NOR IS IT ALWAYS in the most distinguished achievements that men’s virtues or vices may be best discerned; but very often an action of small note; a short saying, or a jest, shall distinguish a person’s real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles.
—Plutarch, “Life of Alexander,” c. 110
Collioure’s bleak winter of 1984–85 seemed to O’Brian, now in his seventy-first year, to have simply merged with a cold and blustery spring. A raging tramontane gusting down from the Rhone Valley and the Alps besieged the coast of the Gulf of Lions. From December through March, there was virtually no rainfall, although, as if to spite the author, who considered the weather “perfectly vile,” it snowed on St. Patrick’s Day.
While cooped up, O’Brian read Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Thrale, 1776-1809, the two-volume diary kept by Samuel Johnson’s onetime good friend Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, the mother of Queenie Keith, who in O’Brian’s novels helped raise Aubrey after his mother died and remains a dear friend and benefactor through her powerful husband, Admiral Lord Keith. After the death of Piozzi’s first husband, according to Thomas Babington Macaulay, “[Piozzi] was left an opulent widow of forty, with strong sensibility, volatile fancy, and slender judgment.” She married an Italian music master and shirked Johnson, who, according to Macaulay, “said that he would try to forget her existence.” In Piozzi’s diaries, O’Brian noted in a letter to Ollard, he perceived a high degree of unconscious self-betrayal.
That spring, O’Brian sent his brother Barney a copy of The Far Side of the World for his seventy-third birthday, but Barney noted in a letter to Joan that Pat seemed melancholy and increasingly eccentric and unsociable. “I was sorry to see that he continues to indicate that his wife, severely injured in another accident, has suffered psychologically as well as physically,” Barney, who had never met Mary, told Joan. “His letters have been short and rare and I take it he is kept very busy tending and fending for his good lady.”
This and Collioure’s inexorable slide toward modernity, homogeneity, and overcrowding had narrowed the margins of O’Brian’s world somewhat. The town’s tentacles now reached up the O’Brians’ hillside. With more than 100,000 spectators invading Collioure for the mid-August La Festa Major fireworks, condo-mania had struck, and no bit of real estate was to be left undeveloped. Houses had been built at the base of the O’Brians’ hill and on the narrow road up to Fort St. Elme, and more were coming.
The arrival of fast-food restaurants symbolized the degradation of Collioure’s traditional lifestyle. The young had demanded cheeseburgers, and they had gotten them, along with pop music and electronic games. In summer, it was often impossible to park near the town hall and post office, and bumper-to-bumper traffic through the center of town and even stretching up to the highway above was not unusual.
But O’Brian had the past, in many forms. Several times a year, he and Mary still ate at the Pous family’s restaurant. Though they had changed its name to Les Templiers and had long since added hotel rooms, little else was altered. In fact, with paintings hanging from every available space, the place was a time capsule of more than three decades of artists’ visits. Recently, Jojo Pous, the proprietor, had invited O’Brian to inscribe the establishment’s Livre d’Or, its guest book of the talented and famous. Joining the likes of Matisse, Picasso, and Edith Piaf, O’Brian composed a seventeen-line ode to Pauline Pous’s fish soup, Les Templiers’s friendly atmosphere, and Collioure, which he described as a “tight-packed village like a swarm of bees.” At its heart, he placed the café, “where you can eat like a lord or where / you and fishermen and masons may / play most passionately at cards /. … while geckos walk upon the wall / and the small owl calls gloc gloc.”
The Pouses’ refuge was timeless, at least for now, and so was O’Brian’s work, which transported him and his readers to a temporal place at once two centuries old and floating magically outside time. This was a comfortable place, where “progress” came slowly. O’Brian’s own life having spanned the horse-and-buggy and space-rocket eras, the technological change during the Regency period seemed quaint, almost imperceptible, by comparison. But change was, of course, present, and the fact that O’Brian took such delight in dwelling in the minutiae of the age had the pleasant effect for modern-day readers of counteracting their ennui for subtle change.
For the moment, however, O’Brian had left his imaginary friend Aubrey to stew in his own personal purgatory—neither a member of the Royal Navy, nor a proper, civil being outside it—while he turned his attention to another subject dear to his heart: Sir Joseph Banks, the natural historian and longtime president of the Royal Society, an explorer, a friend of scientists, and a man of letters. O’Brian had several coincidental connections to his subject. Banks had known the scientist Joseph Priestley, an ancestor of Uncle Sidney’s wife, and Banks, through marriage, was distantly related to O’Brian’s favorite author, Jane Austen.
