by Idwal Jones
“Melun-Perret? You see, he asked Pierre about it, and Pierre asked me. So I invited M’sieu to be my guest.”
He was to meet us at this corner. In half an hour a limousine slid up, and Monsieur got out—a florid man, plump as a partridge, with velour hat raked over an ear. He wrung our hands.
“On!” he cried genially.
Guido was—what shall I say, apologetic? He deplored the district. Still, Chiusi’s was worth the adventure. And its modesty in lurking in this purlieu of thieves, ragpickers, and slatterns was understandable. The mob, the tourists would never find it. It was no Faisan d’Or, certainly.
“I’d be sorry if it was,” said M. Melun-Perret.
Blowsy, shrill women in rabbit-lined slippers waddled past, bottled beer and cabbages in their fat embrace. There were harlots, their eyes blobs of India ink on putty, their handbags moving like slow metronomes. Legless beggars shot by with a rattle of casters on the viscous pavement. The smells distressed Guido: the odor of leeks boiling, covered, in dank back kitchens; an empyreuma of rags and paper floating up through the gratings; the fetor of ratty, medieval centuries.
“There’s a little shop here,” said M. Melun-Perret gaily, “a little shop that sells ivories. I wonder—”
He lifted his hat once; he lifted it twice. He had been bowed to from doorways. He strode on happily, and took my arm, eyes alight, as mischievous as a gamin. He might have been one of the familiars of the Quarter, knowing every trull, pork butcher, and knothole in it. That rakish velour hat was a symbol: M. Melun-Perret was a Bohemian. He talked, he laughed, he jested. He sniffed before all the cook shops, appraised the snipe dangling in a café window, whistled, and twirled his stick.
Guido trailed after him, abashed at our flagrant conspicuousness. He was a snob: Petit-Montrouge was unworthy of Guido Tialelli, cuisinier at the Faisan d’Or.
We dove into Chiusi’s. It was bare, with half a dozen tables; crepe paper in festoons dangling from the ceiling like concertinas. The only other client was a taxi driver partaking of soup, with a copy of L’Intransigeant propped before him on a cruet.
“C’est un peu mortuaire,” whispered Guido, as we sat to our table.
The waiter came out, a heavy man with vest unbuttoned. Guido read the menu. Baked Easter kid, ravioli, and a chestnut polenta were the offerings, and paste, naturally.
“Some of the kid, first.”
“There is no kid. Nor any polenta. That is yesterday’s card—and we had many customers. But I can offer you some spaghetti.”
Guido held the card and his eyes drifted about him. Had he become aware that into this immaculate room, with shirred curtains on the window, an indifference had stolen like a faint miasma?
“The Signor Chiusi—?”
“Gone to Italy for a year. Family affairs, you understand—”
“The spaghetti, then,” said Guido. “And first a little antipasto. A slice of mortadelle, if you have it. Some vermouth, dry. And soda.”
“With the paste,” said M. Melun-Perret, “a salad of cress would be good, and some young onions.”
The man nodded. He brought us the appetizers and the vermouth. Then he pulled on his coat and hat and shuffled out. Guido peered into the kitchen.
“It’s clean,” he said.
We drank our vermouths. Time and again we clinked glasses. After the sixth clink, M. Melun-Perret blossomed forth as “Georges.” A big yellow cat with eyes like rubies jumped upon his lap, purring like a sewing machine. He scratched it behind the ear and with the other hand combined more drinks.
The doorbell pinged, and the waiter slouched through to the kitchen, with a lumpy parcel, done up in newspaper, under his arm. The next moment he began chopping on a board.
Guido listened, with head inclined. The thumping was clumsy. He frowned. The flesh of bovines, ordered by nature as the link between us and the vegetable kingdom, should be treated with respectful skill. He leaned back in his chair and drank with eyes fixed on a calendar on the wall: a view of Lake Maggiore printed in indigo.
“The kitchen is fairly clean,” he qualified.
“ ‘Fairly,’ ” said Georges, “is reassuring. You alarmed me at first. Never expect a perfect dinner to emerge from a clean kitchen. As well expect one from a laboratory. Revolting! A cook whose mind runs on soap and antiseptics is fit only for the guillotine.”
