Inside the book

The volume is arranged in six principal sections. Part I, Trois jours en auto dans le vignoble beaujolais, recounts a three-day motor tour from the Bas-Beaujolais to the Grand Beaujolais, with halts at Ternand, Salles-en-Beaujolais, Juliénas, and Romanèche-Thorins, interweaving topographical observation with local history, including the meteorite recorded at Salles in 1798 and the Lamartine family’s link to the Chapitre de Salles. Part II, Le Pays Beaujolais, surveys the region’s geography, prehistory, and historical formation. Part III, Le Folklore en Beaujolais, gathers customs and traditions, from the legend of Claude Brosse to dialect vocabulary, proverbs, boules, and seasonal fêtes. Part IV, Notre ami le vin, offers an anthologie bachique from antiquity to the nineteenth century, with citations from Ronsard, Boileau, and Victor Hugo. Part V, La Vigne, treats viticulture, including origins, cépages, soils, maladies, and vendange practices. Part VI, De la Qualité du Vin, concludes with technical inquiry, drinking customs, and medical and popular beliefs surrounding wine. The text is illustrated throughout with small and full-page engravings, which lend both clarity and a measured visual elegance to the volume. To complete the visual apparatus, there are sixteen photographic plates outside the pagination. The color woodcut frontispiece by Philippe Burnot, as noted on the title page, presents a vine-framed view of the Beaujolais countryside, with a bottle and glasses set upon a table. The folding color map, with a legend distinguishing rivers, routes, departmental boundaries, and railways, documents the Beaujolais road network of the interwar period; a light, playful note in the margin invites the reader to enter any café and ask for directions should the map prove insufficient. A bibliography on pp. 195–196 cites works including Vermorel and Danguy’s Vins du Beaujolais, Billiard’s La Vigne dans l’Antiquité, and Audin’s own Le Beaujolais (1926).