“Certainly sounds like an ideal time to get into the grape business,” said Arthur. Their beers had been brought, and he took a long gulp.
Thomas smiled: yes, he implied, an ideal time. “There are two camps on how to treat it. They’re called the chemists and the Americanists. The chemists have developed sprays that help a little, and they’re trying to perfect them. The Americanists have been bringing over rootstock of native American grapes that is resistant to phylloxera and then grafting French varieties onto it. Most of the varieties take to the graft pretty well. It’s the right way to do it. Simple, really.”
“I guess. We didn’t do much grafting of plants in Newark. Graft, yes, we did that.”
“This was all decided at the International Phylloxera Congress in Bordeaux in 1881.”
“Gee,” said Arthur. “I was busy that weekend.”
Thomas laughed. Arthur had never seen him so happy; this trip was changing things for him, it seemed. “Beal and I grew up in this world. Rootstock may have been one of the first words I learned. At one point there were more than a hundred thousand peach trees on my family’s farm, every one of them grafted either by Beal’s father or under his supervision. Then they all died. It was living hell for all of us. For years all you could smell in the breezes was burning peachwood.”
“Perfect,” said Arthur. “I can see why you’d be planning this on the sly from your wife.”
“The odds of success are better than those for painting.”
“Yes,” said Arthur. “Those odds are getting longer every day.”
Beal’s final sitting was the week before Thomas left for Languedoc. Arthur didn’t know what Thomas had said to her about his plans and still had no idea what he was supposed to do for her in Thomas’s absence. Once again she came to the sitting without Céleste, but their greeting was as formal as it had always been: Beal heading straight for the spot on the floor where he had chalked in the outline of her feet, Arthur keeping behind the demarcation described by the plane of his canvas. There was no bare knee in the portrait and only the tips of the fingers of one hand.
There had been no real reason for this sitting, maybe even for the last two or three. Arthur would keep working on the painting for months, but releasing his subject represented a jump into the unknown, a place where he could either perfect or destroy what he had set out to do, and he was more than a little reluctant to go there. In this he was not unlike every painter he’d ever known.
“Are you really doing anything over there?” asked Beal.
“No,” he said. “I’m staring at my canvas in fear.” He meant it as a joke, though he didn’t think she would get it.
“Then we’re both afraid.”
Arthur was so absorbed in his own anxieties that it took him a moment to hear what she said. His eyes darted back to his canvas: Is the fear there? Should it be there? But suddenly, unexpectedly, perhaps belatedly, it registered on Arthur that after all these weeks, none of this was about—or simply about—a painting. His model was reaching out to him; she was asking for his help. He wasn’t sure what a painter was supposed to do in that situation. He put down his brushes and came around from behind the easel. She was still in her slightly contorted pose, but when she saw him come forward, she relaxed it, let her right hand fall off her left shoulder and hang at her side.
“Beal,” he said.
She gave a start, hearing her name from him for the first time. “You said your painting would help me.”
“I think I was wrong. Maybe a painting makes nothing happen. But maybe I could be your friend. Would that help?”
6
Thomas was late getting off to the station to catch the train into the deep South of France, to Toulouse, almost in the Pyrenees. He’d ordered a cab in plenty of time, but Arthur was coming to accompany Beal home after the train left, and then Madame Bernault decided that she too must join the party. She made up some excuse for this, but the real reason was that she had never approved of Arthur, thought the idea of sitting for a portrait indecent even with Céleste along as chaperone; she was shocked that Thomas had asked Arthur to look in on her while he was gone. “I don’t think he’s suitable,” she sniffed.
“He’s a rough sort,” said Thomas, “but I’ve come to trust him. He’s very fond of Beal.”
“Exactly,” said Madame Bernault.
“Have you ever heard or observed anything that makes you think there is more to his feelings than that?” Thomas asked.
