by Idwal Jones
“Shrimps from Calabria,” I said. “You are fortunate, M’sieu le Docteur.”
“Cook them in a good peasant style,” Monsieur Paul commanded. “A la Calabrese. Take them! Dépêchez-vous! Make a surprise for the doctor’s colleagues.”
How they would harmonize with the carp and the trouts I could not guess, nor imagine what the President would think.
I sped to my range. Shrimps I had cooked often on the Piccolo, and for better men than Duruy.
I heated oil and butter in a pan, browned a chopped bundle of green onions, a grated carrot, a small handful of parsley, and four cloves of garlic. Then I added five peeled tomatoes. These I cooked in enough bouillon to cover, and then poured in a pint of white wine. Then the condiments: a pinch of Spanish saffron, ground peppercorns, salt, some cayenne, and enough brown sugar to fill the palm.
I thickened the sauce with a dark roux, and poured in a glassful of sherry. After three minutes of ebullition, I forced it through a coarse sieve into a casserole. The shrimps, picked, went in. For twenty minutes they simmered, and at intervals I cast in a nut-sized lump of butter, a half cupful in all.
Upstairs they went, on silver plates, served on slices of bread fried in oil with a clove of garlic in it, and scattered over with chopped parsley.
Meanwhile I had vegetables and soups to dish out with Rémy’s help, and pork chops to grill for my fellow apprentices’ supper.
A clap on the shoulder. I turned.
“Superlative!” Pierre shouted above the roar of the kitchen. “I blazed it with cognac. They drank with it a Manzanillo. Duruy was in a rage!”
“Indeed?”
“His perfect dinner is ruined—and di Valmonte and El Indio took your shrimps twice!”
Next day I was summoned to the office. Standing with Monsieur Paul were Urbain, Pierre, Jules, Guido, and the linen man, from whose extended palms lifted a tall snowy funnel with a mushroom top—a chef’s high bonnet, like Monsieur Paul’s own.
Urbain read a letter from the Council of Brillat. Its couching was in terms most elaborately praiseful. And, among the seven names appended to it, was Gaspard Duruy’s!
I broke into confusion and cold sweat, and Monsieur Paul fitted the bonnet upon my head. It was like being invested with a brevet, or with a degree at the Sorbonne. I, Gallois, had attained it in two years instead of the usual four. And when I returned to the kitchen, I was greeted with a salvo as of artillery, the chefs pounding with iron spoons, and the Senegalese porter, a bottle in each fist, banged out a martial rhythm on a cauldron as if it were a tambour.
—
A month later Rémy, Freda, Pom-Pom, Manuel with his mistress, La Flamande, and I went after the night class at Beynac’s to a Moroccan café, Chez Kashbah, for late dinner. The waiter brought me with the coffee an ink-damp Excelsior. My glance fell upon an item on Duruy: he had expired of a syncope whilst playing chess at the Café Harcourt.
I sat pondering, and watching Rémy and Freda dance.
She liked him. She liked his manners, his flattery, his knowledge of the world. He was half Swiss, and hotel was in the blood of the Ghismonts as it was in the Koepflis.
Rémy was handsome, two years older than I, and a spendthrift. His allowance he spent dissolutely in three nights. There was not an under-chef or a waiter at the Faisan d’Or who would not have hastened to be out of pocket for him, for they all dreamed of a high post in the Ghismont hotel chain. But Rémy never borrowed from these, nor from the chefs.
He had no disposition for the culinary life. But he had his talents: he could sing, he was a mimic. He mimed Monsieur Paul’s paroxysms of wrath; the lip-smacking histrionics of Duruy tasting a sauce; Pierre hurling himself into the kitchen, bellowing in fury, his breath coming in the frothy gasps of a stuck ox. Rémy was an observer. “Je connais ces gens-là!” And how well he understood them!
Further, after Pom-Pom, he was the best modeller in our class at Beynac’s. Those long, supple fingers of his were truly gifted with the clay. I was never more than fair, but we got the foundation, all of us, and Pom-Pom and Rémy above all.
When he escorted Freda back to the table, I told him of the passing of Duruy. We all bore up well under the calamity.
“Duruy,” I remarked, “had taste.”
My eulogy died there, for lack of more to add to it, but Rémy stared at me, his mind elsewhere.