O’Brian had proved in his novels and in his biography of Picasso that he excelled at painstaking research, and now he basked in it. In writing a life of Banks, the challenge lay not in finding but in culling the material. Banks’s own quirky prose ranged from journal descriptions of his explorations to his vast, vibrant correspondence, which one historian calculated amounted to fifty letters a week during his active adult life, more than fifty thousand in all.
Banks was born to a wealthy family, so well positioned that his birth on February 15, 1743, was recorded in the Gentleman’s Magazine. He had been sent to the public school Harrow at age nine, “pitifully young” (p. 18), commented O’Brian, whose own father had been hustled off to Shebbear at eleven and whose son had gone to boarding school at an even younger age. At thirteen, Banks left Harrow and entered Eton, which O’Brian described using three histories, including Richard Ollard’s An English Education: A Perspective of Eton, published in 1982. No doubt the intellectual street fighter in O’Brian took pleasure in reminding the many Etonians among his fellow English literati of the colorful, occasionally barbaric history of their institution, albeit founded by Henry VI in 1440.
As O’Brian wrote, during Banks’s day the students took part in “badger baiting, bull baiting, bear baiting, cock fighting and—why not?—small boy baiting” (p. 20). One school tradition had the boys beat a ram to death with clubs specially made for the purpose, but the practice had been banned years before Banks’s arrival—for fear that the boys might overheat and endanger their health, not for any consideration of the animals. O’Brian wrote of the “unscrupulous rapacity, not to say the downright dishonesty, of successive provosts and fellows” (p. 19), who robbed the boys of food and benefits, and of the Long Chamber, where the boys slept, which had not yet but would soon become a “byword for squalor, cruelty, bullying and sexual immorality” (p. 19).
He clearly enjoyed taking the school down a notch, claiming that “there was much to be said against Eton: it lay in low, damp, unhealthy ground rather than upon a salubrious hill; in many respects it was more like an ill-managed bear-garden than a school; and even then there were people who felt that Etonians spent more time than was necessary in thanking God that they were not as other men” (pp. 18–19). O’Brian later took jabs at Eton in the Aubrey-Maturin novels as well. In The Yellow Admiral, he reveals that General Aubrey, Jack’s disreputable father, is an Etonian, who learned one phrase of Latin there that he often repeated to his young son (as Maturin quotes Pope’s translation of Horace): “Get place and wealth, if possible, with grace;/If not, by any means get wealth and place” (p. 204). In addition, Maturin relates that he and a friend were once mugged by Eton students, who were “dressed as Jack Puddings and merry-andrews in antic garments” (p. 204).
It was perhaps a bit audacious of O’Brian to send the Eton section to Ollard to critique. After all, Ollard was not only an old boy but a historian of the school. Ollard’s chronicle of Eton, taking in its entire history, was, of course, quite different from O’Brian’s brief unflattering portrait. But O’Brian was a competitive man, and part of his gamesmanship was to take the moral high ground by being unquestionably correct and fastidiously courteous, at least on the surface, and then to dunk his opponent—a position for which anyone with intellectual pretensions qualified.
One of the reasons O’Brian admired Banks was for his lack of such rivalry, evident in a closing he signed in a letter to a colleague: “your ever affect but never emulating/J Banks” (Joseph Banks, p. 174). O’Brian found this telling of Banks’s nature. “Ordinarily,” he wrote, “competition plays such an important part in the relations between men, and is the cause of so much decay in friendship, that a ‘never emulating’ companion, one who does not feel (as Johnson felt) that all encounters are contests, with evident superiority on one side or the other, must be wonderfully restful” (pp. 174–75). With this characteristic, Banks made many friends and kept them. O’Brian operated more along the Johnsonian model.
But Ollard, whom O’Brian later described in a BBC radio interview as “a sort of pleasant fellow,” took it in stride. He was used to and tolerant of O’Brian’s ways, no matter how fussy and occasionally condescending. Ollard felt that deep down, at least, their relationship had the same “human respect” that O’Brian had received from Picasso. He understood the weight of O’Brian’s talent and his bitterness at not being recognized for his literary genius.
