by Idwal Jones
“I am not one of any great education, Jean-Marie, but I have a respect for learning, though I can no more than count.
“So, when there was no one left about the door, I went over, made believe to write my name, but instead tore off a page and hid it under my cloak. Papa Gaspard, who is a scholar, that night read aloud the page. We fell upon each other’s neck! A peculiar treasure had come into our hands—a passport full of good names. A mayor, two deputies, three bankers, police sergeants, and twenty gendarmes! There was a blank space on top, and on this Papa Gaspard wrote a little piece telling everyone what good and honest people the Vascucci are, and the Gaspards, and urging that all show them every manner of high consideration and politeness.
“It is a safe-conduct that has so far worked very well, like an incantation. As in that affair of the goose. But on the way back we may have to take another road.”
I had written to François, and when we came to the inn of the Black Hen, at Orange, there was a reply awaiting me, urging me to return, adding that I was missed, and that Célie, having married her porter, had left. I sent him word that I would be back at the Roi Nantois in three weeks, after I finally got to Marseilles, saw the unveiling of the statue to Mistral, the poet of Provence, and dined with my friends of the road at the restaurant of Mère Blanchet. That latter was a treat I had promised myself, and a little return for the kindness they had shown me.
All the rest of the way down we dined maigre—on bread, a fish caught in the river, salad of grass, plucked in the field, and dressed with a little oil and the juice of a handful of unripe grapes. We lived sparely, like monks on a pilgrimage, and slept hard and long under the hedges, and work had us all under its spell. From Figeac to the Camargue we traversed a country rife with leaky pots and cauldrons and kettles, and Tino made everyone behave, for we were in a region of old and valued clients. Indeed, if a pot were distinguished, and of copper, Tino mended it himself, denying himself a glass of wine, no matter how great his desire, so that his hands, so skilled at wielding the little files, might be adequate to the task. Night after night he frugally supped on bread and water. “Why?” I asked him.
“Jean-Marie,” he said, “I shall not dine until I sit with you at Mère Blanchet’s table.”
There was more wisdom in this old gypsy’s finger than in all the steady patrons at the Roi Nantois, who were unaware that surfeit leads but to boredom. Tino was the true hedonist, aware that we cannot feast unless we are willing also to fast. No passion, no pleasure, no interest must be slaked at will. Indeed, to keep it sharp and alive, the wish to gratify it must often be denied, or else it become the foe of its own gratification.
We were driving out of the Camargue that night, when the moon was dim; young Basil Gaspard was riding with us for a change, and he had the reins. He pulled up, sniffed, and his eyes slid as he peered through the dark. I could see nothing but the lantern at the end of the shaft and the horses. Basil drew a long breath, his finger wavered, then pointed over the front wheel into the ditch.
“There!” he whispered. “An old one with some young!”
A scent lifted up to us, a scent as of celery leaves, licorice, and frost-bitten apples, all bruised underfoot: the unmistakable scent of live pork. Basil inhaled it deeply, his nose quivering; he tightened his belt, stood on the wheel, and poised, like a diver, with hands outstretched. He leaped into the darkness. There was a drum-like thwack, then a grunt. He had landed on a sow. The first note of a shriek rent the air, and it was choked off.
Basil came up with a grin, holding up a little pig, its legs flurrying like egg beaters.
“Look at him! A tender one, sweet as butter! How would he look in a pan, with a basketful of onions in him?”
“Like an angel,” said Tino, scratching its head with his pipe stem. “Now you put him right back! That’s right. Now you can jump in!”
We were all still fasting when we reached Marseilles that gala day, with a fair, a street carnival, and immense crowds on the Cannebière, and it seemed as if half of Provence had poured into the town to attend the dedication of the statue to the great Mistral. From where we sat in our carts we had a good view, and we heard all the speeches, the songs, and the music of the bands, with their brasses, tambours, and fifes, so infinitely moving to a Provençal exile like myself.
“O Magali, ma tant amado.…” Tino and I both sang Mistral’s lyric as loudly as did the rest. The Mayor pulled at the cord, the canvas rose, disclosing to the eyes of the reverent the figure of the poet, high on the pedestal, arm held out rigidly, pointing toward the hills and his native aillane, with its gardens and cypresses.
