by Idwal Jones
“Ha!” breathed François, in a reverential sigh.
The earth spirit, in accord with the gods of the hearth and spit, had been bounteous. There were beeves, this side of deification, crowned and hung with ribbands. Sole and whiting, and Devon lobsters with forearms like Vulcan’s, were heaped up in a salt-encrusted baskets, on frozen seaweed. It was a month notable in cheeses: in Camembert, Pont l’Évêque, Excelsior, and in Brie now as plump as cream tarts. Plover, woodcock, and partridge were strung in festoons, their neck feathers a-glitter in the winter sunlight. The vision and splendor of feasts-to-be stirred the heart already moved by the pounding of the bells in the steeple of St.-Médard.
We turned into the Rue Tournefort, and in the bleak edifice where Balzac’s Père Goriot lived, we entered a small café. I was half frozen, and a little sad. It was an empty December for me. A letter had apprized me of a loss: Rémy, still in Switzerland, but on a higher Alp and in a bigger Ghismont hotel, was to marry Freda before the year’s end.
“The wine,” said François.
A bottle stopped with sealing wax was brought him, and he poured it out. It was a red wine of Noirmoutier, the island off the coast of Vendée—a crusted, vinous, and dark wine, redolent of the seaweed ash flung upon it to foster the bloom on its grape; a sea melodrama of a wine, the Atlantic tang of it a sword slash through velvet.
“A home wine,” said François. “I lived there a long time. I close my eyes and again behold the white surf and the black monastery, and the road across from the mainland; the road dripping and moss-green, visible only on low tide. That was where Briand, dozing in his chair, his vest white with cigar ash, hid away from the world, dreaming and sipping the red wine of Noirmoutier.
“Madame, another bottle, and some figs!”
She brought us a string of them, the Bourjasotte Grise, hanging a score to the string from a nail on the wall—hard outside, but with jelly-like pulp, aromatic and winy. They were from Provence, my home.
As I bit into them, I dined with phantoms. The filaments of one’s taste buds stretch into the past. Their ends are shaken by memories. And if there is fragrance, the past—even the forgotten parts of it—enfolds one instantly. A whiff of saffron, the smell of pastry in the oven, and one is a child again. The true pleasure in eating comes not from the gratification of the senses as in the awakening of a subliminal faculty. Saint Francis, who knew the delicious honey of the slope where he played when small, knew whereof he spoke when he gave sustenance of truth in a sermon to the Poor Clares, and called it “spiritual bee-bread.”
“In the Bastille,” said François, peeling another fig and talking as if to himself, “is a small cook shop, not clean, but very good. I sometimes go there with a friend, a botanist who is half English. He eats there, on summer days when it is raining, a rhubarb tart. A sort of compulsion.
“He eats it slowly, then puts down his fork, and is bowed over the plate in a kind of trance. He described it as a feeling of bliss, of warm sheltering, as if he were very young and protected.
“It was, he told me, only lately that he understood. The root of it was exposed to him suddenly when he was eating the tart very hot. Back in his early years, when he was an orphan living with an aunt in Vendée, and asleep one afternoon, she woke him and told him to go to the rhubarb patch to see a nest of singing birds she had just found. He dashed out, looked at the birds, and was shaken with excitement and a glad rapture. He had an umbrella, for there was both rain and a burst of hot sunshine. The rain drummed on large rhubarb leaves, and they steamed. There was also the roar of surf on the beach. He was very young, you understand—five or six—new in a world that was magical. Children are not the young of the human race. They are of a race apart, and have different and very intense feelings. The mother bird was singing on a twig. The smell of the leaves—”
François refilled his glass. “In itself, rhubarb can be, in some circumstances, good. What is it, a fruit or a vegetable?”
“A weed, I think, but not necessarily a damned weed. You had better ask your botanical friend.”
