by Idwal Jones
Did not the Club des Cent, that hierarchy of gastronomes, banquet twice in our Louis XIV salon? Did not Pierre think it a poor, a dreadful, night if Prosper Montagne, M. Boulestin, or André Simon, or Ali Bab were not dining at the honor table near the Venetian glass mirror? The garden adjoining was taken over and roofed with lattice for a supper Belvedere. It flourished so that Pierre, now mysteriously one of the sharers in the firm, made it a jungle of palms, whose glazed fronds caressed the ear and the tiara. One may not, to paraphrase Goethe, dine with impunity beneath palms; for the fiber weakens, and the palm lover never asks the best music, and objects little, if at all, to paying out double for a dish or a wine, but the Roi Nantois, though it deplored the vegetation, ramped him not a sou the more.
We were also eclectic. We raided the great Democracy of the West, drawing upon it for Oysters Biltmore, the Gumbo Bisque, and a wine or two, notably, a leonine Zinfandel, grown near the Golden Gate of California. If America is in the main a gastronomical Sahara, it has its five delectable oases.
The Roi Nantois is still renowned; it still has masters in the kitchen. Gray and cheerful men with an affection for their tasks: acolytes of the haute cuisine, who have a reverence for the simple fruits of the earth, for honest vintners and makers of cheese, paste and sausages and conserves, for pressers of good oil, and a gratitude for birds and the dumb creatures, our link with the vegetable kingdom, who so meekly bow their heads to the pole axe. Heller, Pichon, Laplanche, Aubrey-Zay, all you in white bonnets—vale! I learned much from you, my masters!
In a year I began to weary of high post and glory.
I was, in pocket, richer than my old masters at the range. The good Baroness, that old friend of my uncle, had gone forth and peddled Nougat Masséna. Not, let me assure you, from door to door with a basket. She opened a villa at Cap Ferrat, and with excellent dinners worked up a background in the imposing grand manner. Brokers, warehousemen, and shop-chain owners who played roulette with her at the casino, and who progressed to a state of mellow feeling over her port, were so vulnerable that she inveigled them into buying Nougat Masséna by the ton, by carloads. They were extremely fortunate. It was good nougat, and it sold from the Bosphorus to Fifth Avenue.
I relinquished my share in the nougat factory to her. Noblesse oblige, and she had once done me a good turn. Besides, the sum she paid, though reasonable, was large. Judging from the size of it, she must have been desirous to consolidate her emotional attachment to the Establissement Masséna with a business link that took care of all the convenances. For quite a while now my uncle had been wearing a coat and usually passed as “M’sieu le Baron.”
“Not at all a bad coup,” Melun-Perret remarked as we were dining one night Chez l’Annamese. “What, may I ask, do you intend to do with that sickeningly large sum?”
“Roumanian oil?”
“Do nothing so imbecilic. That’s my game.”
“Well, then, it’s already sunk in Guido’s new place on Long Island.”
Guido had done too well, for his restaurant had reached that deplorable phase of success when patrons came in not so much to eat as to be seen. It was a mockery of success. The cuisine, the wines, the chef were subordinate to the clientele—jazz nabobs, film players, and so forth. Melun-Perret listened in agony.
“He’s retiring farther inland,” I went on, “miles and miles. So far that patrons will have no motive to go there except to eat gratefully at famine prices.”
“I would have been good for an unreasonable sum,” he muttered cloudily. “But if, later—” He drummed on the table vacantly, and looked at the sleet-trickled window. “Damned sorry. So many old friends dropping off like this. Where do you leave from?”
“I don’t know. Havre, perhaps.”
“No.” He shook his head firmly. “Decidedly not. In a week or so I’ll be running through Spain. Because of the war. Why not ride on with me to Barcelona?”
I thought of Freda and, much less, of Rémy, who had a hand on a chain of hotels in the Peninsula. I pitched a coin. Heads it was.
“Why not?” I said.
All the next week Aragon and Castille were about us. We crawled slowly through the tawniness and desolation of Spain, by caprice and starts, generally at night, and often to be waked by the thumping of rifle butts on the door. The armed guards could not always see the bunting at the ends of the train. Burgos closed behind us with a barrier of steel, for we were the last train out; and the train was all Melun-Perret’s. He had some vague, discretionary powers from Governments. His was the unreal sphere of intrigue, diplomacy, and high finance that transcends boundaries. The train itself—engine and a salon coach marked with a crest under gilt festoons—was a reality. Quite as much was it a dream. We had a library and shower bath, a valet, and Ramon, the chef. We had safe conduct; we were persons of importance; and we were headed inflexibly, whatever might fall, for Barcelona. It was a train with the stopping instinct well developed. Visitors had slipped in and out all the way from the border.
A telegram came to him as we were sitting in the library. Georges looked out into the rain. His cigar went out. He relighted a fresh one, and it died in his fingers. Overhead droned a plane, following the rails.
