The morning was an idyll. It was a perfect autumn day, almost too warm once the sun toasted off the chilly snap. Alexandre grubbed in the ground cover on his hands and knees as happily as a little boy. It turned out he really was as familiar with the inhabitants of the undergrowth as she was with the denizens above ground. Normally chronically impatient, he seemed delighted to poke around endlessly. Within an hour Alexandre’s irritation at being deprived of his beloved Paris was long gone and he had reverted to his former self, telling stories that she had never heard, as bubbly as if he had been sitting in a Paris café.
All of a sudden he exclaimed, “Langue de bœuf!” and held up a disgusting fungus that did look exactly like a cow’s oxblood-red tongue. A few minutes later it was “tricholome de la Saint-Georges” and then “pleurottes,” followed by “pieds de mouton.” The basket was nearly full. They walked down a lane, swinging their clasped hands. Capucine felt a surge of romantic ecstasy as saccharine as a greeting card. They arrived at a large clearing bathed in sunlight. Capucine began looking for a spot for their picnic.
“Arrête!” cried Alexandre. Capucine froze. “You’re about to crush a whole bunch of agarics des jachères. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many in one spot.” Lunch waited as each mushroom was separated from its base with surgical care.
Eventually Capucine managed to spread the blanket and remove the napkin that had been secured to the top of the luncheon basket with kitchen twine. It contained a huge hunk of pain de campagne, an abundance of pâté and rillettes, and an exceptionally creamy Camembert, each wrapped in crinkly waxed paper. There were two bottles of cider that were opened by twisting off the wire and popping the cork, just like champagne. For dessert, Odile had provided two tablets of chocolate—one with nuts, the other without—to be followed by a thermos of strong coffee and, inevitably, a small decanter of Calvados.
Capucine snuggled into Alexandre’s side and relaxed so completely she felt her shoulders fall away from her neck. It was appalling how tense Paris made her. Alexandre’s arm draped over her shoulder as comfortably as a well-loved cashmere shawl. He kissed her gently; she responded ; he kissed her more ardently; she moved her body even closer to his; he responded even more passionately. She knew full well where they were headed. And why not? They were a million miles from anywhere. There was certainly no one to see.
The situation progressed apace. And continued to progress. A young deer, a buck with small antlers culminating in two little points like serving forks, bounded across the clearing with broad leaping strides. Alexandre nuzzled Capucine’s neck. “I was just thinking that with your luscious breasts and dainty feet you look like you’ve come straight out of one of Fragonard’s rustio-erotic scenes, and that joyous little deer completes the picture.”
Capucine put her index against his lips.
“Shhhh. He’s not joyous. He’s trying to escape.”
The sound of hounds baying angrily rose in a crescendo, and thirty or so large black, tan, and white dogs loped across the clearing, howling a deafening caterwaul.
They were followed by a troop of splendidly tailored horsemen in bright green seventeenth-century outfits, complete with short swords and boots rising over their knees, looking for all the world like escapees from some Hollywood film set. One of the riders smiled at Capucine and bowed deeply from his saddle. Capucine felt her cheeks burning in a deep blush. She tried to hide her open blouse and undone bra by dropping behind the ferns but succeeded only in falling backward into a depression and waving a shapely foot at the passing hunt.
“Good Lord, what a spectacle!” Alexandre said, getting up.
Capucine, still flustered and red cheeked, pulled Alexandre back and dug as deeply as she could into the undergrowth. “Get down. There’s more to come.”
As promised, a procession of bent heads could be seen traversing spectrally over the ferns, moving forward, ghostlike and soundless, with no bobbing motion at all.
“It’s the bicycle followers. As soon as they’ve gone by, we’ll get out of here,” Capucine said.
