Anyone who has driven through the morning air for an hour or two before breakfast, will understand the satisfaction with which, about seven o’clock, we deciphered a complicated milestone into 14 kilometres from Besancon, which meant breakfast at the next village, Nancray.  The breakfast was simple enough, owing to the absence of butter and other things, and consisted of coffee in its native pot, and dry bread:  the milk was set on the table in the pan in which it had been boiled, and a soup-ladle and a French wash-hand basin took the place of cup and spoon.  A cat kept the door against sundry large and tailless dogs, whose appetites had not gone with their tails; and an old woman kindly delivered a lecture on the most approved method of making a ptisan from the flowers of the lime-tree, and on the many medicinal properties of that decoction, to which she attributed her good health at so advanced an age.  I silently supplemented her peroration by attributing her garrulity to a more stimulating source.

When we started again, it was time to learn something about the scene of our further proceedings, and the driver enunciated his views on monks in general, a propos to the Convent of Grace-Dieu, the Chartreuse at which we were to leave our carriage, and obtain food for man and horse.  The Brothers, he said, were possessed of many mills, and were in consequence enormously rich.  Among the products of their industry, a liqueur known as Chartreuse seemed to fill a high place in his esteem, for he considered it to be better—­and he said it as if that comparative led into an eighth heaven—­better even than absinthe.  I had an opportunity of tasting this liqueur some weeks after, a few minutes below the summit of Mont Blanc, and certainly no one would suspect its great strength, which is entirely disguised by an innocent and insidious sweetness, as unlike absinthe as anything can possibly be:  impressions, however, respecting meat and drink, and all other matters, are not very trustworthy when received near the top of the Calotte.  It has lately been found that the worthy Brothers of the Grande Chartreuse have been systematically defrauding the revenue, by returning their profits on the manufacture of this liqueur at something merely nominal as compared with the real gains.  I could not learn whether the ceremony of blessing each batch of the liqueur, before sending it out to intoxicate the world, is performed with so much solemnity at Grace-Dieu as at Grenoble; and, indeed, it rests only on the assertion of the short-tongued Bisuntian that the manufacture is carried on at all at the former place.[35]