Oxford University, which O’Brian also had not attended, fared a little better than Eton in his hands, though he did quote Gibbon on his time there at Magdalen College (“they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life” [p. 26]). Still, Banks, much to his own credit and industry, thrived there, furthering his deep interest in botany by recruiting the capable teacher Israel Lyons from Cambridge to be his private tutor.
O’Brian was certainly not above a jaundiced view of the iconography of the English educational system and was perfectly willing to tweak the establishment with the evidence that beneath the veneer of these hallowed places—the mere names of which so often served the user with instant credibility, not to mention airs—there lay a human institution, with all the inherent shortcomings.
Once O’Brian carried Banks out to sea, however, the author’s spirits seemed to lift. He shook his competitive, Johnsonian edginess and dropped his guard. O’Brian’s mastery of the ways of the Royal Navy together with Banks’s clear-eyed descriptions of ship fife, new flora and fauna, and natives in such places as Newfoundland, Tahiti, Australia, and Iceland made for a read nearly as gripping as fiction. Banks had written more than twenty thousand words on a voyage to Newfoundland at age twenty-three and filled two thick volumes with ten times that during his three years on board the Endeavour.
The study of Banks was a chief subtext of O’Brian’s book. He steered the reader—as if he were addressing an eager professor—to Banks’s journal, “two fat quarto volumes” (p. 70), at the Mitchell Library in New South Wales, to the books Banks acquired on one voyage, kept at the British Museum, and to the lava he returned with, still at Kew Gardens. He complimented at some length Averil Lysaght, who had superbly edited the Newfoundland journal, the original of which, O’Brian noted, lay in a branch of the Royal Geographic Society of Australia. O’Brian praised Lysaght again for uncovering a letter about Banks’s relationships with the two important women in his life, his wife, Dorothea, and his sister, Sophia. The letter had escaped the editor of The Banks Letters.
Banks’s firsthand accounts so impressed O’Brian that he presented the explorer’s two early voyages largely by stitching passages of his commentary together. By this means and with evident admiration for an era when natural historians set off wide-eyed into the beguiling world, O’Brian successfully captured Banks’s joie de vivre. The voyage Banks made with Captain James Cook to observe from Tahiti the transit of Venus across the Sun was particularly eventful, including amorous interaction with the lovely women of Tahiti, confrontations in New Zealand with fierce Maori tribes, who often had to be pacified by musket shot, and peril along the Great Barrier Reef, which Europeans had never before seen.
But everyday shipboard life could be nearly as colorful. O’Brian quoted a memorable Banks analysis of the ship’s “indifferent” bread, which was filled with vermin:
I have seen hundreds nay thousands shaken out of a single bisket. We in the Cabbin have however an easy remedy for this by baking it in an oven, not too hot, which makes them all walk off, but this cannot be allowed to the private people who must find the taste of these animals very disagreeable, as they every one taste as strong as mustard or rather spirits of hartshorn. They are of 5 kinds, 3 Tenebrios, 1 Ptinus and the Phalangium cancroides;this last is however scarce in the common bread but was vastly plentiful in white Deal bisket as long as we had any left. (P. 108)
O’Brian’s only regret was the loss of nuance in the transition from Banks’s manuscript to type. “Cold print,” he wrote, “differs essentially from a page written by hand, and its inhuman precision makes Banks’s way of writing seem wilder and more outlandish than it really is” (p. 41).
For the young Banks, who was healthy, wealthy, courageous, and curious, the natural world really was his oyster. Wherever he roamed, new plants and animals and even human beings waited to be observed and categorized. Banks thought nothing of shooting scores of birds at a time; he served the edible ones—after careful examination and skinning—at mealtime. The sailors, he noted, preferred albatross in savory sauce to fresh pork. Banks and Cook both regretted encounters with fierce New Zealand natives, whom they had to subdue by force, but Banks thought nothing of returning to England with a native for further observation.
For the Aubrey-Maturin audience, reading this section of the Banks biography is something like riding in a Model T, the essence of a car, after driving in a Rolls-Royce, the apotheosis of one. Cook and Banks on some basic levels resembled Aubrey and Maturin. For one thing, despite sometimes conflicting agendas, they coexisted as friends in close quarters for three years (1768–71) on board the Endeavour.