It was inspiring, and such was the intent of the sculptor. But on the faces of some citizens about me was depicted a shocked embarrassment; the beard of one silk-hatted elder on the platform, who happened to be orating at the time, was trembling with suppressed mirth. The hand of the statue was pointing straight at an alley populated by the daughters of joy.
The poet, though I am not sure, for I haven’t been to Marseilles in a long time, may have been turned since, to indicate its pride, the harbor.
Straight on to Mère Blanchet’s we went, an old rendezvous of mine when I followed the sea; and we played cards and dominoes and drank wine until evening, when Mère Blanchet called us in to dinner—a very special dinner she had prepared for us. It was so special that she had laid the table with the one tablecloth in the house. It was old, of linen, heavily embroidered, an heirloom, and part of the dowry she had brought when she came down from Nantes, to marry Hippolite Blanchet, now gone. No other guests would she serve that night, or not with the elaborate dishes she had cooked for myself and my gypsy friends, who banqueted, as they had never before banqueted in their lives. And I had much to celebrate! My infatuation for Célie was gone! That called for champagne.
The other clients dined on ragout of hare, or tripe, on bare tables. Being kings, naught was too good for us. At midnight I requested my bill.
“Lobsters, birds, a roast, salads,” Mère Blanchet muttered. “For eight, ten, let me see.” She clapped a hand to her forehead, and counted aloud. The mental gymnastics were beyond her. With her thumbnail she marked on the tablecloth. “The fruits, the cheese, the coffee.” She marked again. “And the cognac and the cigars.” Adding up the marks twice, “Three hundred francs,” she read.
I counted out the money, with another note for luck, and, after stuffing it under her apron, she reached for the cognac bottle to give us a last round. A voice snarled out from among the card players. A hard-eyed gendarme, evidently no friend of gypsies, and who had most probably dined on tripe and onions, was glaring at us.
“Mère Blanchet, it’s time you respected the law for once! A bill must be stamped. It must then be receipted, then given to your client, whose property it is.”
The poor woman was aghast, but she fetched a stamp from a box above the mantelpiece, stuck it on the tablecloth, and wrote across it. Then she handed a corner of the linen to me. I essayed, with nonchalance, to stuff it into my pocket, then gave it up.
“Madame,” I said, handing the corner back to her, “it is too large a document for me to carry around, so please keep it for me until I come around next time.”
Her eyes were limpid with gratefulness, and we rose with our glasses, and we drank our farewell round to her. It being nearly one o’clock, I said good-by to the Vascuccis and the Gaspards, and rode to the station, where I caught the express for Paris.
XIV
LORDS AND LADIES, VALE!
Louis of France decided to give a nuptial banquet in honor of a daughter of the powerful house of de Broglie. Cardinal Mazarin was to appear, and likewise the Prince de Condé, whom he had locked up tightly in jail for a brace of years. Since the bride was plain, overlarge, and bony, and had visited the altar twice before, and the groom was an obscure Seigneur, squat and unprepossessing, like the King-Frog in the fairy tale, the marriage struck no lyric note, and was possibly a marriage of convenience. Tongues were h
eard to say that the union interested Louis not at all, and that, weary of the bickering between the Cardinal and the Prince, he saw in the banquet a chance to bring them together for a reconciliation. It was not probable they would fight at the table. But many were curious. The crowned heads of three countries, and fur-wrapped envoys from Sweden, Muscovy, and Poland, traveling by ship, coach, or sledge, began to press earnestly along the route to Fontainebleau.
The importance of the wedding, as historians have since proved, was not illusory. Indeed, word had already got about that this was likely to be the last banquet of D’Aujac, the greatest chef in France. In his cell he had sat for days, composing the bill of fare. It was a work of splendor almost unprecedented, as stately as an oratorio by Handel. It was an epithalamium of wines, a processional of stags, cygnets, bustards, turbots, elaborate set pieces, fruits uncounted, desserts, and Sicilian ices—these last in compliment to the Cardinal, who was a Sicilian. The death of Mazarin was undeplored by Frenchmen, and D’Aujac, it is clear, had a low opinion of him. The apex of the feast was roast stag in pastry, with a sauce that the chef had invented for the occasion, and rightly he named it after himself, Sauce D’Aujac.
