The Berliner was fain to acknowledge the superiority of the foam engendered by Champagne over that crowning his favourite _weissbier_, his own beloved _kuhle blonde_, and the beer-topers of Munich and Dresden to give the preference to the exhilaration produced by quaffing the wine of Reims and Epernay over that due to the consumption of _bockbier_. The Nassauer and the Rhinelander had to admit certain intrinsic merits in the vintages produced on the slopes of the Marne, and found to be lacking in those grown on the banks of the Rhine, the Ahr, the Main, and the Moselle. The Austrian recognised the superiority of the wines of the Mountain over those of Voslau or the Luttenberg; and the Magyar had to allow that the _crûs_ of the River possessed a special charm which Nature had denied to his imperial Tokay. Even the red-coated officers who followed 'Milord Vilainton' to the great review at Mont Aimé, near Epernay, proved faithless to that palladium of the British mess-table, their beloved 'black strop.' Claret might in their eyes be only fit for boys and Frenchmen, and Port the sole drink for men; but they were forced to hail Champagne as being, as old Baudius had already phrased it, 'a wine for gods.' [Illustration: LE DÎNER DE MILORD GOGO, 1816 (After a coloured print of the time).] The officers of the Allied armies quartered in Paris after the Hundred Days supplemented the charms of the Palais Royal--then in the very apogee of its vogue as the true centre of Parisian life, with its cafés, restaurants, theatres, gambling-houses, and Galeries de Bois--with an abundance of sparkling Champagne. Royalty itself set the example by indicating a marked preference for the wine, Louis Dixhuit, according to a statement made by Wellington to Rogers, drinking nothing else at dinner. To celebrate the victories of Leipsic and Waterloo or a successful assault on the bank at Frascati's, to console for the loss of a _grosse mise_ at No. 113 or of a comrade transfixed beneath a lamp in the Rue Montpensier by a Bonapartist sword-blade, to win the smiles of some fickle Aspasia of the Palais Royal Camp des Tartares or to blot out the recollection of her infidelity, to wash down one of the Homeric repasts in which the English prototypes of the 'Fudge Family Abroad' indulged, the wine was indispensable; until, as a modern writer has put it, 'Waterloo was avenged at last by the _gros bataillons_ of the bankers at _roulette_ and _trente et quarante_, and by the sale to the invaders of many thousand bottles of rubbishing Champagne at twelve francs the flask.'[248] The rancorous enmity prevailing between the officers of Bonapartist proclivities placed on half-pay and the returned _émigrés_ who had accepted commissions from Louis XVIII., resulted, as is well known, in numerous hostile meetings. Captain Gronow has dwelt upon the bellicose exploits of a gigantic Irish officer in the _gardes du corps_, named Warren, who, when 'excited by