XI
MUSK OX AND SHERBET
The Faisan d’Or was deep in her seasonal lull, four of her banquet halls shrouded; Urbain and Monsieur Paul, in an Anglophile mood, were poking about inns along the Thames, and for a month were to be lost in the Hebrides, looking for a certain wild Highlander whose pot still had never known the locks of the exciseman. I had been left with some vaguely denoted powers, and the occupancy of Monsieur Paul’s sanctum. The staff was impressed, I think. The laundress brought in my linen so heavily starched that it was painful to wear; my bonnet was whiter, stiffer than before, a foot higher—a cloud atop a funnel.
I was having my breakfast of coffee and a brioche, with a copy of Candide propped against the cruet. Seeing an article closing with the signature “Lambert,” I read it, as I did everything by that exquisite author of grocery catalogues, who nourished his spirit on the richness of the antique past. Some Russians, his story said, exploring a terminal moraine above the Arctic Circle, had dug deeper than usual in their hunt for rocks; they chipped out some bones, then a brace of musk oxen, perfectly preserved. More oxen were below, in that eternal icebox.
This was the peg on which our Academician had hung an essay remarkable for its learning and charm of expression. Pleistocene man had a thin time of it, by all accounts. The climate was not at its best, and when the earth shook under the mammoths that trotted past, he hid in his cave. There were also sabertooth tigers, and lions twice the size of the breed at the zoo. As often as not, he was the hunted and not the hunter; he dined on roots, for he had no other weapon than a chunk of flint. If luck favored him, he could knock over a leathery bird, or some kind of hare.
I was pondering over this when François lounged in.
“Old fellow,” he shouted, “that’s fatal—wearing a hat that high. You know what happens to a chef whose hat is too—too altitudinous! He gets flung out!”
“You ought to be wearing it, François. The second in command, you know.”
He grinned. We both knew I had been put in as a stopgap in this dull season, and that Monsieur Paul, though secure in his tenure of office, and the doyen of his profession, regarded him as the only possible rival in the esteem of the patrons.
“It’s quiet, Jean-Marie. Only half the staff here, and unless we get some excitement we’ll have to go into the streets and whip up a riot.” He poured himself a glass of brandy and sank heavily into a chair. “It’s even stupider than it was last year. I should have gone fishing.”
“Read this,” I said. “It’s Mayor Lambert in his best vein.”
He read it, gulped his brandy down, then paced the room, agitatedly polishing his pince-nez. He tried to speak, but his will could bring forth only a deep breath and gesticulations. Another glass, and he stared, blinking, at the article; then he tore feebly at his neckcloth.
“Jean-Marie—think of it! A million years! That musk-ox beef has been pretty well hung! If we could only get a joint of it!”
“Melun-Perret ought to hear of this,” I laughed.
“I have an idea!” the Creole broke in. “A Pleistocene banquet! That would be something. Think of what it would mean to the Faisan d’Or. Astounding réclame, for one thing, with the moral of a vast increase in business. How that would please Urbain!”
“It would be a novelty.” I wrote on a pad. “Pleistocene banquet. Soup, a potage of musk-ox tail. Then a prime roast of musk ox, a double-rack, with King Edward the Seventh trimmings—garnish, sauce, and so forth. Vegetable, purée of fossil moss.”
My Creole rubbed his hands. “And some fossils from the Sorbonne, tottering professors, very learned, with beards parted in the middle! A banquet for archaeologists. The very notion of it, my young friend, is staggering!”
“We must first catch our musk ox, of course,” I said. “A mere detail. I shall discuss it with Melun-Perret. He will regard it as a most prodigious idea, such a dinner. Also,” I warmed up, �
�it seems to me that our Mayor is deserving of the Legion of Honor ribbon, and this would bring his name into cosmic renown. Alas, that so great a scholar should have been doomed to obscurity through his brains!
“And by the way, François, it is his birthday on Thursday next. We shall have a little dinner at his place, and you will cook it.”
And so we were agreed. I dispatched a telegram to Georges at his house in the Champs Élysées. He was so pleased at the notion that he postponed for a week the installation of a new and beautiful Grecian in an apartment that he maintained discreetly elsewhere.
We were eight in all. Mayor Lambert had brightened his flat, dusted his books, arranged flowers on the trestle-board table in an alcove, and brought in three Academicians. The kitchen was a dark cupboard with two gas burners under a grid, three or four saucepans, and a spoon or two.