No, said Madame Bernault, she had not, but what did one know about these Americans, these American youths in Paris who lived a life so apart from the normal population, whose comings and goings seemed to obey no particular standards of behavior. Madame Bernault had lived all over the world serving the Society of the Sacred Heart and had always felt it her calling to enter into the local community, not to remain cloistered. But one maintained one’s carriage. “I can’t imagine what the parents of those young women are thinking, allowing them to come here alone to live only God knows where.”
“Oh, Mother Lucy. You know Hilary was here with her mother, and the rest of them live with the demoiselles Rostand. Your novices live a freer life. You said that Colleen and Hilary were gamines et captivantes. You said you admired their resolve.”
Still, Madame Bernault insisted on coming along, and she was to be hurried less and less these days. So after the frustration of waiting for Arthur to help him carry his luggage to the street, Thomas had to endure further minutes waiting for Madame’s large black-and-white form to round the corner from Les Invalides.
“Don’t fret,” said Beal.
Céleste was there too, still the French teacher: “Remember, in the Midi some say oc instead of oui.” When at last they made it to the Gare d’Orléans, there was time only for Thomas to give Beal a parting hug and tell her that he hoped that when he got back, the path forward for them would be clear. Beal didn’t add anything to that—he had not expected her to, for what could she say?—but Thomas understood full well that what had once been a promise—Don’t worry, I’ll find something for us to do—had become more of a warning: Someday very soon we’re going to be packing up. Because by now Thomas was more aware than ever that it wasn’t going to be easy for her to go back to the farm after living so fully in Paris.
* * *
The conductor was waiting impatiently outside Thomas’s compartment, and as soon as his luggage was loaded, the train lurched with a clang and thud and a screech of the whistle. The train gathered speed as it passed through the suburbs and towns just outside the Paris purview, and soon they were on flat tableland that reminded Thomas of the Eastern Shore, except for the clusters of stone villages and the imposing hubs, the mas, of the larger farms. As the morning wore on, they passed through rolling hills where there seemed to be mills and forges of some size. In Argenton, while the engine took on water and coal, Thomas descended to the platform to eat the lunch Mme Vigny had packed for him. In the hills were the ruins of a thirteenth-century castle “destroyed by Louis XIII,” as one of his several guidebooks informed him. This was a theme of the French landscape that Thomas had begun to notice: so much built by human hand for some purpose or cause, so much destroyed by other human hands under the banner of other purposes or causes.
Back on the journey, they entered into that sparse heartland of France called the Limousin, an ever-changing vista of hills and rivers and fertile farmland, and as they reached the city of Limoges, they were in the midst of one of France’s greatest industries, porcelain and enamel known the world over. Thomas had skipped over the vast number of volumes on the subject at Galignani’s; he remembered his mother, Ophelia, exclaiming with a kind of feverish rapture that the new set of china at the Retreat was genuine Limoges, not some cheap German imitation. How odd is life, Thomas thought, that he might have just passed the factory where that set was made, that he could see in the very air of the city the light haze of dusty kaolin, the headspring, really, of his mother’s delight.
> Thomas could have booked himself on a mail train that had dining and sleeper cars, but seeing the sights of this country, of his new home, seemed as much the point of the trip as anything, and so it was that he spent the night in Limoges at a rather plain but comfortable hotel not far from the station. From his accent, the proprietress thought he was Flemish. The city, the hotel, the chatter of business people in the dining room reminded him of Baltimore, and for a moment he thought of all those years when his mother and Mary were living across the bay in that city and he and his father were on the Retreat. He went to bed that night, his first night without Beal since they’d landed, with his arms closed around her absence. He did not minimize the stakes for this trip, but here in this new bed his heart pounded with eagerness for what might lie ahead.
