In the foyer I saw one lady carefully spelling out with her lorgnette one of the words on the list posted there of the subjects for conferences.

“Ah!” she said, considerably reassured apparently, “Keepling!” But then she may have come in late.

Thursday.

The war has been hard on the main business of the neighborhood, of course—­Germany was the heaviest buyer of Bordeaux wine, Russia next, and not as much as usual is going to England.  The vintage this year, like that of 70, is said to be good, however, and, though the young men have gone, and the wine-making was not as gay as usual, there were enough old men and women left to do the work.  I visited one of the older wine houses—­nearly two centuries old—­and tramped through cellars which burrow on two levels under a whole city block.  There were some two million bottles down there in the dark and dust.

There is something patriarchal and princely about such a house, almost unknown in our businesses at home—­from the portraits of the founders, from the caskmakers, at lunch-time, broiling their own fish over a huge fireplace and drawing wine from the common cask as they have done for generations; the stencils in the shipping-room—­“Baltimore,” “Bogota,” “Buenos Aires,” “Chicago,” “Calcutta,” “Christiania,” “Caracas”—­from things like these to the personality and point of view of the men who have the business in charge.

“Now, wine,” began the charming gentleman who showed us round, “is a living thing.”  And though you could see that he had showed many people about in his day—­and was not unaware of what might interest them—­that he was, in short, an advertiser of the most accomplished kind, yet one could also see that he liked his work and believed in it, and grew wine as an amateur grows fancy tulips and not as a mere salesman.

To be sure, he was inclined to slur over the importance of white wine, while champagne and its perfidious makers didn’t interest him in the least; but of the red wine of Bordeaux, its lightness, bouquet, and general beneficence, and the delicate and affectionate care with which it was handled, one could have heard him talk all day.  Now and then younger houses discovered things that were going to revolutionize the wine trade.

“Of course,” he said, “we examine such things.  We look in our books, where records of all our experiments are kept, and there we find that we tried that new thing in 1856—­or 1756, perhaps.”

Far underground we came on some of the huge majorums, big as nine ordinary bottles.  “The King of Spain ran over to Bordeaux one day, and came to us and said:  ‘I’ve got two hours; what can you show me?’ We said:  ‘We can show you our cellars.’  ‘Very well,’ said he; ‘go ahead.’  When he came to the majorums he said:  ’What on earth do you do with those ?’ ’They are used when there is a christening or a wedding or some great event, and when a king visits us we give him two.’”