As they escaped down the lane, Capucine somehow felt she was being driven out of the forest by a hostile dinosaur released from the distant past. The hunt had been her passion as a child, but now it felt alien, an anachronistic ogre with a thousand eyes searching for her secrets, probing out her faults. As she plodded down the path, she sought Alexandre’s hand, unsure if they were lost orphans or Adam and Eve cast out of Paradise. She told herself she really should avoid Calvados at lunch.
A burst of horns warbled through the wood. Alexandre looked at her inquiringly.
“They tell each other what’s happening with the horns. That’s the hourvari. It means the deer has pulled one of its tricks to confuse the hunt and they’re stuck. Usually, they take the hounds back to the point where the scent was strong and see if they can figure it out from there. For everyone not on a horse, it’s a time-out.”
Farther down the lane they came across a lively alfresco cocktail party. Cars were pulled up haphazardly with trunks open, while people in dark green loden or Barbours milled around with glasses, gesticulating with long sandwiches made from baguettes and the riches of the terroir. The atmosphere was even more aggressively jovial than an art gallery opening.
Capucine was far less than pleased at the idea of running the gauntlet between the parked cars. The bubble of her bucolic contentment had already been rudely popped, and now she was going to be subjected to one of those horrible country moments when people she had no memory of would know all there was to know about her. Perfect strangers would tell her how much she had grown and what a pretty little woman she had become. She felt like screaming. Miraculously, Alexandre saved the day.
“You old dog!” a voice rang out. Alexandre replied with the exuberant whoop he reserved for his best cronies. His interlocutor was dressed in the standard getup of hunt followers, loden overcoat, corduroy britches buckled just below the knee, and muddy green Wellington boots. What set him apart was an entirely incongruous flowing white beard and a brightly colored silk kerchief tied around his neck. The general effect was of a wild man of the mountain in borrowed clothes.
The two embraced warmly with loud back thumping. The newfound friend held Alexandre at arm’s length and exclaimed, “You, here of all places! Drink this immediately. It’s something I’ll bet you don’t get every day. A true Domfrontais Calvados, one-third pear brandy and two-thirds Calvados.”
Appreciatively sipping his Domfrontais, Alexandre introduced his long-lost friend to Capucine. He was an artist who specialized in etchings and oils of hunt scenes.
“I’d heard you’d married, but I didn’t believe it. But now that I am confronted by the plenitude of madame’s pulchritude, the scales fall from my eyes,” the artist said, bowing from the waist and performing a perfectly executed baisemain.
After three tiny silver timbales of the Domfrontais—which struck Capucine as packing even more of a punch than regular Calvados—they heard the warble of the horns again.
The “bien aller!” An excited ripple went through the crowd. This time it was the artist who explained to Alexandre, “They’re off. The hounds have found again. Time to get going.” Cars were started, baskets were thrown pell-mell into trunks, and the crowd moved off in an excited procession, leaving a faint gray haze of exhaust fumes.
For the second day in a row, the afternoon ended at the Pharmacie Homais. This time it was for another sacred duty of every French pharmacist: supreme arbiter of mushrooms. Homais carefully spread Alexandre’s harvest on a table and picked through them one by one until he finally wrinkled his nose, put one aside, and studiously washed his hands with great thoroughness.
“Amanite vireuse,” he said as solemnly as an oncologist announcing a particularly pernicious form of cancer. “Not quite as lethal as its cousin, Amanite phalloïd, but it will definitely do the job. Mind you, it looks almost exactly like an Agaricus silvicola, which is what all of these are,” he said, pushing a numb
er of mushrooms into a pile. “Even a very experienced collector could easily have been fooled. Everything else in your basket is guaranteed to be perfectly healthy.”
Capucine looked very closely at the poisonous mushroom isolated at the edge of the desk and could see no difference whatsoever from its “guaranteed” brethren.
“I wrote an article about this particular killer just last year,” Homais continued, puffing out his chest. “Even though I live in the remote countryside, I’m the official correspondent on mushrooms for the biggest newspaper in Rouen.”
“The Fanal?” Alexandre asked with a wry smile.