The banquet, with its dishes and wines and music on clarinets, had the grandeur of the Italian Renaissance, save that it unfolded more rapidly, with centuries packed into staggering hours. In the kitchen, at the precise moment, D’Aujac hobbled to the fires, leaning on the arm of an apprentice, for he was ninety-two, and an ague had rendered him infirm. The cooks followed, desirous to assist at the birth of the new dish—for it was nothing less, this sauce. There were some who noticed that the master seemed agitated, that his hand trembled. But his soul was resolute. In the pan, over hot coals, the wine, essences, and butter leaped to their fusion. In the supernal light of the torches, his voice rang as he called out for the ox palates, the bowl of Espagnol, the tray heaped with rods of marrow. They were cast in. Then he faltered; the spoon fell from his hand, and he collapsed.
“It is done!” he murmured, expiring like Pindar in the arms of his disciples. “Ah, D’Aujac, what the planet is losing in you!”
He had toiled overlong since youth, being insatiable of fame—no bad thing in itself, if it procure a man happiness, and without oppression of his fellow beings. But fame is not peace of mind, for ambition, vain and disturbing, is its mainspring.
That apprentice had a sharper ear than his fellows in the kitchen of Fontainebleau that night, and the words of the master were burned into his memory. He became a cook at a hunting lodge on the outskirts of Paris, and when, a hundred years later, it became the Roi Nantois, the Sauce D’Aujac was still a secret of the establishment.
Under the hand of François it acquired more dash, more brilliance, and a luster which the astute Boulestin praised, and attributed to a toning with a glaze from the neck meat of bulls. François said nothing of it. The panache, the dramatic quality of this Creole, was outward merely. He shrank from popular acclaim; there was lacking in him that egomania dashed with charlatanry, or scoundrelism, as often to be observed in the arts as in politics. Nor was he intolerant. Like Aristotle, he was a great epicure in respect of fish, and said that a bloater, caught off Yarmouth in November, and correctly fried, was as perfect a thing as Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” and that if France had a cheese to match the Stilton or a ripened Double Gloucester, he hoped somebody would tell him what it was.
In several ways François was the wisest chef in the long history of the Roi Nantois. He had contrived no new sauce or dish. Like the magisterial Chinese potters and weavers, who invent nothing, he was content to repeat the classic designs. Not originality but perfection is the lodestar of the virtuoso, who knows that a perfect work cannot be improved upon, and that it takes more skill and conscience to make a vibrant, living copy than to create a poor original.
It is Epicurean to reject glory and pleasures bought at too high a cost, and to hold that the summum bonum is to live pleasantly, unknown, in serenity and prudence, far from the era of conflict. François, in short, abdicated his throne at the Roi Nantois. It was on an Easter night, after a thousand dinners had been sent up, and in the sluggish air the staff, limp and fatigued, was falling out.
“Messieurs!”
There he stood, truncately massive and solemn, in the doorway of his office, crowned with the black toque that he wore only on state occasions. Near by was the sommelier, with chain and key, a cart before him, loaded with champagne and glasses. The staff came forward.
François spoke: “Messieurs, I have to speak to you directly, and I shall be brief. I have resigned, and I retire to the country. From all of you, my colleagues, I part with a grief that is inexpressible. Let me point to my successor, Jean-Marie Gallois!”
It was a surprise to everyone but myself. The cooks lifted a shout, and hammered on their ranges and tables with pots. The champagne was poured, and Urbain, lifting his glass, called out: “A double toast! To François and to Madame François!”
And that, too, was a surprise! It was like being told that one’s bishop had not only given up his miter but had taken a lady to wife. There was clamor, and handshaking, a great pouring out of champagne, and a farewell that lasted an hour.
I walked home with François. He was in a poetic mood, and, emotionally giving himself thumps on the chest with his stick hand, talked only of the lady awaiting him at Aix-en-Provence.
“Our proprietors grieve at their loss,” I said.
“They were shocked!” he admitted. “Profoundly!”
