ocks; and such a place has indeed much to say of the
wealth, the capacity for production, of France--the bright, cheerful,
smokeless industry of the wonderful country which produces, above all,
the agreeable things of life, and turns even its defeats and revolutions
into gold. The whole town has an air of almost depressing opulence, an
appearance which culminates in the great _place_ which surrounds the
Grand-Theatre--an establishment of the highest style, encircled with
columns, arcades, lamps, gilded cafes. One feels it to be a monument to
the virtue of the well-selected bottle. If I had not forbidden myself to
linger, I should venture to insist on this and, at the risk of being
called fantastic, trace an analogy between good claret and the best
qualities of the French mind; pretend that there is a taste of sound
Bordeaux in all the happiest manifestations of that fine organ, and
that, correspondingly, there is a touch of French reason, French
completeness, in a glass of Pontet-Canet. The danger of such an
excursion would lie mainly in its being so open to the reader to take
the ground from under my feet by saying that good claret doesn't exist.
To this I should have no reply whatever. I should be unable to tell him
where to find it. I certainly didn't find it at Bordeaux, where I drank
a most vulgar fluid; and it is of course notorious that a large part of
mankind is occupied in vainly looking for it. There was a great pretence
of putting it forward at the Exhibition which was going on at Bordeaux
at the time of my visit, an "exposition philomathique," lodged in a
collection of big temporary buildings in the Allees d'Orleans, and
regarded by the Bordelais for the moment as the most brilliant feature
of their city. Here were pyramids of bottles, mountains

[Illustration: BORDEAUX--THE QUAY]

of bottles, to say nothing of cases and cabinets of bottles. The
contemplation of these glittering tiers was of course not very
convincing; and indeed the whole arrangement struck me as a high
impertinence. Good wine is not an optical pleasure, it is an inward
emotion; and if there was a chamber of degustation on the premises, I
failed to discover it. It was not in the search for it, indeed, that I
spent half an hour in this bewildering bazaar. Like all "expositions,"
it seemed to me to be full of ugly things, and gave one a portentous
idea of the quantity of rubbish that man carries with him on his course
through the ages. Such