The carnival in the market was still going on, but Pomona no longer felt like taking part.
She drank wine as she walked. She had bought it from a roadside vendor, who claimed it was noble rot wine from Alsace. If that were true, the bottle would be very valuable, yet she had bought it for only one Galleon.
Legend had it that Sir Maxim's ancestors came from the Hugo family of France. After the Edict of Nantes was revoked, the entire family moved to Plymouth, Britain, then went to Massachusetts in America. Later, during the Westward Movement, they reached Maine, where they acquired a piece of land and cultivated it diligently. Hiram Maxim was the eldest son of that family.
The Hugo family had originally been German nobility. They migrated to Alsace in the sixteenth century and had run vineyards there for generations. Grapes infected with noble rot shriveled like the skin of a Shrivelfig, yet they were exceptionally sweet. The wine made from them had a distinctive fruity fragrance, and the vines possessed remarkably strong roots—strong enough that even phylloxera, the natural enemy of grapes, could hardly shake their foundations.
Yet what destroyed a vineyard might not be aphids or weather. In any case, the Hugo vineyard had survived the French Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, and both World Wars, becoming "liquid gold."
In 1851, the Great Exhibition was held in Hyde Park, London, Britain, while Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte carried out a coup d'état, dissolved the National Assembly and the Conservative Senate, declared the French Republic an empire, and proclaimed himself Napoleon III.
Hugo was one of the legislators who opposed Napoleon's establishment of the empire. He was exiled abroad for nineteen years. He sold off his property and fled the country with his wife and children, but it was