The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams by William Carlos Williams

Author:William Carlos Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811225731
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 1951-08-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 34

Paris Again

On our return by train to Paris our first stop was at Salzburg. It was May first, and the Communists were parading with a red flag before the hotel. That night we were served baked carp, a famous recipe. Two old aristocrats, man and wife, sat formally at dinner, he half-asleep, she bejeweled about the hair, neck and breast, heavy rings on her fingers, trying by her coy remarks to keep him from falling over. It had rained all day long, the paraders marched, without music, stolidly up the street, the square red flag before them.

After Salzburg and the visit to Lancy, where I saw again my old school, the primrose-grown soccer field, and George Brunei, son of the old director, we went direct to Dijon. We had been invited to meet Bill and Sally Bird there for a wine-tasting spree under Bill’s guidance. It was an opportunity not to be missed.

Arrived at Dijon six P.M. We met Bill and Sally Bird at the Hotel de la Cloche, the original perhaps, at least in spirit, of all the great old candle and crystal chandelier days of a hundred American hotels of the last century. After we washed up, Bill took us at once to Ernest’s, a famous restaurant, where we tasted his favorite, Richebourg and Chambertin, and heard Ernest himself (he knew Bill as an authority on wines) tell us of les Américains stationed in Dijon during the war. Whisky was all they wanted, or a shot of brandy on occasion. If they could be persuaded to broach a bottle of burgundy they slugged that in too, just as they took the other stuff, cultured or raw. It had broken Ernest’s heart. He had finally given up hope and had poured them what they asked for, disclaiming any possibility of there being any rare vintages left any longer in his cave. They wouldn’t know the difference. But for Bird, Ernest really dug down and brought up the best. Floss and I were, of course, not quite up to it, but we had to admit that it tasted like nothing we had had before—except perhaps one bottle of Swiss, grown near Sierre on the slopes toward Italy, which we remembered. We didn’t enter into that with Bill and Ernest.

In the evening we wandered with Bill and Sally about the worn and empty streets of the old ducal city. Stone of the most antique feudal cut, stone, stone, stone—underfoot, between silent stone walls, even the roofs are stone—asleep perhaps forever, perhaps not: made one think of Beauty and the Beast. If there will ever come a prince to wake us from our modern utilitarian sleep, he may be from under a gray stone roof of Dijon, smelling of the grapes of the Côte d’Or where lived Vercingetorix, the last of the Gauls to hold out against Caesar. He was betrayed by his own tribesmates, as we all are in the end.

Maybe the vineyards we saw next day on our way to Beaune got their flavor from the very blood of these men still in the soil.

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