Homais looked puzzled. “The Paris-Normandie, of course,” he said. “I’ve never even heard of a paper called the Fanal.”
CHAPTER 6
Capucine hadn’t been to the Elevage Vienneau since she was a child. At first she thought she might have taken a wrong turn, but as apple orchards turned into fields filled with chubby white steers as well groomed as if they had been children’s ponies, she knew she was on the right road. A few minutes later they came to a tall stone archway supporting an ornate wrought-iron gate. At the apex of the arch, foot-high flowing italic letters announced ELEVAGE VIENNEAU and smaller letters below boasted ETAB. 1821.
Capucine shot the Clio through the gate, spitting gravel, and announced happily, “It all comes back to me now. You’ll see. It’s a fabulous place.”
She turned hard left into a road lined with towering poplars standing as stiffly as soldiers on parade and emerged into the courtyard of a striking two-story, timber-faced manor house with a steeply-sloped thatch roof. The building had clearly started out life as the home of some modest Norman lord.
Inside, the original great hall had been left intact. Despite an attempt on the part of the current occupants to create some coziness by cordoning off the area in front of the looming stone fireplace with sofas and chairs, the barnlike proportions of the room demanded exhausting loudness. In addition to the Vienneaus, only Bellanger was present, kitted out in another outfit so new looking Capucine half expected to see a price tag fluttering from the back of his jacket.
As they walked in, the topic of conversation was Marie-Christine’s desire to take lessons on a shooting range in order to become an active participant at hunts.
“It’s so humiliating sitting there on a stick like some sort of ornament,” she said.
“But what a charming ornament,” Bellanger said with dripping unctuousness.
“I myself am quite proud of the way my manly air embellishes Capucine’s station,” Alexandre said, rooting around on a long table behind the sofa so laden with cattle memorabilia it would have been at home in the Paul Bert flea market in Paris.
“Marie-Christine, don’t listen to him. You really should learn to shoot,” Capucine said. “Women have a natural gift for it. It’s because we have a better sense of rhythm and we’re more supple than men.”
“Shooting is very dangerous,” Vienneau said. “Just look at what happened to poor Philippe.”
“That was so strange,” Marie-Christine said, tears welling in her eyes. “How could he have been shot accidentally ? The whole thing just seems so crazy.”
Capucine noticed that Bellanger darted a particularly venomous look at her and seemed about to say something, but the cook, round and rosy as a turnip, opened the door to the kitchen and popped her head out, a tacit invitation to the luncheon table.
Inevitably, it was steak. But it was nonetheless extraordinary : flawless tournedos wrapped in French bacon, perfect pommes soufflés, an impeccable béarnaise. Alexandre’s beatific smile was of a depth seen only in churches and in three-star restaurants. He breathed a deep sigh of contentment. “Loïc,” he said. “This is quite possibly the best fillet I’ve ever eaten. How on earth do you do it?”
Vienneau laughed. “Well, you know we’ve been at it since the nineteenth century. My great-great-grandfather was a colonel in Napoleon’s Grand Armée. His leg was shot off at Waterloo. He was only twenty-seven at the time, can you imagine? He recuperated right here in this house, which had been in the family for generations, and he fell in love with Charolais cattle and my great-great-grandmother.
“Our herd’s been refined for nearly two centuries, which is why it’s so well marbled. And, of course, we’ve learned a thing or two about the care and feeding of the little devils over the generations. That’s all there is to it, really.”
“It’s such a waste,” Bellanger said. “The Vienneau name is a completely underexploited brand on the French fast-moving-consumer-goods scene. With the proper backing you could transform your franchise into a significant family heritage. You could expand your volume, become a known name in supermarkets, even diversify into prepared dishes. Your business has huge potential.”
“Henri,” Vienneau said, “I’ve made it perfectly clear I have no intention whatsoever of selling out. Our discussions are to be confined to the possibility of raising a small amount of capital to make some needed improvements to the élevage, nothing more. The idea of linking my family name to the ‘fast-moving-consumer-goods scene’ is utterly repugnant.”
