The vineyards alone make a splendid estate, by the way; they produce
a delicious red wine, which is exported to Bordeaux, and there
bottled and sold as a vintage claret under the name of Chateau
Monnivet. Charles revelled in the idea of growing his own wines.
"Here we could sit," he cried to Amelia, "in the most literal sense,
under our own vine and fig-tree. Delicious retirement! For my part,
I'm sick and tired of the hubbub of Threadneedle Street."
We knocked at the door--for there was really no bell, but a
ponderous, old-fashioned, wrought-iron knocker. So deliciously
mediaeval! The late Graf von Lebenstein had recently died, we
knew; and his son, the present Count, a young man of means, having
inherited from his mother's family a still more ancient and
splendid schloss in the Salzburg district, desired to sell this
outlying estate in order to afford himself a yacht, after the manner
that is now becoming increasingly fashionable with the noblemen and
gentlemen in Germany and Austria.
The door was opened for us by a high well-born menial, attired in
a very ancient and honourable livery. Nice antique hall; suits of
ancestral armour, trophies of Tyrolese hunters, coats of arms of
ancient counts--the very thing to take Amelia's aristocratic and
romantic fancy.
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