Georges laved his palate with vermouth and smiled at us blandly.
“Now take Papa Andrieu at the Vieille Tour. His little kitchen is about four feet by ten. If its floor were trimmed with pick and shovel—which Heaven forbid!—the ceiling would be very much higher. It is an Alps of peelings, cinders, grease, impacted chicken bones, and bread. The debris of meals goes back to the days of the War—perhaps the Napoleonic Wars!
“Upon this he treads, this prince of Alpinistes, and what does he turn out? The most delicious of little Woodcocks à la Dumas; enchanting fricassees of eels; a squadron of the most disarming hors d’oeuvres. He climbs up and descends, like a lama in a trance, his soul absorbed in the confection of a Filet de Truite Saumonée, or a Bombe Valentinoise. The outer world does not exist for him. His eyes are filmed in meditation; his whiskertips drip gravy.
“Assuredly, where vision and the creative flame exist, a little honest dirt is no barrier to art. You go to a shop to buy a masterpiece that has taken your fancy—a Renoir, say, or a Van Gogh. Are you going to spurn them on the rumor, or even on the fact, that they came from ateliers that hadn’t been scrubbed out since year before last?”
Guido echoed the full mirth of the great epicure, but his laugh was from the teeth outward. He ran a finger inside his collar and glanced at the clock, as if it were the face of destiny. There was no reason why that paste should be boiled to rags! He had been watching the clock hands tragically—ten minutes had elapsed.
Georges had shed his fastidiousness as well as his coat. Larger, more florid, and jovial he grew as he filled and refilled our tumblers with the rasping Algerian wine that tasted of rusty kettle. He was the raconteur born. He was as witty and amiable as if he were dining at the Quai d’Orsay with ambassadors. And right in the middle of a Pantagruelish anecdote of his village in Normany, the dish appeared.
Guido saw it first. Incredulity dilated his eyes; then he paled in despair, his throat contracting in a jerk. It was a pallid, glutinous mound, as gray as tripe, as ribbed as a washboard, and doused over with a pink sauce.
“It is long,” he breathed, “long since I was here last.”
He had fallen from grace, sunk in the lowest pool, reserved for the utterly damned. He had brought here, in his pride, the most renowned epicure in Europe, and amply had the gods punished him for his temerity. As the dish was set on the table, he flung me a glance—one glance before his eyes drooped—and his nerveless fingers brayed the crumbs on the tablecloth.
“Never,” the glance said, “never let Jules hear of this!”
I think the cook also had caught that glance, for stupidity has not always the skin of a rhinoceros. He stood in the doorway, smoothing his apron, with an expression both defiant and furtive.
“And then, the mayor called upon Madame Goosefoot next,” boomed Georges, filling up with talk what might have been an icy crevasse of silence.
We lifted our forks and began to divide the paste. Georges ate with gusto, alternating paste with salad and gobbets of hard bread. We had cheese next, then grapes and coffee. For another hour we lingered over cognac. Guido had revived. He was serene, even cheerful, as men can be who have received the consolamentum on the scaffold.
We departed. Before the tobacconist’s, Guido slapped his pocket and gave a cry of annoyance.
“My pocketbook! One moment, I beg of you!”
He hurried back. Georges looked into the shop, then entered, and I sped back to Chiusi’s and listened. The Avenging Angel had pulled down the shades. A voice bellowed with fear; there was a sound of fists crashing, like mallets on a side of beef. Chairs collapsed, and a table. A mome
nt later the door was unlocked, and I walked on.
Guido rejoined us, and we stood under the street lamp. Our guest gave us each an oily Larranaga cigar. He held a wax vesta to them, and then lighted his own, holding it an inch or two away, puffing, until the flame shot forth and the tip ignited, winking in a halo of smoke.
I was conscious that his glance was elsewhere, resting on Guido’s hand, bound in a kerchief, upon which a red glow was spreading.
We strolled as far as the Observatoire, where we shook hands with Georges. His cab whisked off into the fog. Guido leaned against the railing, head fallen, hat and collar masking his face.
“Let me fetch you a cab,” I said.
“No.” He sank to the coping, as if drunk. “Ancora in cento anni! Another such a dinner in a hundred years!” He lifted a hand to his eyes. “My young friend, do me a kindness.”