Just as Jack Aubrey would do, Cook ran his ship, though a lowly, blunt-bowed collier, built for cargo not speed, “in strict man-of-war fashion, as precise in the little bark of which Cook was the commander as ever it had been in sixty-gun line-of-battle ships in which he had been the master” (p. 73). And like Maturin and his good friend Nathaniel Martin, as scientists on board a naval ship, Banks and his colleague, the Swedish botanist Daniel Solander, suffered the fate of often having contrary desires to those of the crew. They delighted in the sailor’s bane known as the doldrums, a fluctuating windless band near the equator, where they fished, collected specimens, and swam. There were also tantalizing misses, like the time Cook agreed to land Banks and Solander on the unexplored island Ferdinand Norronha. When contrary winds made it impossible, the frustrated scientists dolefully watched the fading island, which, O’Brian noted, was not visited until Darwin landed there sixty-four years later. Even worse, on the teeming banks of Rio de Janeiro, the Endeavours scientists remained shipbound because a suspicious Portuguese viceroy could not be convinced that the ignoble collier was not a pirate or smuggler and so strictly limited traffic between ship and shore.
Somehow, O’Brian made Cook’s voyage seem a benevolent way of life. Never mind that during the Endeavour’s three-year circumnavigation, one-third of the crew was killed or died of disease.
Upon his return to England, at the age of twenty-eight, Banks was greeted by massive hyperbole. Even Linnaeus called him “immortal.” As O’Brian paraphrased Linnaeus’s letter: “No one since the earth began had dared so much, no one had been so generous, no one had exposed himself to so many dangers” (p. 148). From such a lofty perch, he was bound to fall. As O’Brian had seen in his own experience and now observed about Banks, “Going through a war does not necessarily fit men for ordinary life; nor, however horrible their experiences, does it necessarily cause them to grow up” (p. 155). Banks grew vain and squabbled with powerful and wiser men in the Admiralty, and his promising start as an explorer was cut short.
After that, Banks’s career, though noble in certain ways, began to falter. Despite his masses of notes, he wilted under the task of writing a book about the great voyage. O’Brian concluded of this writer’s block that the “cause, at least to the present writer, is impenetrably obscure” (p. 171). Soon Banks, the intrepid explorer, grew sedentary and obese. O’Brian compared him to the barnacle and the oyster, both of which “have an active free-swimming youth; then when they are still quite young something comes over them—they find a convenient place, settle there, change shape, and never move again” (p. 191).
For all his brilliant, enthusiastic leadership of the Royal Society and Kew Gardens, his well-used influence with King George III, and his humane assistance to scientists and friends around the world, a whiff of dilettantism surrounded Banks. While he had a talent for establishing meaningful acquaintances, “Banks was,” as O’Brian noted, “either unluckier than most or … in this respect his judgement was not very acute” (p. 236), for he befriended, associated with, or patronized a number of unpleasant men, including the infamous Captain Bligh. Banks was a great benefactor of the sciences, but he was not an innovator as a botanist. He spoke no foreign languages, and, O’Brian admitted, “did not possess … the very rare [intellectual] equipment that might have allowed him to strike out a new theory of classification superseding that of Linnaeus, which had already served its time” (p. 175).
Banks was a social lightning rod who capitalized on his wealth and connections. In terms of personality, he couldn’t have been more different from O’Brian. Nonetheless, O’Brian admired him and treated him with the gentleness of a friend. Though he had his share of faults and weaknesses, O’Brian found in him “a fund of life … a zest and eager intelligent curiosity” (p. 303) and considered him a generous man who was willing to exert his influence and expend his resources for those in need. These qualities provided the foundation of the biography.
O’Brian was confident in the result. After his editor, Stuart Proffitt, sent him several pages of notes, O’Brian wrote back saying, as Proffitt later I recalled with a self-deprecating chuckle for the BBC, “Dear Stuart, Thank you for your most sympathetic comments on my typescript, but all I really want is your praise.”
However, as with Picasso, O’Brian was perhaps not as exacting as he should have been regarding Banks’s relationships with women. Upon the book’s publication in the United States in 1993, one unsatisfied reviewer, Linda Colley, wrote in the New York Times Book Review:
There is a harsher side of Banks that Mr. O’Brian neglects. It comes out in his relationships with women, and not just those Tahitian women whom he explored as eagerly as he did any other South Seas artifact. There seems to have been a fiancée, rather brutally paid off. And there were certainly a mistress and a bastard child, discarded along the way. … He told his sister, “You women are sad husband killers in your hearts.” Yet what Banks meant by that Mr. O’Brian never asks.