“It is far worse, far worse, than they thought,” he said. He flicked his thumb upward. “I shall have to fly back on that. And you stay on. Take your time.”
He packed a grip and a portfolio. “I am sorry I shall miss dinner with you. Our last dinner in a long while, Jean-Marie. Drink to your friends in the old, dark Rioja. Adios!”
A last handshake, and he was gone. Madrid next, and we slid into a yard on its outskirts. It was pitch-dark. I dispatched a telegram to Freda, then engaged a taxicab at a ransom.
The house, towering and gloomy, like a small version of the Escurial, was dimly lighted. A servant unchained the door and admitted me.
“The Señora will be down in a moment.”
He brought me cigarettes and a glass of sherry. I took a chair in a large salle d’attente, and smoked, staring at the broad, high staircase rising at the far end of the room, the flight of it cut halfway by the edge of the balcony under which I sat.
Had she remembered me after all these years? I asked myself. It was all so far back in the past when we were more than friends, when we were at school at Beynac’s, and when I gave her a ring. Had we married, she would have known less of the luxury of which she was fond, and been the wife of an inn-keeper on the Rhone—a sleepy inn, with beehives, geraniums, and cabbages in the garden, and a sign creaking in the breeze.
A rustle atop the stairway, and I saw a pair of jet slippers. Slowly they descended, step by step. It was Freda descending, and my eyes traveled up her gown, to the edge of her fan, then to her hand. Upon her finger shone a ring with a large emerald, and it was visible and shining as she held out her hands, and I went to meet her.
“Jean-Marie!”
“Freda!”
The past enfolded us, and for hours we sat talking, laughing, falling into silences, talking again. Then I rose to bid her good-by.
“Rémy will be sorry to have missed you,” she said. “And if he were here, you could travel together. He had to leave, and I am sure that friends of his, who have a car, could have taken you both as far as Saragossa, if no farther. A day or two there, and you might again find a way out.”
She accompanied me to the door. It was dark, the night smelled of rain, and there was the rumble of cannon, with glare on the horizon.
“Stay, Jean-Marie. All the roads are closed but one. You see, we are as good as besieged. And there are simply no trains going out. Rémy tried, but could find none.”
“There is one,” I said. “It is waiting for me at the siding. A private train. I am sorry Rémy has already left, for I could take him wherever he wants to go.”
The look she flung at me—the look of wonder, of uncertainty—lightened the pain I had felt for eight long years.
“Oh—I didn’t know—” she said. “Adios, then, Je
an-Marie!”
I had no time for explanation, for I was scrambling into the taxicab. It hurtled into the darkness, and in twenty minutes, after detouring many barricades, I was at the station. The armed guards thrust me up the steps, and, as they followed, one turned to point up into the sky.
Precisely then the aerial bombardment started. There was a drumming, as of a child’s rattle grotesquely magnified. The night was scratched with bright zigzags, was loud with whistlings that burst into red detonations. Then the metal keys to heaven and hell opened their diapason with notes that echoed and flowered in the clouds. Somewhere in the yard a bomb jarred on the earth, and the uproar was like the explosion of a comet in a boilerworks as engines and rails were twisted into a wire puzzle.
“If the Señor will be seated,” said the butler, pointing to the table. “Dinner will be served him.”
I had not dined. I was in no mood for dining. But Ramon came in, bearing a haunch of boar smoking on a platter. The dark Rioja was on the cloth, a magnum of it. Just then fists thumped on the side of the coach.
“Open the door,” I said to the guard. “Let them in, let them all in. Hurry!”
Out of the night ten piled in—soldiers and yard workmen, one tying up a bleeding wrist. No more entered, though we called and shouted into the night as the train moved out of range, with blinds pulled down.
“A dinner for twelve,” I said to Ramon.
Chairs and folding stools we dragged to the table. Ramon ignited the brandy, and spooned fire and sauce over the haunch. He bent pridefully over it, flicking herbs into the blaze, unheeding of the nerve-wracking thunder about us in a world gone mad. Art is enduring. Madness comes and goes, as it ever will. The artichokes were succulent, the salad cool in a frosted silver bowl.
I poured out the Rioja—a brimming glass for everyone. We all stood up.
“Tonight, amigos, we shall eat and drink and make mirth. Tomorrow—”
Only the present is ours, said Epicurus.
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
Maya Angelou
•
Daniel J. Boorstin
•
A. S. Byatt
•
Caleb Carr
•
Christopher Cerf
•
Ron Chernow
•
Shelby Foote
•
Stephen Jay Gould
•
Vartan Gregorian
•
Charles Johnson
•
Jon Krakauer
•
Edmund Morris
•
Elaine Pagels
•
John Richardson
•
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
•
Carolyn See
•
William Styron
•
Gore Vidal
TO PHIL TOWNSEND HANNA, ESQ.,
HOMO MULTARUM LITERARUM, AND
EPICURE UNPAUNCHED.
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