“And that?”
“Leave me here. Good night.”
My lodgings were three miles away. Being in the mood for solitude, I walked home.
IV
MONSIEUR POM-POM
The head of our art school, Louis Beynac was very famous, eccentric, and old—about eighty-six, I believe—a bent figure in a greenish-black coat with a ribbon in the lapel. For thirty years he had been struggling with an urge to retire to his vineyard in Alsace. But the desire to be useful to others was stronger. He took only those pupils who came weighted down with letters and credentials. He was just and extremely kind. I was entered at the request of Monsieur Paul, of whom he was fond.
At school I modeled columns, shells, flutings, and canopies—designs for vol-au-vent and Ducal wedding cakes. My notions of art swirled about classical ornament. Toward spring my sketches took the form of Freda Koepfli. She was like a tall sheaf of wheat. Her eyes had the velvety flush of an apricot. Her father was a confectioner in Geneva. He wanted her to learn design and later take charge of his cake factory. She lived with a maiden aunt in the Batignolles.
I used to walk home with her. Then, on Sundays, we would ride out to Versailles to visit the Petit Trianon, or to Sèvres to look at porcelain. Later we dropped all pretence of studying ornament and spent our time at the cafés, or in the country. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and I was in love with her. Therefore I had to see much of her Aunt Giulia, who, being Italian, had the strictest notions of propriety.
Guido made it easier for me by inviting us to his apartment for an evening of music, Chianti, and little batter cakes. And I would bring along a Siamese art student whom we all called “Pom-Pom,” Manuel, the Colombian, and Rémy Ghismont, another student, who also was a culinary apprentice at the Faisan d’Or. His father owned a chain of luxury hotels all over Europe, from Sweden to Portugal.
There Giulia would placidly knit, listen to the music and the talk of the old editor, his wife, General Umberto Padaglione, and the rest of the group, so charming and so well-framed in the decayed elegance of the pension. I was part of it only by accident. But there I was, a friend of M. Guido Tialelli, and part of this respectable and old-worldly background, with its drawn portieres, horsehair upholstery, wax wreaths, dolmans, and the spinet-like piano with its ghostly tinkle and shaded candles.
Giulia, for all her austerity and jet beads, was youngish and plump. Her voice was musical. At the keyboard she would sing ballads of gondoliers and plaintive loves.
Aime ton soleil, Italienne.
C’est celui qui dort ton berçeau,
C’est celui qui fleurit ton tombeau:
Aime ton soleil, Italienne.
She became a favorite at the pension, and came to know almost everyone Freda and I knew at all well. By this time I was accepted as a suitor of her niece, though on probation. We had a very formal talk, sitting in her dreadful parlor.
“Your prospects?”
“I have a small income, a legacy. In two years I shall have a profession.”
“H’m.” Her eyes were as metallic as her needles. “Your relatives?”
“An uncle. At Vence. He has a factory.”
“I expect to go to Nice for a week. I may visit him.”
A tour of inspection. I shuddered. The prim Giulia, what would she think of my lusty uncle, the unbelted Dosso with his abattoir jests, and the alcoholic Baroness? I wrote to my uncle, after she was gone, begging him to be decorous for at least an hour, and to receive her in his best black coat.
How was I to know they were to surmise she was a timid little creature whose confidence would have to be won only by extreme geniality? They swooped down on her like an avalanche. They rushed her to the mountains in a big yellow tram which Dosso had engaged for the sake of spectacular effect. Under the delusion she was a gourmand, they dined her at the nougat factory, at Dosso’s kitchen, at the hotel. In the same yellow tram, they careened through the lower Alps, Dosso in shirt sleeves roaring at the wheel, hunting for the prettiest picnic sites.
It was a month before Giulia returned, sunburned and plumper.
“How long did you stay at Vence?”
“Three weeks.” She turned up her hands. “What could one do? That Dosso—che numèro!”
Despite that, I was approved.
Meanwhile, her niece and I were as good as engaged. I gave Freda a ring, an emerald set in a band of chased gold, which I bought for five thousand francs—all I had—at a jewelry shop near Beynac’s. I borrowed enough for that night, from Pom-Pom, to take her to Foyot’s for dinner and then to Lucia di Lammermoor at the Opéra.
