It is in accordance with the eternal Unfitness of Things that Sparkling Champagne—that river on whose foaming stream, to the accompaniment of whose gallant laughter, two centuries of blades and Cyprians have floated bravely down into the gay backward abysm of Time—should have taken its rise in a Benedictine abbey. Yet in 1670, at Haut-Villers, one Dom Pérignon scored history with a thicker line than ever was drawn by William of Orange in 1688 of blessed memory. It took an Act of Settlement effectually and finally to abolish Divine Right; but in 1680 the dynasty of Still Champagne was quietly wiped out of being by a pacific friar. It perished perfect, consummate, unregretted—for the usurper proved himself omnipotent. The invincible Dom Pérignon, some ten years earlier, had lighted on a precious hoard beside which the Abbé Faria’s was a trifle: for it was a case of incalculable milliards. And though the founder of a line is ever its greatest hero, so that Napoleon the Little is the natural complement of Napoleon the Great, this monk contrived to maintain the splendour of his order. He imparted his secret only when, in articulo mortis, he placed the crown on the head of Friar Philippe, his legitimate successor; who in his turn bequeathed it in 1765 to Brother André Lemaire. And this one reigned for thirty years, an enviable despot, and passed it down to his successor Dom Grossart. And he, having the Moets among his subjects, died with his secret big and undivulged, and the line and dynasty of Dom Pérignon was extinct. And none was greater than the Founder, who, arch-celibate though he was, yet made conjunctions happier far than all the rest of the clergy put together; for so consummate was his skill, and so exquisite his palate, that, being blind with years, he would taste you grapes from a score of vineyards, and decree that the wine of this one must be married to the wine of that; and his fame was great in the land, and the people would have his wine or none. And as the greatest mind is that which can adjust itself to the smallest details making for perfection, so this our benefactor, discarding the oil-steeped wisps of tow which till his time did vulgar service as stoppers, invented corks. So, too, he established the long, flute-shaped glass wherefrom to drink the elixir he had found, and wherein, like a true hedonist, he might watch the merry atoms frisk and dance like winter stars in running water.
It is also of the essence of a great discovery that it should come at the right moment, and this thing sparkled into being when the fortunes of France were on the ebb. So debilitated was the stomach of the Grand Monarque, that Fagon, his good physician, had to forbid him all but the oldest Burgundy, and that most villainously laced with water. But this Dom Perignon—how bright a herald, how inspiriting a companion for his dull and lonely Maintenon, aweary with his tiresome wails, his enfeebled autocracy, and soured by the falsehood of her true position! What wonder if she and all the bloods and the grand dames and the lesser ladies drank of it and were glad, while Louis looked another way and sipped attenuated Burgundy? Here was enough, you would think, to console their France under those terrific visitations of Corporal John’s; yet the influence has passed clean from the land of its nativity, the genius of the people it represented has been carried to other shores. It has pierced the fogs of Albion, and made us for the moment the compeers of those brighter spirits across the Channel whose image and superscription it bears.
De ce vin frais l’écume pétillante,
De nos Français est l’image brillante,
said Voltaire; yet he told but a half truth, after all, for his countrymen for the most part drink it at this present heavy and sweet to an accompaniment of marrons glacés and such-like cloying cates. Happily our own habit is different; and herein shines forth the ancient insular superiority. Scarce has the fish, bull-headed cod or blushing mullet, swum into our ken, ere the cork leaps forth with a cloop of joy, and straightway, as on the approach of spring, the sap stirs and the buds of speech burst into life, and talk, reluctant and hidebound no more, bursts into many-coloured bloom. No longer in middle-class houses is the wine doled out like drops of blood, as in those ugly parties which Original Walker satirised. At this, the tail-end of our century, it pours like melting snow down Soracte’s sides, or spring torrents in the Acroceraunian hills. The dullard stands amazed at his own wit; and the professional talker-out moves not to envy; and the sorriest dog of us barks in rhapsodies and epigrams. No less than Port it carries the vintage glory with it; for do we not speak of that ’74 Perrier-Jouet (now for ever laid to rest in pious gastronomic cells!) as of darling poet or statesman idolised in the Abbey by the stream of Thames? And the masterful Eighties, the fickle, fleeting, delicate-souled Eighty-Fours, the once speculative, broadly -promising but now fully-realised Eighty-Nines—do we not discuss them, even as the children of our loins? Wine does more than generate talk: it is talk itself; and do we not glory somewhat in their prices and value our dinners by those Princes of the Blood with whom we are privileged to fraternise? And our preferences—how exclusively our own, how cherished, how esteemed! How this one will swear by the buff label of that Widow Clicquot, who takes precedence, and the wall of all other widows, save Mrs Wadman alone! Think, too, of the liquid splendour of the Irroy name, the mouthful of majesty in Deutz and Geldermann’s Gold Lack, the aristocratic flavour of Due de Montebello, and the disappointment bred of too great an intimacy with that titled impostor! Then, too, the utter exclusiveness of Heidsieck’s Dry Monopole, the merry lilt of Pommery and Greno, the boom of Bollinger ! Are we not familiar with them all ? They are intimates at the eventful moments of our lives! We have trysted with them at the Continental, and in marbled halls, when
“‘Love me’ sounded like a jest,
Fit for yes or fit for no.”
At the wedding breakfast (an extinct ceremony) they have prompted mouthings in honour of the ladies, and composed whole speeches to the health of the bride. They have even soothed the savage breast at those great and heavy dinners in Cromwell Road where Uncle Boanerges plays the gouty Elagabalus once a year. Only at funerals shall be missed the captive bubbles struggling, and rightly, to be free: though here the need of them is sorest, and you must perforce put up with Marsala, or, if a first class interment, with brown Sherry.
Truly it is a beverage of romance and laughter, this Champagne. In the lush green by Upper Thames, when summer shines on the glancing hair, the corks have broken forth and shot skywardly, singing the song of prodigality and abandonment. To look at life through this clear and golden medium was to cast seriousness to the winds. Clouds would fleet past the midday sun and darken for a brief spell the moon of night: but in these clear depths there was nothing of cloud, nothing of shadow; only, as should be, a heyday of laughter and romance. For, of all the transparencies this world can offer, none is so beautiful; none is so precious as that through which you behold the shining soul of a jest. And where else shall you look for, and more inevitably find it, than in this Dom Pérignon? God rest the good monk’s soul ! And thou, “animula, blandula, vagula,” sweet spirit of the present, born to pass here and now, in this narrow space of sun between the grisly past and the yet grislier future, rise up and still up from the source of things, even to this pleasant patch of surface! Actors love thee, and women; but for all that, rise, rise, rise ever; for once the beaded bubbles of ephemeral evanescence have winked their last, there is no deep so plummetless as that encircled by yon vacuous and reproachful glass.
