Naturally I cannot recount the whole story, although it would be interesting; but will only observe that contemporary civilisation confirms the law by which predominance in the Latin world and the pre-eminence of wine are indissolubly bound together in history. Paris is the modern Rome, the metropolis of the Latin world. France continues, as far as can be done in modern times, the ancient sway of Rome, irradiating round so much of the globe, by commerce, literature, art, science, industry, dominance of political ideas, the influence of the Latin world, making tributaries to Latin culture of barbarous peoples, and nations too young for leadership or grown too old; and France has inherited the pre-eminence in wines, although it lies at the farthest confines of the vine-bearing zone, beyond which the tree of Bacchus refuses to live. Do you realise that in all the wide belt of earth where vineyards flourish, only the dry hills of Champagne ripen the delicious effervescent wine that refigures in modern civilisation--at least for those who are fond of wine--the nectar of the gods? And this, while effervescent wines are made in innumerable parts of the world and many are so good that one wonders if it were not possible for them, manufactured with care, placed in sightly bottles, and sold at as high a price as the most famous French Champagne, to dispute a part of the admiration that the devotees of Bacchus render to the French wine. Ah, they do not scintillate before the eyes of the world as symbols of gay intoxication like the others, for through those bottles passes no ray of the glory and prestige of France! An historian fond of paradoxes might affirm, and with great likelihood, what does not appear at first glance: that the great brands of French Champagne would not be sold so dear if the French Revolution had been suppressed by the European coalition, and if France, overcome in the terrible trial, had been enchained by the absolute monarchies of Europe like a dangerous beast. It would even be possible to declare that the reputation of Champagne is rooted, not only in the ground where the grapes are cultivated, and preserved in the vast cellars where the precious crops are stored, but in all the historic tradition of France, in all that which has given France worldly glory and power: the victorious wars, the distant conquests, the colonies, the literature, the art, the science, the money capital, and the spirit--cosmopolitan, expansive, dynamic--of its history. It would be possible to declare that it makes and pours into all the world its precious wine by that same virtue, intimate, national, and historic, by which it created the encyclopædia and made the Revolution, let Napoleon loose on Europe and founded the Empire, wrote so many famous books and built on the banks of the Seine the marvellous universal city, where all the forces of modern civilisation are gathered together and hold each other in equilibrium: aristocracy