I’ll begin with an apology.  When I wrote out my thoughts about Episode 7, I thought that Episode 8 was the end of the series.  Had I realized that there was still one more episode to come, I might have drawn different conclusions on one or two subjects.  In my defense, when I looked at “Scheduled Recordings” on my DVR, I saw that Episode 8 was longer than a standard episode — some 80 minutes, including the Viking Cruise commercials – and I also saw that the recording for the following Sunday was a “Making of Downton” program.  That seemed to confirm my understanding that Episode 8 was going to be the end.  I drew the wrong conclusion.  In compensation, this commentary is offered free of charge except for a small fee for handling.

With so many story lines needing to be tied off, it is just as well that we have one more episode.  Looking back with now perfect hindsight, I can see that it was too much to hope for that both Mary and Edith could accept their respective fiancés and celebrate their respective weddings within the span of a single episode.  Mary needed most of Episode 8 to get to the altar.  Fresh from the tearful phone call that concluded Episode 7, she sent off a confirming letter of rejection and then sent off Henry himself when Tom maneuvered him to Downton’s front door.

Henry presents so many issues for Mary that we can take pot luck.  He is not Mary’s financial equal and will be of significantly inferior financial and social status to his stepson.  He will spend his married life living in someone else’s house.  If he and Mary have children, they will be relative paupers compared to their half-brother.  But most important, Henry will walk past the Grim Reaper, nodding his head to a familiar acquaintance, every time he goes to his job, never knowing whether this day is the one when the G.R. decides to ride with him.

It’s that last problem that sends Mary into tears.  Fortunately, Violet reappears after Tom sent for her.  I should have known that she would not abandon the audience before the finale.  She adopts a novel attitude, completely devoid of the financial and dynastic calculations she made when we last saw her discussing Henry with Lady Shackleton a few episodes back.  Now she is the Mr. Mason of the upper classes and counsels Mary to follow her heart and throw caution to the winds (I think two clichés are enough).  And so Mary says Yes.

I would also say that Henry, a fellow who is scraping along with no money to speak of, manages to appear in each scene with perfectly tailored clothing appropriate for each occasion and with elegant and expensive transportation whenever he needs to travel.  He does well for a man without any money.

As busy as Mary was on her emotional shuttle, she still found time to wound those around her.  She was able to blame her father for Barrow’s attempted suicide in the time it took to pour a cup of tea.  And she was able to wreck Edith’s chances for happiness in less time than it took to butter a piece of toast.  Of course, it was idiotic for Edith to think of keeping Marigold’s parentage from Bertie.  One of the reasons the British upper classes gave, probably still give, for their place in society was that they set an example.  It should have been clear as crystal to Edith from the beginning what the right thing was to do.  Not only that, but no one could expect to build a marriage with a deception sitting right at the heart of it.  And there is the practical problem that the truth always does come out eventually.  In this case, the truth’s appearance came early, aided by a heartless and vindictive sibling, but it was only a matter of time.

So Bertie has gone off to Tangiers without Edith.  But this is the benefit of having an entire additional episode, one that I did not budget for, in which to work out the problems that remain after the general roundup of Episode 8.  Does anyone doubt that Bertie and Edith will end up married?  How it will happen we cannot say.  Bertie may come back to Downton, or he and Edith will meet somewhere by chance, or Edith will write, or Tom will intervene, or Violet will be wheeled into action again.  A long-shot possibility is that Mary, experiencing remorse for the first time in her life, will contact Bertie on Edith’s behalf to make one final sisterly plea.   I remain confident that Bertie and Edith will wed however it may be arranged, and I’m sure that 90% of the viewing audience is of the same opinion.

Quite a number of other story lines were resolved in this episode, suggesting that the final episode (or The Final Episode if you prefer) will have enough slack to allow plenty of time for the tale that will bring Edith to the altar to be complicated and slow moving.  At each development, there are numerous characters who will want to talk about it among themselves: Robert, Cora, Rosamund, Violet, Isobel, Mary, Henry, and Tom, not to mention all of the downstairs staff who might spare a thought now and again for Mary’s less glamorous sister.