Thomas had once considered taking a route farther to the west and spending a day or two in Bordeaux, where he might one day have some business. But then he had decided not. Yes, Eileen Hardy was the angel guiding this trip, and there was no way for him to think otherwise; it was as if she ran alongside the tracks like a clear mountain stream. It was her voice in his head that told him not to waste his time among the British and Austrian aristocrats; it had been her voice telling him to get on this train in the first place. Back at the Gare d’Orléans, in the rush, he had for one second thought he spied her red hair in the crowd, and it was a moment of panic but then of sad delight, the thought that from a distance she would be there to see him on this quest. She was there, in his mind; he’d told her that she would be when he said goodbye to her a few days before he left. For the past month, all had been very businesslike between them. “Good luck, then,” she said. “I am glad our collection has served you so well.” He wanted to tell her he would miss her; he almost wanted to tell her that everything was riding on this trip and that depending how it went, the situation might be very different when he got back. But he had not said any of that, only that he would be sure to let her know how it all turned out, and she turned away with a proper smile to the work at her desk, as if he should certainly not disarrange himself on her account. That smile would remain in his mind, in his conscience, to the end of his days.
After a night in Toulouse—less comfortable, with indifferent welcome and service—he caught the Perpignan branch line, across the dry rubble land of the Haute-Garonne and the wild rocky hills of Aude, along the route of the Canal du Midi, and finally into the old Roman capital of Narbonne. This was his destination: lenga d’òc. Below the southern limit of metropolitan France, as the Parisians thought of it. The paysans were dirty, coarse; they talked without stop, as Céleste had told him. The wine was not fit for the Parisian table, so said M. Richard. Why in the world would he want to go there? Worst of all, in Languedoc many people didn’t even speak French, but clung to their own language, Occitan, the Langue d’Oc. It was the land of the Cathars, a twelfth-century heresy that had taken two centuries to wipe out. People thrown off cliffs and ramparts; four hundred men, women, and children roasted alive on a single day; defeated soldiers left with their noses, tongues, eyes, and ears cut out. That sort of wiping out. It was a land of steep mountains and deep crevasses, but also broad plains and high meadows. A yellow land, with dots of ochre and obsidian. The land of schist, of limestone and shale, of chalk rubble. A land on which grapes flourished because it was so inhospitable to them. How odd, thought Thomas; this was the sort of orneriness in the natural world, the sort of melodrama of plant life that his father would have enjoyed. Grapes like to be mistreated, forced to search for water and nourishment. If they’re fat and happy, they make a luxurious and indolent leafy mantle; if they’re hungry and worried about the continuation of their species, they skip the ornament and make seeds—not a lot of them, but a few bursting with vital juices. They had been doing this for thousands of years quite happily, until the arrival of phylloxera, a different kind of wiping out.
Thomas knew all about fighting a desperate, endless, and finally unwinnable battle against the peach yellows, an enemy one couldn’t see that would show itself only after it had completely infected the plant. He remembered walking in the orchards with his father and Abel Terrell, Beal’s father. They never said anything to each other; they didn’t have to: the leaves, the fruit, the bark said everything for them. We are ruined. For Thomas, as a child, it felt as if his own body would be the next to be attacked, that he would wake up on some not-too-distant morning with the suckers of diseased branchlets sprouting on his arms and legs, just as they did on the peach boughs. He remembered the dozens of theories and treatments, each one loonier than the last, which were extolled loudly and emphatically and then quietly dropped when the deaths continued. Blight had a way of reducing owners and professors and senators and farmworkers and former slaves and immigrant fruit pickers to a single class, to a genus of baffled humans who had no idea what was hitting them. It all ended in cemeteries distinguished by a unique brand of tombstone: the endless lines of blackened stumps that marked the places where a tree, or a vine, had once lived.
The difference here was that a solution was at hand. So Thomas had picked a name out of the list of négociants in Montpellier, Béziers, and Narbonne and written to him, asking whether there might be land for sale in the region, and if so, could M. Fauberge serve as intermediary for him. The return was immediate. Yes, said M. Fauberge, there was certainly land suitable for growing grapes available in the region. But, he asked the writer—who was obviously English or American—why not Bordeaux or Bourgogne or Champagne? Why Languedoc, a region not of legendary domaines and wine caves, but of simple table wines? His tone was defensive, protective: Did Monsieur have any idea what he might be getting into? Thomas could well understand why M. Fauberge asked this, and his reply was straightforward: “I know nothing of wines, nothing about how to make them and how to drink them. I know only about farming. I was raised on an orchard and am familiar with blight.”
