The Last Banquet

by Jonathan Grimwood

  I was in my room, eating a bouillabaisse that needed more saffron but was otherwise passable, when there was a knock at my door. ‘My lord, sir, I’m so sorry but there’s a boy . . . ’

  I had the innkeeper tell the boy to wait until I’d finished eating, and later went down to pay the child and instruct my coachman to bind the arudi’s front and back legs and stow them on the roof of my coach for our departure. ‘Hurry home,’ I told the boy, then stopped him from doing so with another question and rewarded his answer with a sou. The beasts bred easily and were best fried swiftly with garlic or cooked slowly in a fruit stew.

  To cook arudi

  Prepare a marinade by mixing torn rosemary, chopped mint, chilli and garlic with a cup of good olive oil and the juice of two lemons, two limes and a blood orange. Add salt and crushed pepper, pour over two pounds of meat cut from the legs of a young arudi, chopped into thumb-sized chunks, and mix well. Cover with a muslin cloth against flies and leave overnight in a cool larder.

  Next day blister the skin of two red and two green peppers over flame and remove skin as cleanly as possible. Put peppers to one side to cool. Repeat with a large aubergine, cut into slices and squeeze between two plates with a small weight on top to remove sourness (drain away any liquid). Now sear meat by frying in marinade mix to seal, adding extra olive oil if necessary, then add peppers and aubergine, and fry fast. Can be eaten with rice or pain de campagne. Tastes like mutton.

  To make the perfect redingotes Anglaise

  Take the caecum* from two smallish animals—arudi are ideal—and soak for a day in fresh water, changing the water twice. Turn both inside out and mash gently in a weak solu­tion of lye for a further two days. Scrape carefully to remove the mucous membranes, leaving the stronger outer coats. Expose to vapour from burning brimstone, then wash care­fully with soap and water. Turn the second length of moist gut back to its original configuration—with the scraped surface on the inside—and put aside. Smooth the first length onto an oiled glass dildo and draw the second length over the first. The two insides will seal together. Burnish the condom with a glass weight to polish its surface and thin the membrane. Dress with oil and slap the condom repeat­edly against a table to break down the fibres and make it supple. Sew a red ribband around the lower edge for tying in place.

  1748

  Charlot Marries

  The burial of Amaury, duc de Saulx, was the last of the great state funerals. There were others later that were as grand and equally impressive, but his had a solemnity that was missing from those that came later, as if we secretly knew the world was changing. Amaury de Saulx had been born in an earlier century, had grown up under the Sun King and been that king’s godson and favourite. The men who turned out to mourn were as old as their houses. Marshals and generals, premier dukes and peers so ancient they had to be helped from their carriages and walked with sticks on both sides, shaking off offers of help as rude attempts to hurry them.

  The old légitimés de France, Louis XIV’s legitimised bastards, were dead but their sons represented them. The service was at Chateau de Saulx and the king himself attended. Fresh in our minds was the previous year’s battle of Fontenoy in the Netherlands, where the king took to the field, along with his sixteen-year-old son, and with the help of his marshal, Maurice de Saxe, smashed the armies of the Dutch, the English, the Austrians and the Hanoverians. Charlot’s cavalry attack on the English and Hanoverian infantry helped win that battle. He was twenty-nine then, thirty now. His face as he buried his father was unreadable. As we left, he gripped my hand firmly, hesitated and hugged me. He kissed his sister carefully on both cheeks and promised to write.

  Virginie cried in silence for the first hour of our journey home, the first tears she had shed since receiving news of her father’s death. I had no idea if she cried for her father, at the formality of her brother’s farewell or from the emotion of the week now gone, which had seen her return to the room she’d slept in as a girl.

  ‘He always liked you better.’

  ‘Virginie . . . !’

  ‘It’s true. You know it’s true. I’m surprised he let me marry you. Sometimes I wonder if we’re really brother and sister.’

  ‘Of course you’re brother and sister. It would be hard to find two people more alike. It’s not just in your eyes and cheekbones. It’s in how you behave, how you look at the world.’ Virginie glared at me so fiercely she could have been sixteen again. ‘He couldn’t have stopped me anyway,’ I said, attempting to make peace.