O’Brian also glibly reported that Banks, who at thirty-three was openly keeping a mistress, “had not wholly committed himself; nor had he entered upon a regular marriage, which he looked upon as incompatible with natural philosophy, with a life of scientific research, and there was still the possibility that he might become a free-swimming organism once more” (p. 192).
When Banks finally married, at the age of thirty-six, the twenty-one-year-old heiress Dorothea Hugessen, O’Brian could not resist a gratuitous shot at children: “The marriage seems to have been thoroughly suitable and, unencumbered by children, thoroughly happy” (p. 197).
In early 1986, Mary underwent another in a series of operations resulting from her declining health. Her recovery was slow and she lost a lot of weight, but she gradually put it back on and regained her strength under Patrick’s watchful eye. Her health would be an ongoing problem as a result of the two automobile accidents. But, though dainty in form, she was a strong-willed and uncomplaining patient.
O’Brian relieved the pressures of writing and helping with Mary’s recuperation by indulging in one of his great passions: collecting books. In so doing, he made the acquaintance of an antiquarian bookseller named Stuart Bennett. Bennett, an American based in London who specialized in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century literature and who was reading the Aubrey-Maturin series, had sent O’Brian a catalog of eighteenth-century English libertine literature. All of the books had been purchased by a Texas collector, but Bennett thought that O’Brian might take an interest in the bibliographical information.
O’Brian wrote back to see if Bennett could help him acquire early editions of Jane Austen. Most of those published in her lifetime were printed in the classic Regency three-volume format. O’Brian already owned those that were not: a two-volume third edition of Pride and Prejudice (1817) and a first edition of the four-volume Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (1818), though the latter had been rebound in inferior material. He hoped Bennett might find him other early editions at good values, but they had to be in durable condition because he wanted to read them. He loved to read a book produced when it was written. The physical object, from the binding and cover, to the pages, to the typeface, acted as a time capsule to transport him to the period of the story. Though early editions were pricey, he had no use for the less-expensive Bentley editions of Austen, which became the standard when published in the mid-nineteenth century. Spellings had been modernized and type regularized; these books felt Victorian, anachronistic.
Bennett responded with discouraging news. Austen novels had been the subject of a recent buying frenzy, particularly by Japanese universities and trophy-book collectors. But he would be on the lookout for volumes satisfying O’Brian’s demands and within his means. This he proved to be very good at.
In the spring of 1986, Bennett produced an unusually nice copy of the second edition of Sense and Sensibility. At £400, the book was a relative bargain. When O’Brian received the three leather-bound volumes published in 1813, he was elated; they were finer than Bennett had described. That May, Bennett and his wife, Kate, were vacationing in France and arranged to spend a night in Collioure. O’Brian, wearing a dapper white linen jacket, picked them up at their hotel to take them home for dinner. The Bennetts presented him with a jar of Gentleman’s Relish, a highly seasoned anchovy paste, which had been O’Brian’s only request when Bennett pressed him to name something he wanted from England. They also gave the O’Brians a bottle of Chambolle-Musigny, the Burgundy served by Aubrey to the Bristol merchant Canning at a feast on board the Polychrest in Post Captain.
Urbane, intelligent, and unassuming, Stuart and Kate Bennett, both in their midthirties, hit it off with Patrick and Mary. Patrick was particularly charmed by Kate, a museum curator who was elegantly mannered, soft-spoken, and conversant in all areas of art. She was also a beauty of Nordic and Italian descent, with fair hair, slightly olive skin, and blue eyes. They ate a feast that Mary had magically produced from her tiny kitchen, drank Patrick’s red wine, which tasted of the fragrant hills around them, and finished off with his sweet Banyuls. The talk meandered agreeably. When Stuart referred to Jane Austen’s mysterious suitor, with whom she had an intense relationship until he died within a year of their meeting, both Patrick and Mary pounced on the bibliophile with passionate interest. “What is your source for this?” they wanted to know. “Tell us more.” And when Stuart mentioned the Augustan publisher Jacob Tonson, the first to publish Alexander Pope, Patrick rose to the occasion, breaking into John Dryden’s famous lampoon of Tonson: “With leering looks, bullfac’d and freckled fair / With two left legs, and Judas-coloured hair, / With frowzy pores, that taint the ambient air.” Laughter filled the house.