So he found himself, all ironies intact, the following morning, waiting for M. Fauberge in a pleasant sidewalk café under the palm trees just a block from Narbonne’s modest but picturesque Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville. High piles of firewood, flocks of sheep, mounds of coal, and, over and over, casks and casks of wine bobbed almost magically in front of him, the cargo piled atop canal boats that he could not see from where he sat.
“M. Bayly?” said a man behind him. He pronounced the name “buy-lee,” which Thomas had heard from time to time in Paris.
Thomas stood up and found that M. Fauberge was an extremely handsome and robust man with a mustache of remarkable breadth and luxuriousness; anyone who ever saw him would remember the mustache first. Thomas found it a little untrustworthy. Fauberge was wearing the obligatory black serge suit, but his straw boater was tipped back on his skull and he had a welcoming, winning smile despite the facial hair.
Thomas introduced himself, and they sat down.
“I am hoping…” M. Fauberge began in English, but Thomas waved him off. “Excellent,” M. Fauberge continued in French, relieved, seeing Thomas already in a new light. “I hope you are enjoying our city.”
Thomas was. It was a lovely and relaxed town, full of charm, he said.
“Your M. Baedeker has said that we have ‘emphatically seen our best days’ and that visiting Narbonne is a disappointment to ‘those who bear in mind its former importance.’” M. Fauberge quoted this in English, but with good cheer.
Thomas had the feeling that M. Fauberge, and other town leaders, could recite the entire hurtful entry from the guide, which, in fact, Thomas had read on the train just the day before. “I think Karl Baedeker is German. No?” he said.
“Quite so. I should not have blamed America for what he said.”
“Yes. Especially since you can rightly blame phylloxera on America. No need to add to our sins.”
The dreaded word caused M. Fauberge to flinch, but Thomas knew that by using it he had won a tiny bit of respect, that the more he could remove the unsaid from this man’s prattle, the better th
ings would go for them both.
“Oh, but America is the source of our salvation as well. We all have our roots in America now.” He laughed at this common joke. “Here in Languedoc we think that the plague was a blessing of sorts. It gives us a new chance while Bordeaux and Burgundy try to recover. That is, if we plant the right grapes.”
“By which you mean something other than Aramon?”
M. Fauberge’s mustache danced with surprise at hearing Thomas say this, and he looked around with alarm to see who might have overheard. He lowered his voice. “As you Americans say, the wines of the plains, the Aramon wines, are my ‘bread and butter.’” He said this in English, with a self-satisfied cock of his head. “But this is not where we will compete with Bordeaux.”
“Grenache, then? Carignan? Syrah?”
M. Fauberge was still a little nervous to be having this fraught discussion in a café full of his friends and competitors; Thomas was doing little more than parroting words he had read in a book, but he understood the magic of some of them.
“I see you are very well acquainted with the challenges that face the vigneron. And”—and here, for the first time, M. Fauberge entered into the sly, slightly arch but finally more candid tone that Thomas was to hear a good bit of in the coming weeks—“that you understand the opportunities for a man with a vision such as yourself. Eh?”
Thomas didn’t know if he had a vision, but the facts and figures and the science, the botany and agronomy seemed to add up to the same empirically proven conclusion: Aramon was a lousy grape that made a lot of lousy wine, wine that no one outside the Midi would consider drinking for one second. That was a vision, as far as Thomas understood it.
“A vision,” M. Fauberge continued, “to show the world that we can make wines as fit for the table in Paris as those from Bordeaux. That Languedoc is the sleeping giant of French wine no longer. That we can produce more than simple vin de pays. Am I correct?” M. Fauberge was almost rising from his seat in excitement.
Thomas and Beal in the Midi Page 15