“Listen! That game of piquet last night wiped me out, old chap. You have nothing either. Duruy can do a humane thing once in his life by earning us a stack of Napoleons.… Have you bus fare?”
“Twenty francs.”
“That’s enough.”
“For what?”
“Who was Duruy? The leading gastronomer of Paris! Great enough, like a Coquelin, to be honored by a death mask! We’ll make one of him—and sell it to the Alliance des Arts Culinaires for ten thousand francs. Cheap at the price, too. They can hang it in their lounging room.”
Rémy glanced calmly at his watch. “We shall have to go, Jean-Marie, Pom-Pom, and I. Will you excuse me, Freda? And will you, my good Manuel, be so good as to call a taxicab and escort Freda home when she is ready? This is a matter of great importance to us, and we must be on our way.”
That was Rémy—highhanded and selfish when his will was bent on accomplishing anything. I protested all the way to La Villette and up the stairs. Pom-Pom listened owlishly to Rémy’s plans. He looked unmoved behind his thick glasses, but inwardly he was staggered.
“My dear Monsieur Ghismont,” he murmured, “are there not certain formalities—?”
“Nonsense! Go to Beynac’s, old chap, and bring back some plaster and clay. We’ll wait here for you.”
Pom-Pom gave me a helpless glance, but obeyed. When he returned, we drove to Duruy’s house in the Rue de Bac. The concierge admitted us. In the salon was a notary who received us, then led in a large female in black, who was dabbing at her eyes under a mourning veil.
After Rémy made our proper condolences, he said, “Madame, we have been sent by the Alliance des Arts Culinaires, to make a mask of their honored ex-secretary. And if Madame will now be so kind as to grant us the privilege—”
Pom-Pom and I quailed before her outburst of hysteria. The notary soothed her, and spoke gently on our behalf: after all, a mask would gratify the members, and render a distinct service to future generations.… Madame glared at us in a damp and jealous fury.
“Ten minutes, then,” she screamed. “Allez!”
Rémy bowed, and we followed him into the upper suite. I locked the door and sat in the antechamber, looking in through the door. Rémy and Pom-Pom built a clay dam about Duruy’s head on its pillow, and then mixed up plaster in a washbowl. Then Pom-Pom joined me, and we lighted cigarettes.
Every few minutes Madame banged and screamed at the door, and was led off in another emotional fit.
Rémy called out jauntily, “Ten minutes, and the plaster will be set.”
We could hear the crackle and swish of a newspaper as he fanned the mould to hasten its drying. It was taking longer than we had thought. Madame’s hysteria increased; she rattled the doorknob, wailing. Even the notary began to thump. Rémy strolled into the antechamber.
“I forgot to oil the face. The mould has stuck, worse than glue.”
He opened the casement and looked down into the garden. His hands were shaking, but his face was impassive. “Twelve feet. It won’t hurt us if we land in the rosebushes.”
He returned to the bed. For an eternity we heard him wrestling with the mask. Then he tottered in, pale and exhausted. “I can’t! We’ll have to run for it!”
“Try again,” counseled Pom-Pom softly. “I’ll keep talking through the door to quiet them. Hurry!”
We sat looking at each other in horror. Finally Rémy murmured, “His face will come off too.”
Pom-Pom sped into the chamber. The uproar began again in the passage, and now came the banging of the notary’s dry fist; he was impatient, for Madame was by now more than he
could manage.
Rémy shut his eyes and inhaled deeply at his cigarette. We could hear the thumping of head on pillow in the bedroom—the furious fighting with an inert weight—Pom-Pom’s breath coming in gasps. There was a loud plop. He shot backward, catapulted over the footboard. Then he bounded up, came to us, and showed the concavity of the mould.
“Perfect,” he said gently.
Rémy collapsed, nerveless, as might a suit pushed off a nail. I threw open the door; Madame rushed like a tigress into the chamber; and the little notary helped me carry Rémy to the salon while Pom-Pom packed the mould into his bag.
“It was a great strain on our artist,” I explained, and a painful task. But, then, Monsieur Duruy had so many devoted friends—”
“Indeed?” The notary, as if I had uttered some feeble joke, scanned me from the corner of his eye. Then, seeing our grave faces, “Indeed?” he remarked again. “I—I did not know.”