  ‘Of course he could. My mother hated the idea. My father was uncertain. Charlot spoke up for you. He persuaded Margot to speak up for you in her turn. Do you think my father would have agreed if Charlot had protested?’

  ‘I thought they disliked each other?’ I’d never put that thought into words, and writing it now from this distance I’m ashamed at my poor grasp of how families worked. All I can say in my defence is that I’d never really had one, until I met Charlot and Virginie . . . I was her husband, the father of her child. But she was—and always would be—Amaury de Saulx’s daughter. That she loved me, would take off her dress and spread her thighs for me, remained a shock. Even back then, almost ten years after we married.

  Virginie sighed. Her face grew thoughtful as she hunted for the right words and she wiped away the last of her tears with her knuckles without even noticing.

  ‘He grew up in harder times.’

  That was all she ever said about her father, all she ever said about Charlot’s relationship with the man, which I now understood somehow mirrored her own. I had been the exception. His kindness to me allowed by the lack of blood tie. He was truly from another time.

  Charlot married two years later, in the summer of 1748, a girl almost exactly half his age, seventeen to his thirty-two. Lisette had dark eyes and a round face, tightly curled black hair that fell to her shoulders, and a tight, almost muscled figure, with high breasts and hips like a boy. She looked more Breton than Norman. I wasn’t even sure I’d known Jerome had a younger sister, certainly not one born when we were at the academy. Charlot was infatuated, suddenly kind and unexpectedly nervous. Virginie found comfort in this. As if her brother, who had always been a little too brave, a little too strong, and in her eyes a little too careless with the affections of those drawn to him, suddenly redeemed himself by showing the same vulnerability that the rest of us tried so hard to hide.

  He married her in a private ceremony in the chapel at Saulx, the same chapel that had been filled with princes and nobles for the burial of his father two years earlier. Jerome sat in the front pew, beside my wife and my young son, who was doing his best to appear grown-up among his father’s friends. I stood at the altar beside Charlot as Lisette approached, as I’d stood beside Emile, the difference being Charlot was invited to Emile’s wedding, and had gone out of a sense of duty, but Emile was not invited to his. I’d received a letter beforehand from Emile asking me to inter­cede, and had to write back that I had mentioned the matter but he knew what Charlot was like and I was loath to make promises I couldn’t keep. Emile didn’t write again for three years. It would have been worse had he known Virginie was the one who banned him from her brother’s wedding—and it had been her, not Charlot, I’d been unable to sway.

  These were good years for Charlot, Jerome and me. We were in our prime, married, with children or with children on the way. Lisette fell pregnant almost immediately, and I stood godfather to Amaury, Charlot’s first boy, as did Jerome. We were bound by our time at the academy, and by the fact our names were rarely mentioned separately. Charlot’s father arranged my entry into his world, but my friendship with Charlot and Jerome consolidated it. At the academy they’d raised their eyebrows, muttered asides, called me philosopher and forgiven my strangeness because it amused them. But as the years went by my oddities became eccentricities, my eccentricities became virtues.

  Society approved my marriage to Charlot�
��s sister. We were politely formal in public, as manners required, but we were known to be affectionate in private. I kept no mistresses and she took no lovers. That made us unusual for people like us in those days. Instead we shared a bed and kept to ourselves as much as politeness and society allowed. Later, I wondered if Virginie had wanted more from me or from her life. If she did, it never showed. She was the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect chatelaine.

  Using a portion of the money she inherited on the death of her father, I had the kitchens at Chateau d’Aumout rebuilt in the latest style. A new bread oven was installed, and the old spit, driven by geese on a treadmill, ripped out and replaced with one of my own invention. My spit was wound by hand and powered by a steel spring that could have driven a town clock. A ratchet kept the meats turning at a steady pace. Gearing was used to adjust the speed. An artist from Paris came down at the king’s command to make engravings of my design.

