Wine of Honor

Most facile of writers is debonair Paul Reboux, editor, dramatic critic, parodist and bon vivant, author of The Little Papa-coda, Romulus Cuckoo, Colin, or the Tropical Voluptuaries. Among his other works, nimble Critic Reboux has paid homage to France's national sport and greatest glory, Gastronomy, by publishing a cook book, Plats Nouveaux.

In the course of a charming dissertation on the wines of France, outspoken Gastronome Reboux lately touched on the subject of champagne, France's "Wine of Honor."

Said he, among other things:

"In the wine grower's cellar, Bordeaux and Burgundy are treated with the respect due important people. The care that is taken with them consists in preserving them from all impurity, in letting them, day by day, gently elaborate their perfection.

"Champagne, on the other hand, must submit to indecent manipulations. To render it epileptic they dose it with candied sugar, tannin, brandy, alum. They mix it with other wines. They shake it. They set each bottle rump in air, and they oblige it to spit--and this word is a euphemism--the muck that has settled against the cork. . . . The manufacturers, in spite of all difficulties, finally conquer the undisciplined beverage. They stick a label on its belly, slap a gold or silver plaque on its head, and there it is ready to conquer the world!

"Once the Champagne was a wine-growing land. Red and white wines grew there, wines of charming tint. . . . But when in 1670 the sinister cellarer of the Abbey of Hautvilliers, Dom Perignon, as baneful a man as the monk Schwartz, inventor of gunpowder, created explosive wine and fiendishly invented the skullduggery by which the honest wines of Champagne became the favorite drink of debauchees, at one blow he ruined the honor of his country and made it prosperous."

Champagne growers, outraged, vowed revenge in the name of France's Wine of Honor. It was hinted by Paris newspapers that M. Reboux had been discharged as political contributor of radical Paris Soir. In their combined majesty and awfulness the Syndicat du commerce des vins de Champagne and the Syndicat general des vignerons de la Champagne brought suit against the brash gastronome. Last fortnight the case was called before the civil tribunal of the Department of the Seine.

Defending his client from the onslaught of the effervescent tycoons was black-gowned Maitre Joseph Paul-Boncour, famed lawyer, author of ponderous tomes, former Minister of Labor. But brash M. Reboux did not rely alone on the fame of oratorical Maitre Paul-Boncour. Impressed with the formidable forces against him, he appealed for help to the Syndicat des Journalistes, an organization comparable to the U. S. Authors' League.

Wrote he: "If the Syndicat does not support me in this affair in which I am trapped . . . whalebone dealers will be able to attack fashion chroniclers who write against corsets. ... On that day there will be no more liberty of the pen, there will be no freedom of appreciation, there will be no more journalists, and there will be no further use for the Syndicate of Journalists. Allow me to believe in its usefulness."