“We shall have,” said François, “one of those small dinners, appropriate to the décor. And not so much phenomenal as not easy to forget. Something Creole, let us say. A Jambalaya.”
He boiled up some rice, sluiced it with cold water, and let it dry. In butter he fried a few cloves of garlic, two onions, and a green pepper, chopped into bits, then four peeled tomatoes. These and the rice he combined in a saucepan with a pint of cooked shrimps, pepper, salt, and cayenne. He covered it to simmer for half an hour, with an occasional moistening of stock and, at the end, a tablespoonful of sassafras powder.
It was dark, hot, and aromatic, and after the bland consommé struck a harmonic chord with the cooled Chablis. We sat framed against books of red and black leather and oiled vellum, the beards of the Academicians and our host gleaming in the luster of the shaded lamp hanging above the table. The Mayor sat at the end, formal in an embroidered green waistcoat, a row of clay jars on the shelf above his head.
The food was pungent; it was novel; the eaters were silent, as if they experienced through it the sense of a withdrawal from the common life. A small Academician who was eighty, and as remote from the world as if he were in old Assyria, smiled like an infant.
“It is like a paella I had once in Seville. But this has a strangeness, with green shadows, a breath like an emanation of the jungles, perhaps African. The hypnosis of a flavor, gentlemen, partakes of a spiritual revelation. For the moment we are in a Louisiana bayou.”
He rested his head against two high volumes of Pliny, his bearded face, in the shadow, as white as a cloud and beautiful.
We had plenty of Chablis, then a sharp-tasting salad of greens. François, very gently so as not to disturb the serene talk, slipped to the corner where the kitchen was, and I after him. He had come early to prepare the brandy pudding, and it was cooled now in the box of cracked ice.
He had, I recall, creamed the yolks of eight eggs with two cupfuls of sugar and two cupfuls of brandy, thickened it in a double boiler. He removed it from the fire and cut in the stiffened egg whites. When this was cool, he worked in a tablespoonful of old marmalade and a quart of whipped cream, and many dashes of the orange bitters they know in New Orleans bar rooms. He allowed it to set in a compote dish paved and walled with macaroon cakes.
François flicked in a thumb and licked it. “Dites moi, ma mère,” he hummed as he carried the dessert to the table.
It was a rich and gracious finish, yet subdued enough to keep vivid the excellence of all that had gone before. We lingered over it so that the coffee was embraced in its sunset.
Georges opened a bottle of pale eau de vie so ethereal that we breathed its aroma at the plop of the cork. Lambert took down eight of the clay jars, and after they were rinsed—since we had no more glasses—Georges filled them with the cognac.
We smoked Larranagas; we inhaled and sipped eau de vie from the small earthenware jars. Georges, his bland and candid eye rolling benevolently at us through the smoke, got out pencil and envelope, and planned the banquet for us.
“A month from tonight. Item: full haunch of musk ox. Item: fossil moss, if edible.” He rolled his perfecto and scribbled. “Item: some Pleistocene sweetbreads for a vol-au-vent. How’s that for a start?”
“But that will take months,” said Lambert.
“Four days at the outside, I assure you. I’ll send my plane and sky chauffeur up there. He’ll take along some vodka and a case of Port, for our Russian friends will need some cheering in that gloom. Anything else we can get out of the Pleistocene?”
“Nothing,” said the Mayor. “But I know where we can get some old rice. Four measures, at least. In sealed urns, dug up in the ruins of Palmyra. That’s a quantity, you see. More than you’d get from a hundred mummies with rice in their clutch.”
Georges murmured with approbation.
“We’re getting somewhere. Now, the wine.”
“We’ll find none so old,” said the Academician. “Lucky for us. My Bulgar colleague, Professor Vuletich, gave me a taste of that Opimian, bottled in the year Caius Gracchus was slain in the revolt of the plebs. It has a lump of purple enamel. We made a tincture in alcohol, and had a teaspoonful apiece. It tasted like ink. Vinum insaluberrimum. But there it was, wine already old before Rome was an empire.”
