So says Jessie Royce Landis, as Jessie Stevens, straight-shooting mother of the goddess-esque Grace Kelly, as recent finishing school grad Francie Stevens, who suspects Grant is after her mother’s jewels in Hitchcock’s ultra-stylish caper flick To Catch a Thief. In Europe to find Francie a husband they find themselves at a French Riviera casino with Grant and John Williams (who you may remember from those old Longines Symphonette TV commercials.) Ultimate message of this subtle Hitchcock outing? You can’t shake your nature. Francie might be putting on airs but her mother sets her straight, her father, who died before they were filthy rich, was a hustler with a heart of gold. Thus, what attracts Francie on her European husband hunt? Grant’s John Robie, retired cat burglar/dreamboat.

Jessie: “You can take all that champagne and dump it in the English channel.”

Later on she bellies up to the bar American-style and puts in an order: “Avez vous bourbon?”

The Patrick O’Brian novels are an unparalleled mix of Age of Sail detail, insights into pre-Victorian anglophonics and keen characterizations but they also achieve their effect in many small ways, at times overshadowed by the more obvious of their merits.

One such is the minute attention to food, drink and other substances. Alcohol is prominent, both on-board and off, and tobacco is not only widely used, it’s practically celebrated, and at times prescribed by our co-hero, Doctor Maturin.

Anyone who’s read the books will know the characters in the excerpts below. If you’ve seen the movie only, excellent as it is, you’ll have gotten a mere fraction of the portraits of these men, and a small fraction at that, and absolutely none of the women. These excerpts from this, the sixth book in the series, will give scant background but if you’re sensitive to even the tiniest of spoilers, you’d better stop here and start reading the books, before they’re banned for promoting tobacco use.

This first snippet is the part of the aftermath from the ending of the previous work (Desolation Island.) Here Maturin considers Diane Villiers, who has dealt him some emotional blows in the past, she having lately spent some time among the ruffians of the New World (and as the mistress of one): 

Page 36: “His pain was not the piercing thrust of jealousy but rather a certain grief at hearing her say something crass. He had always taken it for granted that whatever Diana might actually do, her tact was infallible and that she could not, without intending it, say anything that would give offense. Perhaps he had been mistaken: or perhaps this long stay in America, living only among the loose, expensive set of Johnson’s friends, together with her distress, had coarsened her for the time, just as it had given her a hint of colonial accent and a taste for bourbon and tobacco…as refuge in coarseness, as it were.”

Yeah! Bourbon and tobacco. Refuge in coarseness. Never thought of them like that. Perhaps because to many of us New Worlders, coarseness would be a step up.

And later Captain Aubrey, in Halifax attending a ball for the Royal Navy’s first naval victory of the War of 1812, the Shannon’s taking of the Chesapeake, has had his wind spilled by disappointment: by no letters from his wife, Sophie; by the news from a fellow ball-goer that he had recently danced with Sophie at a ball in England; and by the loss of an assignment because he’d been away so long (recounted, again, in the previous book.) Things begin to look up when a young lady takes an interest, and after one of his former crewmen promises to fix him something with more of a kick than the “thin fizzy stuff” officially available to the party-goers, something more familiar to him from years aboard ship…grog. Aubrey, a gifted sailor, commander and fighter on a ship, can barely make his way on land, whether it be with finances, navy department politics or romantic affairs, and tends to drift toward the rocks in all these areas, especially after he’s had a few. Here he’s engaged in some verbal sparring with an obnoxious Army officer over the attentions of a young lady when the confrontation comes to an end, and Jack begins to feel a little more…irrigated. 

Page 60: “Miss Smith’s reappearance checked any retort that might have been forming in Jack’s mind: the music began again, and as he led her into the dance he observed that it was strange how differently wine took different men – some grew glum and fault-finding, some quarrelsome or tearful; for his part he found it did not affect him at all, except perhaps to make him like people rather more, and to make the world seem a cheerful place. ‘Not that it could be much more cheerful than it is already,’ he added, smiling at the throng, where the greenbacked girl, dancing away totally unconscious of her betrayal, was adding much to the gaiety of nations.”

Resonates, eh? I’ve known maudlin and argumentative and hypercritical drunks, but Aubrey’s “no-affect” affect sounds familiar as well. Mm hm. That what-a-wonderful-world feeling, yep, that’s exactly how alcohol doesn’t affect me. Every time.

BTW: And the girl was “greenbacked” because a sudden rain storm had chased those outside in the shrubbery back inside, perhaps before they’d has a chance to be brushed off by their companions.