XXXIX.
On My Return To Macon I Found Myself Fairly Face
To Face With The Fact That My Little Tour Was Near Its
End.
Dijon had been marked by fate as its farthest
limit, and Dijon was close at hand.
After that I was
to drop the tourist, and re-enter Paris as much as pos-
sible like a Parisian. Out of Paris the Parisian never
loiters, and therefore it would be impossible for me to
stop between Dijon and the capital. But I might be
a tourist a few hours longer by stopping somewhere
between Macon and Dijon. The question was where
I should spend these hours. Where better, I asked
myself (for reasons not now entirely clear to me) than
at Beaune? On my way to this town I passed the
stretch of the Cote d'Or, which, covered with a mel-
low autumn haze, with the sunshine shimmering
through, looked indeed like a golden slope. One
regards with a kind of awe the region in which the
famous _crus_ of Burgundy (Yougeot, Chambertin, Nuits,
Beaune) are, I was going to say, manufactured. Adieu,
paniers; vendanges sont faites! The vintage was
over; the shrunken russet fibres alone clung to their
ugly stick. The horizon on the left of the road had
a charm, however, there is something picturesque
in the big, comfortable shoulders of the Cote. That
delicate critic, M. Emile Montegut, in a charming
record of travel through this region, published some
years ago, praises Shakspeare for having talked (in
"Lear") of "waterish Burgundy." Vinous Burgundy
would surely be more to the point.
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