Two other characters who were settled in Episode 8 are Mr. Barrow and Mr. Molesley.  Barrow was another beneficiary of the additional episode that I failed to anticipate.  If the writers had only eight episodes to deal with, they might have been tempted to close the series with the shocking discovery of Mr. Barrow doing his best imitation of Frank Pentangeli in The Godfather Part II.  But with an episode in hand, there is time for Barrow to recover, to receive a restorative orange from Master George, and to be allowed to keep his job “if only for the time being” as Mr. Carson so cheerfully put it.

Molesley starts his new job as a teacher.  He gets off to a rough start when the students behave badly.  A bit of encouragement from Miss Baxter and from Daisy is all it takes to buck him up and he proves to be a natural, as Daisy says.  If he had been teaching in the same school today, he would probably have bled out from knife wounds on the first day.  Oh, and thanks to Mr. Carson for his words of encouragement to Mr. Molesley.  What a perfect antidote he provides to ambition and a desire for self-improvement.

Mr. Carson was not content to limit himself to discouraging Mr. Molesley.  As an equal opportunity pessimist, he was willing to paint a picture of ruin for Mrs. Patmore to contemplate.  You may recall that my first guess about Mrs. Patmore’s guests was that one of them was a co-responding witness.  That didn’t pan out, but my second guess did.  (The reader is respectfully invited to examine footnote 4 from the comment on Episode 7.)  This is enough to cause Mrs. Patmore’s cottage to become a “house of ill repute.”  Surely that phrase does not have the connotation in British English that it has in the United States.  Mrs. Patmore can hardly be expected to vet the marital status of each guest who books a visit to the cottage.  A “house of ill repute” is one whose purpose is to conduct the activity that gives it that reputation.

Whether the term is fairly applied or not, Mr. Carson helps to increase Mrs. Patmore’s sense of desperation.  He claims, falsely, that he always thought the house was a bad idea.  He announces that he is going to take steps to ensure that his investment is not ruined the way Mrs. Patmore’s has been.  To top things off, when the family agrees to rally to Mrs. Patmore and allow themselves to be photographed leaving her cottage after taking tea there, Carson tries to discourage them.  Like Denker down the road, he is more snobbish than the nobs themselves.  Mrs. Patmore’s immediate problem seems to be on its way to resolution.  The only missing element is her eventual union with Mr. Mason and again we are thankful for the extra episode (as I will continue to think of it) to give us time for that loose end to be knitted up, should Mr. Fellowes be so inclined.

The fate of Isobel and Lord Merton is also in Mr. Fellowes’s hands, acting through his agent Larry Grey (whom I have called Larry Merton in the past because I forget that these upper class people have a family name as well as one or more titled pedigrees).  Isobel seems to have decided that she will accept Lord Merton if Larry gives his blessing.  Presumably she wants to feel that she has his heartfelt assent.  It will not be enough for him merely to speak a form of words.  We shall see whether Larry is up to it.  My hope is that Isobel remains independent, but she hasn’t asked for advice.

I would like to add a note about Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  I agree with Samuel Johnson: “He who aspires to be a serious wine drinker must drink claret”[1].  There are some 10,000 producers of Bordeaux wine, so to sample even a small fraction would be the work of decades (for people who intend to be sober for at least part of their day).  Although I consume more than my share of the wine of Bordeaux, I had never tried or even heard of Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  I was intrigued by the name when it was mentioned a couple of episodes ago.  I decided to try it.  Total Wine had only one vintage, 2009, a very good year in Bordeaux and drinkable now, so I bought a couple of bottles.

The wine has a pleasant dark garnet color, but I thought the tannins were still too pronounced to enjoy the fruit.  I drank the first bottle over three days and I will put the second one away for a couple of years.