I had occasion to remember his tone of surprise, of incredulity. I thought of it as we three rode back to the café. Kashbah brought us out some arrack, two quarts in all, enough to keep his establishment going a month, and we drank it up. That was a night.
A foundry at Javelle made a bronze cast of the mould, charging Rémy something like a hundred francs. It was thin, of skillful workmanship, and perhaps too life-like.
Rémy called upon officers of the gastronomic societies, but their eyebrows, as he spoke of Duruy, went up as if at some indelicate reference. The staff of Le Monde Culinaire regretted it had not ten thousand francs to spend on a memorial, not even two thousand. Rémy, a youth of sensibility, was shocked at this callous indifference.
“As well try to sell a bust of the prefect of police to the Apaches,” Guido told him.
Rémy tramped from one club to another, making the round of the ultra cafés and vintners’ conventions, his hopes and price sinking weekly. He dispatched Pom-Pom to call upon Madame. But after a glance at the mask she sent the concierge for the police, and fainted. The Council of Brillat alone was not approached, for it cared not to be reminded of its late incubus.
When the price dropped to a hundred francs, Rémy flung the gargoyle into a dusty broom closet. Broke again, he dragged it out and found that verdigris had given it a notable green patina. Some rag man, under the delusion that it was copper, might reimburse him with a handful of centimes.
But Pom-Pom had discovered on the Seine, near the bookstalls, a barge rigged up as a phrenology studio. Thither we hurried, and Rémy made a speech to the old Professor in skullcap; here was the last opportunity for the disciples of Lavater, the immortal founder of the science of bumps, to buy a genuine Inca head in bronze. He unwrapped the package.
“An Inca!” mused the Professor. He recoiled slightly as the head was exposed. “Quel Inca!”
“Un type digestif,” said Rémy. “Very rare indeed. Even the Museum owns not one specimen of the gastronomical Inca.”
“But two hundred francs!” quavered the old Professor, his fingers twitching, nevertheless.
“A hundred and eighty, then.”
And so we left Gaspard Duruy in the canal barge and marched home, Pom-Pom playing a mouth organ, and Rémy between us, solvent.
VI
THE BISHOP’S ARBOR
“Here will be lilypads, and goldfish with tails like swatches of silk,” said Freda. “And along the pool an arbor with chairs and tables. Like this.”
She passed the sketch to me, and we admired it in the firelight as we sat in her Aunt Giulia’s drawing room at the pension. She had drawn her self-portrait, a figure in the garden, dressed in a Provençal kirtle and shirred cap. All of us had suggestions for the tavern. Guido thought we should have a sign hanging from a post carved to resemble a dragon. Rémy preferred a big lantern visible from the Marseilles road below. These Freda sketched in.
On paper the tavern was complete.
It was all arranged now. After our marriage, we were to go on a honeymoon to the Tyrol, stay a while at Vence, and, after selling the share my father had left me in the nougat factory, leave for the Rhone to create our tavern. The Bishop’s palace I first saw at the age of ten—a vision that grew more romantic with time. A green hill sheltered it from the mistral, which often sped with such force that lambs on the slope were blown away like chaff, and uplifted dogs trotted in the air, as if on an invisible treadmill. The palace had a round, ivied tower, garden, pool, and an olive orchard with a shrine, where “the old Bishop” had the resources of an admirable view, a spring, and the music of birds. It was bursting with legends. Fifty Bishops, at least, had lived there, but it was always “the old Bishop,” as if time had made a composite of them all—those who had lived less than a century ago, and those who had lived when there were Popes in Avignon as well as in Rome.
Last August Rémy and I had bicycled down and visited it again, one blinding hot day, when the village shutters were closed against the glare. We pushed our machines up into the garden, where cypress and mimosa cast black shadows on the grass, and wavelets lipped with a cold tinkle on the edge of the pool. Frogs, like lumps of wet obsidian, swelled their chests on the parapet, and trumpeted to us as we unpacked our luncheon of hard bread, tangerines, and brandy. We had a bath, then a siesta. When it grew dark we talked, and from the Place in the village, where a regimental band was playing under a great clump of bamboos, music came up to us in spurts. We spent the night in the windowless salon, the Bishop’s own chapel, where bats flitted and wasps had a nest on the ceiling with its indistinct fresco by Simone Martini.
