View from the Window at Le Gras

The first photograph, taken at Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in 1826, ten years after Byron, Shelley, and Mary Godwin found refuge at Lake Geneva during The Year Without a Summer, ten years before the HMS Beagle carried Charles Darwin home to England’s shores.  Its light has crystallised since then, a hundred and eighty-nine years hence, but you can still see, if you try, the dappled gold that decks the Bourgogne country-side, and taste the scent of grapes upon the air.