I remained curious about the unusual name of the wine.  There are numerous theories.  I mentioned that Lord Byron visited the chateau from which Chasse-Spleen was eventually hived and commented that the wine was a “remedy to chase away the spleen”, spleen meaning “the blues”.  But was he speaking of this particular wine or of wine in general?  Lord Byron was a man who enjoyed his wine and one can find many quotes attributed to him on the subject.  Not all of them were spoken while he was on this property.

Interestingly, the word “spleen” entered the French language via Lord Byron’s use of it.  The word “spleen” naming the digestive organ entered English via the French word “esplen” but “spleen” in the sense of melancholy or the blues entered French from English and specifically from Byron.  The poet Charles Baudelaire used the word “spleen” extensively and an entire section of his foremost work “Les Fleurs du Mal” or “The Flowers of Evil” is titled “Spleen et Idéal”.  Several of the poems in the series have the word Spleen in their title.  But what does this have to do with wine?

We get closer to an answer when we learn that Beaudelaire wrote another series of poems, he called them prose-poems, titled “Le Spleen de Paris” or “Paris Blues”.  This series was published in 1857, the year in which the first edition of Les Fleurs du Mal was published.  One of the poems is titled “Enivrez-vous” or “Get yourself drunk.”  It contains the lines: “Enivrez-vous sans cesse! De vin, de poésie, ou de vertu a votre guise.”  A possible translation: “Be drunk all the time!  From wine, poetry, or virtue, as you choose.[2]”

Those lines appear on the front label of each bottle of Chateau Chasse-Spleen.  What French winemaker would not want to name Charles Beaudelaire the national poet of France?

The final connection is that the artist Odilon Redon illustrated an edition of Les Fleurs du Mal, apparently after Beaudelaire’s death in 1867.  Redon came from a town just down the road from Chasse-Spleen.  The suggestion that he proposed the name is plausible.  I feel the connection is complete.  There is no definitive explanation, but one can imagine how the name came to stick through a series of coincidences.  The surprising thing is that there are not more chateaux in Bordeaux using the name “Spleen”.  No one could be melancholy after a couple of glasses of good Bordeaux wine.

I realize that this digression may be of limited interest.  Possibly I can make it up to you by sharing two quotes about wine that I found when I was tracking down the background on Chasse-Spleen.  First, from an otherwise unidentified Spanish bishop: “I have enjoyed great health at a great age because every day since I can remember, I have consumed a bottle of wine except when I have not felt well. Then I have consumed two bottles.”  Second, from W.C. Fields: “I cook with wine; sometimes I even add it to the food.”

Three final thoughts.  First, was it not a lovely thing that three of Mary’s closest relations – her father, sister, and brother-in-law – were able to take a turn unloading on her?  Her father gave her only a single sentence, but one dripping with contempt.  Tom lit into her more extensively and Edith delivered a quarter-century of pent-up resentment with a single word.  Very satisfying for those of us who are not fans of the elegant Lady M.

Second, Bertie’s description of his mother making “Mr. Squeers look like Florence Nightingale” is surely unfair.  The distinguishing feature of Mr. Squeers – the headmaster of a Yorkshire boarding school in Dickens’s “Nicholas Nickleby” — was not that he was strict or maintained high standards.  He was sadistic and dishonest.  Bertie’s mother can’t be that bad!  I’m sure she and Edith will get along beautifully.  No doubt she will be delighted to welcome Marigold as well.

Finally, the name of Bertie’s new home, the place where we had the bird shooting last year, is Brancaster Castle.  P.G. Wodehouse is looking in on Downton once again.  At some point before he was employed by Bertie Wooster, Jeeves was the butler to Lord Brancaster.  I think these little coincidences are worth a smile if not an outright chuckle.

My glass of Chasse-Spleen is drained.  The blues are chased away, and I await the last episode of Downton the Sunday after next.

[1] Claret, to the British, is dry red Bordeaux wine.

[2] The label attributes the lines to Les Fleurs du Mal.  I hesitate to suggest a correction to a French winemaker on a point of French poetry, but I believe the label is incorrect on this small point.