‘_Nous n’avons pas du monde ce soir_,’ explained Madame Suzanne, when she had ladled out the last potful of soup, and had settled down into a sort of steaming tranquillity. ‘_Ils sont tous là-bas, près St. Estéphe._’ ‘They’ meant the vintagers to whom she was temporary cook, and while the wheels, or rather the wheel, of our chariot still tarried, we fell into discourse with her about them. ‘_Le patron_ feeds them well, _pardi_,’ she said. ‘_Tiens_, would _ces dames_ like to taste the _soupe de vendange_?’ We tasted it, and it was perhaps the noble flavour of that vintage soup that inspired the scheme that simultaneously occurred to us both. Should we ask this nice woman, with her Irish friendliness, and her sympathetic comprehension of bad French, and her excellent cookery, to put us up for the night? We discussed it hurriedly between scalding, inelegant mouthfuls of soup, sopped bread, and tresses of cabbage, interspersed with flatteries on its quality. We wanted to see the _Médoc au fond_,--what more than this could show us its nethermost profundities? If we had lived out a night in a Connemara cottage, could we not stand one in a French _ferme_? So clean, so convenient, so glowing with local colour. Was it not almost a duty to accept such an opportunity? It is a useful thing to be pronounced eccentricities. As we diffidently unfolded the suggestion to Suzanne, she put her hands on her hips and smiled at us with that smile of lenient amusement with which our sojourn in the Médoc was making us familiar. It was droll, _pardi_! She had never before had _pensionnaires_, but she had once been servant in a hotel, and if we feared the long drive in the cold--this was how we had put it--she would know how to make us comfortable. _Voyons!_ Delightful creature! so practical, so unconventional, so Irish in fact, we said to each other, as we listened to her explaining our scheme, with bursts of laughter, to M. Joseph Blossier, who had come to tell us that the carriage would be ready _tout-à-l’heure_. We had left her to deal with him; he required a more masterful treatment than our French would rise to, and it was with sincere thankfulness that we finally saw him depart, with promises to return for us in the morning with sundry essentials enumerated in a note to Léonie, our _femme de chambre_.