  I had an ironworker make me huge pans with bases three times the normal thickness. They took far longer to heat up but retained their heat and could be set aside and continue to cook their ingredients until it was time to return them to the flame. I had a salamander made, longer than a spade, with a heavy metal circle at one end that could be pushed into the coals and left until needed to caramelise sugar or brown the skin of a goose or crisp the crackling on a boar. I began to work on my theory that the taste of food should be treated not like the taste of wine but like music. There were rising notes, falling notes, harmonics. The perfect meal took all of these into account.

  Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are . . . A throwaway line in a letter of mine to Jerome, after he’d been boasting of his beef and root vegetables and other Normandy food, became a bon mot bandied about at Versailles and claimed by a dozen others. My simple comment that the years just gone had stretched our palates, and the discovery of cane sugar, and its different preparations, of alcoholic liquors, of white and red wines, vanilla, coffee and tea had given us flavours hitherto unknown, became a staple of commonplace books. Chefs in Paris dedicated their recipes to me, then chefs in Rome, and London, with which we were briefly at peace, and where all the best cooks are French anyway. Rousseau wrote to me. D’Alembert gave my theories an entry in the first edition of his Encyclopédie.

  I was proudest of my championing of the potato, a vegetable from the Americas that produced more food per acre than wheat. It was filling, nutritious and wholesome, and would, I was certain, if grown in sufficient quantity, save France in times of famine for all my peasants knew it as winter food for their cattle. Unfortunately, the similarity of its root shape to deadly nightshade convinced many it was poisonous. I had even seen my kitchen maids wash their hands after handling it. It didn’t help that the French Parliament had forbidden its cultivation on the grounds that potatoes caused leprosy, an absurdity I exposed by eating potatoes at every meal for a week and challenging the Faculty of Medicine in Paris to examine me and say I was ill.

  In the winter of 1753 Virginie fell pregnant and I realised I would need to make a new redingotes Anglaise. Although we were worried, she carried her baby to term and we named our daughter Hélène after Virginie’s favourite aunt. Jean-Pierre was fourteen when we discovered his mother was pregnant and fifteen when we sent him to stay with his uncle Charlot in the week that Hélène was born. He travelled alone from Chateau d’Aumout to Chateau de Saulx, except for a coachman. I have no doubt his trip was as interesting as mine would have been at his age. He’d been offered a place at the academy in Brienne two years before this, but had chosen to remain at home and Virginie was happy with that decision. He liked his summer with Charlot so much that he returned the following year. And the year after that, with Charlot promising to introduce him at Versailles. It was here that tragedy happened and we were in the gardens at Chateau d’Aumout when we received news of it carried by a royal messenger. Jean-Pierre had been thrown from his horse while hunting with Charlot and the dauphin. He broke his neck in the fall and died immediately.

  I can remember the moment of the letter’s arrival, the beads of sweat on the royal messenger’s face as he was shown to the knot garden Virginie and I had planted to mimic the one at Chateau de Saulx. I remember the deepness of his bow before he handed me the letter, and my voice faltering as I read Charlot’s words aloud to my wife and we reached the import of their meaning. I can remember Virginie’s sob, and the rustle of silk as she fell to the ground. I cannot remember what I thought at all. I suspect I thought nothing beyond the need to help Virginie. As for what I felt . . . I never cried for Jean-Pierre. But in the weeks that followed his death I walked the walks he and I used to walk when he was small; around the little lake, and through the knot garden as far as the monkey puzzle tree and back again. I walked them until my heels cracked and my ankles bled and the bones in my feet hurt as fiercely as if someone had broken them with hammers.

  1757

  The Lover

  Virginie took Jean-Pierre’s death badly as mothers do. She withdrew from family life and our three-year-old daughter clung to me like a shadow, until I appointed a young woman from Limoges as Hélène’s nanny. Fierce and wilful, Hélène took after her grandfather in temper and her mother in looks. Perhaps I should have let her cling. It was only later I realised the child needed me to make up for her mother’s absence.