“Of course, you will come for lunch tomorrow so we can have a walk around the vineyard,” O’Brian insisted at the end of the evening. The Bennetts ended up staying for two days, and a friendship was forged.
In June, O’Brian received in the mail a second edition of Mansfield Park, rebound in the mid-nineteenth century. Bennett had bought the book at Philips Auctioneer and sent it to O’Brian on approval. The relatively inexpensive book (£250) again pleased O’Brian. Bennett next provided him with the modern scholarly edition of The Trial of Jane Leigh-Parrot, about Jane Austen’s aunt’s conviction for shoplifting in 1799, an event that traumatized the Austen family. The original, a scandal sheet, was unobtainable.
In the fall, the Bennetts returned to Collioure, staying in the O’Brians’ small house with them for three days. They tried to time their visit to help with the vendange, and although O’Brian was concerned that they might have arrived too early, he decided to proceed anyway, while he had the help.
Of all the Jane Austen books, Emma was the most difficult to acquire under O’Brian’s requirements. The others had all been reprinted during Austen’s lifetime, but Emma had not. Bennett had previously managed to buy a copy at Sotheby’s for £1,000, however. One evening, he casually offered to swap his first edition of the book for one of O’Brian’s manuscripts. Then, recalling the price, he quickly reconsidered aloud: “Gosh, maybe I should ask you for two manuscripts for the book?” O’Brian shot Bennett a chilling look. Bennett realized his mistake but could not unsay what was said.
Although O’Brian remained pleasant, he grew more reserved with Bennett, withdrawing into the shell he maintained for most of humanity. Bennett knew that he had to do something. Two nights later, he found O’Brian alone. “Patrick, I owe you an apology,” he said. “I made a flippant remark, and it was never my intention to seriously suggest such a thing. I would be honored to trade, if you are still willing to consider it, my first edition of Emma for one of your manuscripts.”
Now that Bennett had broken the ice, O’Brian admonished him for having reduced something between friends to horse-trading, but he accepted the apology. The set look in his face relaxed. He retrieved the manuscript of Master and Commander, two worn spiral notebooks, from his basement studio and handed them to his guest.
Bennett said, “But you haven’t seen Emma yet.”
“I’m sure Emma will be fine,” O’Brian replied.
The two couples, the young and the old, labored happily together in the sunny vineyard. The hut where Patrick sometimes wrote sat at the edge of the vineyard on the crest of a hill with a magnificent view of the coast. Downhill, the ruins of a stone house evoked the past but also a hint of promise since, in France, where building restrictions flourish, one always has the right to build on old foundations. Red and white grapes intermingled randomly, and the pickers tossed one and all into the bins, which Bennett and O’Brian lifted together and loaded into the O’Brians’ 2CV. O’Brian, now approaching his seventy-second birthday, pointed out where he had planted clippings of vines and sprigs were emerging through the charred earth. “The experts tell me that in twenty years they will be more susceptible to the phylloxeral beetle,” he told Bennett, with an impish grin, “but I don’t care what happens in twenty years.”
They picked the grapes in three mornings, taking the afternoons off. Kate could do no wrong, and Patrick, who had once declared he loathed being photographed, even relaxed enough to pose for her pictures in the vineyard. Mary, despite her frailty, seemed always on the move. Even after working in the vineyard, she would be the hospitable hostess, fixing meals and making sure her guests were comfortable.
Picking the grapes and carrying them back to the house was only part of the work. O’Brian then had to press the fruit and seal the juice in barrels. Bennett helped him with this, but when the novice twisted the much adored wooden wine press too tightly, causing it to groan in protest, O’Brian firmly put an end to the experiment.
Contrary to the vintners’ careful calculations, the O’Brians had picked at just the right time. The next week bad storms followed the fine weather. That fall while reading his new first edition of Emma, O’Brian could do so with the added comfort of knowing that he had fared better than many vintners with the 1986 vintage. And when the covers of Emma fell off in his hands, he had confidence that Bennett would do the right thing. He mailed the fragile book back to England. Bennett—amid profuse apologies—had it rebound and returned it to him in France.