To celebrate Giulia’s return, the editor’s wife decided to give a dinner at the pension, upstairs—a very simple affair for nine. The preparations got out of hand.
“The General will cook it,” she had said. “He is a good amateur chef.”
Said Guido in reproach: “Would you call in an amateur surgeon, however good?”
“This time you must be a guest.”
“Madame,” he replied firmly, “this is a case for professionals. And we must have surprises.”
It was an evening when clients were few at the Faisan d’Or. Guido arrived early, bringing a fat Sicilian turkey and Jules with a hamper of London plaice—the fruits of their influence at the Halles. Guido cooked in the small kitchen, working fast, as if he had as many arms as Siva, and prepared every course but the last. Pom-Pom turned up in evening clothes with two jars of arrack. We took our seats, the General at one end of the table, Giulia at the other. Who, I wondered, was to serve?
Guido thwacked a bell. Who should dart in but Pierre! The good Pierre had come in to serve! He brought on the two-color soup, served bread and the dry amber Cortese. He dispensed pomp, as if he were the major-domo at the Farnese Palace. Suave he was, his porphyry-blue jaw thrust out, his linen gleaming, his hands never more dextrous. But he moved with a nimble and exaggerated caper, like a dancer in a ballet comedy.
“Mmm! Quelle soupe!” He sniffed. “Parmesan and nutmegs, eh? Whatever they have at the Faisan tonight, it’s dishwater!”
Then came the whiting, fragrant of the North Sea, glazed in paper, which opened with a steam of anchovy sauce, one of Guido’s subtleties, with a base of chicken stock. Conviviality and easy talk unfolded in the warm, perfumed air and the soft lights. The asparagus was fat and green, crisp with fried crumbs, giving way at the weight of the fork. Unobtrusive was the Tuscan myrtle wine poured with it.
Who could have divined what was in the pièce montée? It was a casket of puff paste with heraldic designs. Inside was the turkey, boned, roasted brown, with ox tongue inside, redolent of Madeira, and packed in truffles, chestnuts, and the celery-scented green lovage. Guido sliced it across with a knife like a yataghan, and the segments fell over, marbled and vaporous in their rings of pastry. The knife steamed, and he drew it delicately under Pierre’s nose. Pierre inhaled with eyes closed. An appreciative tremor went through his frame.
“Melun-Perret, my poor one,” he breathed, “you have never eaten!”
Guido shivered a little, as he poured on the Sicilian sauce.
“With this,” declaimed Pierre, “the Grand Purple!”
He served the Montepulciano. The aroma of it—a mellow, winy tapestry, woven patiently by six decades of time in some dark Apennine crypt—filled the room. We were not alone. History, art, and religion crowded in with the music of trumpets and gnawing horns. General Padiglione murmured as if in a prayer. The purple reflecting against his thin, marmoreal face colored it like a portrait in a church window. He drank reverently, in the minutest of sips. Pierre, in the silence, inaudibly slid before each guest a salad of cress lightly tumbled in oil.
“Wine is made to drink!” shouted Guido. “Pour it down!”
Freda held out her glass to me, and we clinked. Her mouth had a stain as of mulberries.
The turkey was immense. Its year of life had been rendered blissful by a diet of pine nuts, milk, and locusts. The guests ate it with slow voracity and the serious, fixed eye of gourmandise. Though the wine spurred the tongue, the dish fostered that mood, far beyond gaiety, which touches the sensitive who contemplate perfection in any form, and are grateful and meditative. And these were guests of cultured palate.
Jules ate with bulging cheek, an admiring eye upon his colleague.
“Absolute! Do you hear that?”
“Tintoretto,” said the General. “And Verdi. This is utmost fame!”
“He has,” said Pom-Pom in his thin, crystalline voice, looking at him through horned spectacles, “too much delicacy to become famous in his lifetime.”
Freda ate robustly, washing pastry, meat, and asparagus down her full Doric throat with draughts of Montepulciano. Her ring flashed in the candlelight. Pierre, fascinated by her appetite, hovered about her, with soft, encouraging whispers, slipping tidbits to her plate, furtively as if he were palming cards, with fork and spoon, which he manipulated with one hand in the style of tongs.