  The years of Jean-Pierre’s life had been good for us but bad for France. Louis XV, once loved, became hated. When Emile and I finally met, in Paris at supper with his family, Madame Duras told me in all seriousness that her local police were abducting the children of the poor so the king could bathe in their blood to heal his diseases. Since this was treason, I took Emile aside and told him he should guard what his wife said since not everyone was his friend. He looked at me a little strangely, and replied she said nothing everyone else in Paris was not already thinking. The execution of Damiens the following year, in the spring of 1757, made matters worse. The man had tried to murder Louis–of course he had to be executed. But four hours of public torture with molten lead poured into his wounds? While fools like Emile’s father-in-law paid seven hundred livres for a balcony on the Place de Grève so he could hold a party and watch a screaming halfwit die in agony . . . We disgusted Europe with our degeneracy. We disgusted ourselves.

  The years of Jean-Pierre’s life had passed, as they do as we get older, ever faster for me. Although not so fast as they do now, where each New Year’s Day seems followed almost immediately by another with nothing but a few letters written and a few books read in between. I can remember weeks that lasted longer as a child than this last year. The day I sat with my back to the dung heap and watched the duc d’Orléans ride under the arch into my father’s courtyard felt longer than the whole of this last year of my life. Some days I feel I would like to find God, but we keep missing each other in the gaps in our lives. Well, my life, his eternity. The fact I don’t really believe in him probably doesn’t encourage him to approach. Virginie believed, properly and without question. I envied her that in the months following our son’s death, in between feeling irritated at how little she questioned what she’d been told. We took communion together each Sunday in the local church rather than invite the priest to come to our private chapel, and Virginie mouthed private prayers while I made the public responses and tried not to think ungodly thoughts about a local farmer’s daughter or the young wife of a wine merchant. My thoughts might stray but my hands did not and I thought she knew this. Evidently, she did not.

  Virginie took a lover the year after Jean-Pierre died.

  Whether they were lovers in the physical sense I have no idea. Père Laurant was a young priest in the next village and she was five years his senior. She took her pain to him and somehow over the months that followed he did what I could not, lifted the grief from her shoulders and put the smile back on her face and eventually back into her eyes.

  The benefice was mine and I could have dismissed
him had I wanted. But he was liked by all for his freshness and lack of guile. His sermons were short, his penances lenient. It was whispered he’d read Voltaire and believed God had a use even for such a man. If they were lovers, and there were many who whispered that was true, and in the dark of the night my fears saw her naked above him, smiling down with those same dark eyes, I could have had him defrocked by the bishop, although if one were to defrock every village priest who slept with unhappy wives and lonely widows half the vicarages in France would fall to ruin.

  Charlot solved the problem eventually.

  He arrived unexpectedly one afternoon in the autumn of ’57, in the coach that had been so grand and new the year it collected us from the academy. Now it looked tarnished and outdated. He greeted me kindly and folded his sister in his arms and took her for a walk around the little lake until they reached a bench beneath a willow where they stopped to talk until the sun set behind the trees and the sky changed colour and the world shifted a little on its axis and for a while seemed to settle back into place.

  Virginie came to my bed that night.

  With the windows open and the sound of peacocks scratching on the gravel and a dog howling in the village, I heard a creak as the door between our rooms opened and the curtains of my room billowed as the night breeze was allowed free rein. A glimmer of white was framed in a square of darkness. ‘May I come in?’ it said.

  ‘Of course . . . ’

  Her hair was unbound and her feet without slippers, she lacked the lace shawl she usually wore around her shoulders. The night takes away the years. A woman by candlelight is younger than a woman in the light of an oil lamp, a woman in darkness younger still. I have no doubt the same is true for women when they look at men. Virginie seemed to me as young and as beautiful as in the first weeks we shared a bed. She hesitated, when she was halfway across the room, and I shifted on the mattress and pulled back the covers and she slid in beside me. That night neither of us really slept. Although for different reasons this time. We held each other, stiffly at first and then more naturally as we relaxed into the shape of each other’s body, and the tightness in her shoulders softened and she smiled when I kissed her hair.