls many parts of England.
The insect just mentioned, and the famous grape-vine Phylloxera, a creature which caused France a greater economic loss than the enormous indemnity which she had to pay to Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, are practically the only American insects with which we have been able to repay Europe for the insects which she has sent us.
At length the line of high rocks was passed, and I was upon land that, notwithstanding its steepness and the multitude of stones with which it was strewn, had undergone some cultivation. That wine had not long since been grown here was evident from the numerous stumps of vines which had been killed by the phylloxera. A few lingering flowers of hawkweed relieved the monotony of the dreary waste.
Wherever we go, we see evidence of an existence laborious perhaps in the extreme, yet one of wholesomeness and content. Strange to say, chemical science has proved as disastrous to the rural population round about Avignon as the phylloxera has done in other parts of the department. The supersession of madder by aniline dyes has, indeed, for a time almost ruined the small farmers of Vaucluse.
It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the subject really began to make itself felt, and, like the potato blight or phylloxera, it soon became clear that it had come to stay.
Mon ami. We don't observe the Sunday. Voila le vrai phylloxera."
The hum of the mosquito is now just beginning to be heard in the land, especially in some big London hotels. The Colorado beetle is hourly expected by Cunard steamer. The Canadian roadside erigeron is well established already in the remoter suburbs; the phylloxera battens on our hothouse vines; the American river-weed stops the navigation on our principal canals.
If a vine had been so enfeebled, I should cut it back rigorously, feed it well, and permit it to bear very little fruit, if any, for a year. Of insect enemies we have the phylloxera of bad eminence, which has so dismayed Europe. The man who could discover and patent an adequate remedy in France might soon rival a Rothschild in his wealth.
Only within the present generation did those precious vines perish, when the phylloxera began among them its deadly work in France; and even yet may be found, tucked away here and there in the favoured cellars of Provence and Languedoc, a few dust-covered bottles of their rich vintage: which has for its distinguishing taste a sublimated spiciness due to the alternate dalliance of the bees with the grape-blossoms and with the blossoms of the wild thyme.
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