For all the austerity of his office and devotion to his exacting craft, François was no more immune to the tender passion than a tenor, a statesman, or an engineer of bridges. The renowned of the haute cuisine have been neglected by the artificers of romance. Playwrights have written moving dramas of a hero’s sonata, statue, even of his nose, but never of a hero’s sauce. Chanticleer had his Rostand, but what celebrator had a Vatel or a Carême to descant his achievements in drama, epic, or any prose above journalism? Vizetelly and Sala and Léon Daudet, pardon! They have so written, and with eloquence: the practitioners of one ephemeral art in tribute to another.
François had long courted this lady near Aix—a widow sought after by a hundred Romeos, no doubt; and well she might be, for she had a delicious large farm with a tangerine grove, cork and olive trees, a fishing pool, abundance of sheep, and pastures waist-deep in grass, rosemary, and tall, purple foxgloves. And he had triumphed. Or should one not say, knowing the widow, the amiable, large-girthed, and soft-eyed Yvette, so fond of exquisite foods, and knowing our François, that it was a triumph for the lady?
I visited them before I left France, saw that herb-redolent farm where François, clad on the Provençal horseman model, with russet velours and a wide hat, raised fine green melons as round as any Turk. Afternoons, he dressed to visit the café at the village, where he held forth with the Mayor, and shouted poetry as if he were Mistral or Jasmine the Barber.
He cooked no more, not anything, except now and then a crisp fish, a brace of guinea hens, or a gigot of mutton on Sunday, with some of those laudable haricots. “And then only, you understand, to please Yvette.”
When I came he had gone up into the Alpilles, where the sheep had been taken to avoid the searing heat. The excitement of their return! Awakened by great sound of barking, I climbed out through the window. It was moonlight, and the nip of autumn was in the air. The house dogs bayed insanely in welcome, and the peacocks in the yews, their tulle crests like turbans against the moon, espied the flocks and hailed them with loud trumpetings. All I could see was an advancing surf of dust. Then came the shepherds, and in the rear François on a horse. It was a noble sight. Under those beeches had passed many popes, an emperor, fourteen monarchs of France, and Petrarch.
I went out with Yvette to greet him. He had a bucket of snails hung from his saddle, and a sack of wild partridge jumbled in sweet marjoram, thyme, and rosemary.
We had a picnic next day, on a wooded slope
where we roasted the partridges in a fire of roots with the herbs, baked the snails, and from the brook, which ran icy cool and bathed the feet of his tangerine trees, we took out our chilled melons and a bottle of dry, flinty Crau wine. The shepherds joined us, and the mayor, and we dined in the rustic simplicity of the Golden Age. Tangerines scented the air; the crickets made it audible. The sunshine warmed our throats, and the flinty wine seemed cooler, and trickled down our gullets more gratefully than if it had been Yquem. We talked. Yvette, sloe-eyed and as large as a house, slumbered blissfully, her head on François’ lap. We listened to the tinkle of the rams’ bells as the flock began to graze their way up the hill. A shepherd untied a paper, took out a lump of glistening, veined jade—wild honeycomb that dripped as he broke it for us. We ate honey to the soft Thessalian music of bells jangled by the black-muzzled rams, whose fleece was like cotton-wool against the indigo of the sea below. They lapped in the water, the wool bearers; they cropped at the seared grass and thyme, releasing dust and the earth scent, combatting for blossom heads with the golden scarabs and bees. How fat they had all grown in the lush, green Alpilles!
“In the spring we shall have plenty of lambs,” said the shepherd. “Surely, a hundred.”
“My angel,” said François, “behold! We are surrounded by gigots.”
Yvette awoke and gazed about her, blinking in the sunlight. She popped a fragment of honey into her mouth. “Ah, the little gamins,” she cried, wiping her fingers on a fleece. “Listen to them bleat. They want to trot right into the ovens.”
It is doubtful, said Epicurus, if marriage has helped any man, and one may be well content if it does him no harm. Did he grave it on his tablet after dining on honey and partridge with shepherds, and with a sleepy shepherdess pillowed on his knee?
—
Bon fruit murit tard, affirm the old gardeners, distrustful in their wisdom of fruit and men of early ripenings. Perhaps I had matured too early. In the gloom of their despair—for had not the prestige of the Roi Nantois evanesced with the stocky François?—the owners thrust me into the post of chef de cuisine. They could not have marveled more than I that the vessel kept afloat. And yet, somehow, it advanced.