The hours, days, and weeks fled by, filled with renascent joys.  Grape harvest, the festal season in Touraine, began.  Toward the end of September the sun, less hot than during the wheat harvest, allows of our staying in the vineyards without danger of becoming overheated.  It is easier to gather grapes than to mow wheat.  Fruits of all kinds are ripe, harvests are garnered, bread is less dear; the sense of plenty makes the country people happy.  Fears as to the results of rural toil, in which more money than sweat is often spent, vanish before a full granary and cellars about to overflow.  The vintage is then like a gay dessert after the dinner is eaten; the skies of Touraine, where the autumns are always magnificent, smile upon it.  In this hospitable land the vintagers are fed and lodged in the master’s house.  The meals are the only ones throughout the year when these poor people taste substantial, well-cooked food; and they cling to the custom as the children of patriarchal families cling to anniversaries.  As the time approaches they flock in crowds to those houses where the masters are known to treat the laborers liberally.  The house is full of people and of provisions.  The presses are open.  The country is alive with the coming and going of itinerant coopers, of carts filled with laughing girls and joyous husbandmen, who earn better wages than at any other time during the year, and who sing as they go.  There is also another cause of pleasurable content:  classes and ranks are equal; women, children, masters, and men, all that little world, share in the garnering of the divine hoard.  These various elements of satisfaction explain the hilarity of the vintage, transmitted from age to age in these last glorious days of autumn, the remembrance of which inspired Rabelais with the bacchic form of his great work.

The children, Jacques and Madeleine, had never seen a vintage; I was like them, and they were full of infantine delight at finding a sharer of their pleasure; their mother, too, promised to accompany us.  We went to Villaines, where baskets are manufactured, in quest of the prettiest that could be bought; for we four were to cut certain rows reserved for our scissors; it was, however, agreed that none of us were to eat too many grapes.  To eat the fat bunches of Touraine in a vineyard seemed so delicious that we all refused the finest grapes on the dinner-table.  Jacques made me swear I would go to no other vineyard, but stay closely at Clochegourde.  Never were these frail little beings, usually pallid and smiling, so fresh and rosy and active as they were this morning.  They chattered for chatter’s sake, and trotted about without apparent object; they suddenly seemed, like other children, to have more life than they needed; neither Monsieur nor Madame de Mortsauf had ever seen them so before.  I became a child again with them, more of a child than either of them, perhaps; I, too, was hoping for my harvest.  It was glorious weather