“Vuletich, where is he?”
“In Sofia.”
“I’ll go there in a plane myself and bring him and the Opimian.”
“If that precious, that unique, relic should fall—”
“Then we shall both perish with it!”
“What I want to know,” said François patiently, “is, how many will be there?”
It took longer to draw up the list than to invent the Pleistocene menu. Not all scientists approve of every other scientist in the world. Mayor Lambert suggested twenty names. The old Academician winced at all of them, as if he had bitten into a persimmon. So with twenty other names.
“Well, then,” said Georges, “let us have other than malefactors.”
He sipped delicately from his little jar. It was of a pagan loveliness, with lip flared as in a Grecian lamp, and a design in faded red on its black, glazed body, so thin and time-hardened that the liqueur swirling in it gave forth an elfin ring.
“A fitting ceramique for the brandy,” he murmured. “Let me congratulate you on your pots.”
“You have discernment, M’sieu.” Mayor Lambert held a light to a fresh cigar. “Spiteri, the Maltese archaeologist, found these in a tomb. They are Pompeiian tear jars.”
By midnight we were agreed on the choice of guests. Twelve in all, taken from the first list. The brandy gone, we left and I said good night to the diners before their taxicabs at the curb. François was the last to go. He smote his chest, then stared at me.
“The dessert!” he shouted. “The Pleistocene dessert! What shall we have for that?”
He leaped in, the door slammed like a pistol shot, and the taxicab sped in pursuit of Georges and the Academicians.
—
This banquet, where should it be held? The major-domo was for the Talleyrand salon; Pierre for the Blue Room, with its Gobelins and plush chairs, its Fragonards and ormolu. Urbain’s assistant was for screening off a corner of the great dining room, where a door led directly into the kitchen. I was talking with him and François in the crypt, when light came upon me.
“I have it! The cellar!”
We clattered down the stairs. Across from the wine cave was an unused chamber as dark as an oubliette, empty except for a half dozen broken hogsheads. I caught up a lantern and fetched it in. Cobbles bulged from the walls of crude and solid masonry; the paving was of large flagstones; the rafters had been hacked into shape with an adze.
“Is this Pleistocene enough?”
The chamber was thirty yards square, and its fireplace could have housed a coach. François struck a match and peered up the chimney. The draft was perfect. He vowed he could hear owls up above, in the trees. The place might have been built to purpose for the tryst with the musk ox.
“To think I’ve been in the Faisan d’Or since I was a piccolo, and never once heard of it,” said Urbain’s
assistant.
His energy was prodigious. He had the cellar washed out; hung candelabra in the shape of cartwheels from the rafters; put a grid and turnspit in the fireplace; set up rough pine tables and chairs. Thirty chairs, not twelve: the Minister of Instruction was coming as a guest of Georges, and since that made it a diplomatic affair five Senators had had to be invited. The chefs de cuisine of the Roi Nantois, the Dauphin-Splendide, and the Noel Peters—these I invited on behalf of the Faisan d’Or.
The dungeon was thrown open. The light came from flames in braziers; the floor was carpeted with yew twigs. Heading the guests who filed in between rocks, as into a cave, were the Minister of Instruction and the Rector of the Sorbonne.
François entered, with him an upright, small man in white mustachios, with puckered, wise face, a frock coat and a rosette in his lapel. A supreme moment! Ah, Monsieur Paul, you should have been there! The guests rose in homage. Flashlights blazed. It was the great Maître Escoffier himself, writer of La Guide Culinaire Moderne, who bowed to the assemblage, and with grace seated himself between Melun-Perret and the ducal Doctor di Valmonte.
The flower of Gaul’s culinary genius sat in that chair, smiling, chatting urbanely, in the person of this immortal, over whom hung an aura of unreality proper to legendary beings. Had he not, this inventor of Peach Melba and an octave of new sauces, been chef to Napoleon Third? Had he not been Bismarck’s first prize of war at the Fall of Sedan? Had not the post of chef des cuisines of the Hotel Cecil been accorded him at the express wish of King Edward the Seventh?