“Well, what about the wine?  The same?”

“Yes; but I will get it myself.”

The cellar is underneath the larger house.  Outside is an old-fashioned, sloping double door.  These doors are always open, and a cool smell of damp straw flavored with vinegar greets you from a leaky keg as you descend into its recesses.  On the hard earthen floor rest eight or ten great casks.  The walls are lined with bottles large and small, loaded on shelves to which little white cards are tacked giving the vintage and brand.  In one corner, under the small window, you will find dozens of boxes of French delicacies—­truffles, pease, mushrooms, pate de foie gras, mustard, and the like, and behind them rows of olive oil and olives.  I carefully draw out a bottle from the row on the last shelf nearest the corner, mount the steps, and place it on the table.  Madame examines the cork, and puts down the bottle, remarking sententiously:—­

“Chateau Lamonte, ’62!  Monsieur has told you.”

There may be ways of dining more delicious than out in the open air under the vines in the cool of the afternoon, with Lucette, in her whitest of aprons, flitting about, and madame garnishing the dishes each in turn, and there may be better bottles of honest red wine to be found up and down this world of care than “Chateau Lamonte, ’62,” but I have not yet discovered them.

Lucette serves the coffee in a little cup, and leaves the Roquefort and the cigarettes on the table just as the sun is sinking behind the hill skirting the railroad.  While I am blowing rings through the grape leaves over my head a quick noise is heard across the stream.  Lucette runs past me through the garden, picking up her oars as she goes.

“Oui, mon pere. I am coming.”

It is monsieur from his day’s work in the city.

“Who is here?” I hear him say as he mounts the terrace steps.  “Oh, the painter—­good!”

“Ah, mon ami.  So you must see the willows once more.  Have you not tired of them yet?” Then, seating himself, “I hope madame has taken good care of you.  What, the ’62?  Ah, I remember I told you.”

When it is quite dark he joins me under the leaves, bringing a second bottle a little better corked he thinks, and the talk drifts into his early life.

“What year was that, monsieur?” I asked.

“In 1849.  I was a young fellow just grown.  I had learned my trade in Rheims, and I had come down to Paris to make my bread.  Two years later came the little affair of December 2.  That ‘nobody,’ Louis, had dissolved the National Assembly and the Council of State, and had issued his address to the army.  Paris was in a ferment.  By the help of his soldiers and police he had silenced every voice in Paris except his own.  He had suppressed all the journals, and locked up everybody who had opposed him.  Victor Hugo was in exile, Louis Blanc in London, Changarnier and Cavaignac in prison.