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Updated: June 27, 2025
At Loubressac I took leave of my entertaining friend, but not before we had emptied a bottle of white wine together. It was a vin du pays, this district having been less tried by the phylloxera than others farther south and west. I was surprised to find white wine there, the purple grape having been almost exclusively cultivated for centuries in what is now the department of the Lot.
The finest growths suffered first, as animals of the highest blood succumb the soonest to epidemics. When I wrote in 1863 the grape was being replanted, chiefly the white verdelho, the Tuscan verdea. In 1873 the devastating Phylloxera appeared, and before 1881 it had ruined two of the finest southern districts.
The chalky soil produced miserable crops of wheat, maize, and potatoes that yielded no just return for the labour expended. The luxuriance of the young vines, planted where the old ones had perished from the phylloxera, showed that the hillsides here are better suited for wine-growing than for anything else.
Bisulphide of carbon is very volatile, inflammable, and sometimes explosive, and must be handled with great care. It permeates the soil, and if in sufficient quantity may be effective in destroying the phylloxera; but its cost and dangerous character prevent it from being generally recommended. Paris green is most generally useful for destroying insects.
Once the existence of this nymphomania-micrococcus as we philomaths would call it is established, the rest will be dead easy. Whether patients will be treated externally or internally depends, of course, upon the habits of the infinitesimal vulture that is feeding on our social vitals. We do not know as yet whether it is a moral microbe or a physical phylloxera.
The phylloxera has ravaged the vineyards in this neighbourhood; and in the early morning, under some chestnuts by the river, I found a party of men working with a cider-press. I could not at first make out what they were after, and asked one fellow to explain. "Making cider," he said. "Oui, c'est comme ça. Comme dans le nord!"
I and Gianna and the child do what we can, but we are women, and Nerina is young." "No doubt you speak wisely, mother," replied Adone humbly. "But of what use is it to dress and manure a vine, if the accursed phylloxera be in its sap and at its root? What use is it to till these lands if they be doomed to perish from thirst?"
In a second class of cases the sex-chromosome is double, consisting of two components which pass together to one pole. Examples of this are Syromaster, Phylloxera, Agalena. In a third class the sex-chromosome is accompanied by a fellow which is usually smaller, and the two separate at the differential division.
Since my first acquaintance with this neighbourhood, more than twenty years ago, the aspect of the country hereabouts has in no small degree changed. Hop gardens in many spots have replaced vineyards, owing to the devastation of the phylloxera. It was in the last years of the third Empire that the inhabitants of Roquemaure on the Rhone found their vines mysteriously withering.
It is only the polemical infidels who continue to keep their factories in full work and their places of merchandise open to invite purchasers. Some few years ago I was talking with a Frenchman in Rome, a commercial man, about the phylloxera that was devastating the vines, and ruining the peasantry, and I asked him what was being done to correct the evil. "Bah!" said he. "Everything has been tried.
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