Before Alexandre had the chance to spread his diplomatic oil on waters troubled yet again, there was a discreet knock at the dining room door.
“Ah, oui,” Vienneau said. “I’ve asked one of my foremen to come by to show you around the élevage. I have a conference call coming up, but I’ll catch up to you on your tour.”
The door opened to admit a heavyset man in his early forties with muscles as lumpy as a Charolais steer. Capucine wondered if it was in his genes or a mimetic imitation of his wards. Vienneau introduced him as Pierre Martel, foreman in charge of final phases of the breeding cycle. He touched his forelock with his knuckle, bobbed his head, and muttered, “M’sieu’dame,” the age-old salutation of the working classes. A bright-faced young man peeped out from behind Martel’s broad shoulder.
“Oh yes, of course,” said Vienneau. “This is Clément Devere. He’s an intern from the agricultural college at Rouen who’s here to spend his last semester with us.”
Once lunch was over, Martel led them off at a brisk pace. “Monsieur Bellanger, you know the place backward and forward by now,” he said. “You should be giving the tour, not me.” He led them toward a complex of cinder-block structures glowing with white paint.
“This is where we feed the cattle when they come off grass and are put on grain,” Martel said.
“They don’t eat grass?” Capucine asked in a surprised tone.
“They do when they’re very young. But they’re put on grain feed very quickly,” Martel snapped, impatient with Capucine’s surprise. “We need these steers to grow from eighty pounds to twelve hundred in fourteen months. That’s not going to happen on a diet of grass, the same way you’re not going to get a rugby player up to weight by feeding him salad.” Martel snorted in pleasure at the veracity of his truism.
“The other thing,” Martel continued, “is that they need their vitamins and antibiotics. We administer those in the feed. We couldn’t just sprinkle it on the grass, now could we?” He paused to think over what he had just said. “Of course, we could inject them, but that would mean running them through the chute once a week. It’s enough of a pain in the ass to do that for the inoculations.”
Capucine was going to ask a question but realized that, for some reason, Martel was on the defensive about the artificial feeding of the cattle. Did she really look like one of those Green hippies? It must be all these clothes she was borrowing from the cloakroom.
After an uninteresting trudge through a labyrinth of galvanized pens and stainless-steel feeding troughs while they dutifully mouthed the inane questions required on guided tours of industrial installations, they arrived at the next attraction, the abattoir.
This sinister-sounding feature turned out to be no more than a long, unpleasantly chilly room with low-hanging overhead steel tracks. A group of men wearing long white coats hosed the floor down and vigorou
sly swept the bloody water into channels cut into the perimeter. They all smiled at Martel and the guests with an air of forced enthusiasm.
“Sorry, but there’s nothing to see in here right now. The abattoir starts early in the morning and shuts down around noon, and then they clean up until two or three,” Martel said. “Anyway, the interesting part is through here.” He led them through a curtain made of long strips of loose-hanging plastic.
“The butchery atelier,” he announced. An army of beef carcasses hung in neat rows from four ceiling tracks. The room was just above freezing. Workers, made rotund by thermal vests under their bloodstained white coats, split the carcasses in two with rasping electric knives, buzzing like angry bees. “These guys produce what we call ‘sides.’ That’s what we sell to butchers, our bread-and-butter product,” he said, leading them through another plastic curtain.
“Next, the sides are parked in this room here for a couple of weeks.” The temperature had dropped to close to freezing. “I’ll get you guys out of here in a sec,” Martel laughed. “The temperature can’t go above thirty-three degrees. See, one of the reasons the Elevage Vienneau is so famous is that we age our beef twenty-four days, a whole week longer than our competitors. It costs money and the meat loses a lot of weight, but it’s worth it in tenderness and flavor, believe you me!”
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