Freda, who has seen the palace twice, was enraptured with it, and her father had written, proposing to assist us when we moved in.
“I am going to send Father this sketch,” said Freda. “He will like this tavern sign.”
“Much will have to be spent in repairs?” asked Aunt Giulia, looking up now from her knitting, the firelight gleaming in her shrewd eyes.
“Fourteen thousand francs, perhaps,” I said.
Jules had introduced me to the mason who came to do some repairs in the kitchen. Jules also thought well of my dream. Most chefs at the Faisan d’Or had some such vision of an inn which they would own. But with them it most often took the shape of a half-timbered restaurant in town, with panellings, stags’ heads, a royal name, and all the décor of spurious antiquity.
“If you would consent to come down, Jules, as partner, or head chef!”
“Not I, old fellow.”
He had as good as quit the world. His life was entwined in the traditions and prestige of the Faisan d’Or. Its clients were his own. To serve them was he beholden, and among the ranges and stew-pans he dighted their meats with the bliss and devotion of Brother Lawrence, maintaining in the furnaces of his simple alchemy the spirit he carried as an acolyte serving at the altar. Is there wanting an analogy between him who sings Mass before the elements of bread and wine for God’s purpose and him who prepares food “for a refectory table or any other table” in this world of ours?
Jules was the chef par excellence, a good man devoted to his calling. It was his one link with the outside world. To patrons who visited the kitchen, he was inclined to be brusque, or politely chill—at all events, he regarded them with disfavor. When they were up where they belonged, in the dining room, they were palates—a concept that was spiritual, and before which his attitude was one of self-abnegation.
Cognac, which he sipped down in the store room, was the only company he favored before dusk. Toward evening he glowed.
“Aha, here comes our good owl,” Monsieur Paul would say, when Jules came up from the dungeon. “Something fancy tonight, Jules! Here’s the list.”
Jules had an atelier of his own—a corner smoke-blackened like a prehistoric lair. On his heat-sprung range the pots stood drunkenly. Over his workbench a constellation of pans hung so low that he escaped bumping his head only because he moved in a furrow worn deep in the tiles.
Jules had that index of genius—productivity. In the same hou
r he could garnish crown roasts; turn out Mignonettes d’Agneau Maréchal, puddings Diplomate and Nesselrode, fillets of sole La Vallière, glaze à vol-au-vent; and perform alchemies with mortar and white-hot salamander. He was like one of those protean musicians who play on seven instruments at once.
All his dishes had the cachet of improvisations, and yet never veered from tradition, like the best of Sèvres, or of Chinese pottery, which is informed by the art-spirit even if it is but an endless repetition of the same design.
Pierre swooped upon us one night with a yowl. “It’s the Maharajah again! And not a pike in the house! Ah, the—”
He came always without notice, this purple-black satrap with his dubious young friends, either for Scotch woodcock or a Mousse à la Belle Aurore.
“No pike!” Monsieur Paul went pale as curds, for the Maharajah was a favorite of Urbain’s. “Then we’ll use trouts.”
“Monsieur!” said Jules quietly. He drew himself up, and folded his arms. “I beg of you to recollect that this is the Faisan d’Or. And for me, Jules, it must be pike or nothing!”
Monsieur Paul’s jaw firmed. Then, after a few seconds, he inclined his head in a bow. The reproof was deserved. “Pardon,” he murmured.
A chasseur was sent hotfoot to the Roi Nantois down the street, where he borrowed four pikes. We simmered these in court-bouillon and wine, pounded the meat to a paste, and built a wall with a backing of flavored rice. Jules poured in a coulis of crayfish, and in this fragrance swam diced lobster. He parted from it with regret. He stood watching as Pierre departed carrying high the silver dish, the coulis in blue flames.
“Only six have ever favored me with a demand for la Belle Aurore,” he murmured.
“You’ll make it at the Bishop’s palace, with Freda and me,” I said.
“Those Provençals, they eat only haricots! I’ll stay right here!”
—
No, Jules was not to be budged. Guido and I were for going down at once to arrange the kitchen, scrape out the pool, and build hen coops. Rémy augured a casino, and a bar with an immense wine cave cut into the limestone of the hill. Freda was enchanted at the notion of croupiers and a cave, so well had the Ghismonts done with both in their fabulous hotels.