The Last Banquet

by Jonathan Grimwood

  We made love next morning, because she found that easier than doing so late at night. We never talked about why—though I knew. Virginie could dislike her body enough to feel uncomfortable around it when it was full. In the morning when the food had settled and her bowels and bladder emptied she could afford to be kinder to herself. We’re animals made complicated by the belief we’re something more.

  She made me go slowly the first time, grinned when I took her hard and finally crawled on top of me, as she’d done in the early days, and rode herself to relief, collapsing in a sprawl on my chest and biting my shoulder when I slapped her buttocks. She put aside her sadness that morning, as if it were a burden she’d been waiting for the year just gone to put down. Without saying . . . At least without saying clearly, we knew we’d agreed to resume our life as a couple and try for another son. Jean-Pierre could not be replaced but we would try to replace him anyway.

  Charlot left at the end of the week and took Père Laurant with him to a new post at the Sorbonne. It was a big promo­tion for a village priest, albeit a young and intelligent one who should probably not have been a village priest in the first place. He went with the new duke’s patronage, and Virginie’s tears, as she watched her family’s old coach trundle away. A few years later Père Laurant wrote a treatise explaining away the contradiction between God’s kindness and the world’s cruelty, and dedicated it to Charlot and an unnamed muse. By then Laurant was born. I let Virginie have the name since I knew, from the time between the coach’s departure and the baby’s birth, that the child was mine. Besides, she had an uncle called Laurant and said the child was named for him. I pretended to believe her.

  1758

  Responsibilities

  Laurant’s birth gave me a son and lost me a wife. The woman I’d loved and briefly lost to another and got back, mostly through her brother’s good graces as much as any virtues I might have, vanished again and remained gone. My second son was born in the summer of 1758, two years after the death of the brother he’d never meet, and a little over twenty years after Virginie and I married. It was a bad birth and lasted longer than she or any other woman could endure. Her screams were so fierce I abandoned the chateau and walked in the woods praying to a God I barely believed in to let her live if he had to make a choice between mother and child. The labour left her ripped, and pain clouded how she looked at the child. She’d part-fed her other children but could barely stand to have Laurant in the room and gave him over to the servants within days. I kept waiting for the Virginie I knew to re­appear. She had to be in there somewhere. But her eyes remained dull and her gaze fixed on her feet and I’d find her frozen on a chair blank-eyed but crying. ‘I’m fine,’ she’d say.

  Pretty much all she ever said.

  She repeated it to me, to the doctor, to her brother who came to see the new heir to the marquisate his father had worked so hard to have transferred. In desperation I sent to Paris, to the Sorbonne, for Père Laurant, the man for whom I believed the child was named. He came at once, trundling through the night over rough roads through bandit-infested forests to arrive dust-covered and exhausted. I showed him into her room and took another turn around the gardens. I no longer cared what anyone thought.

  Père Laurant sought me out several hours later.

  He looked drained and exhausted and older than in my memory. Paris had been unkind to him and his skin was blotched from poisons in the water. The year away had taken the hair from the crown of his head and thickened his waist and broadened his shoulders so they stretched the cloth of his cleric’s gown. His was a face pretty in youth and coarsening with age. Round faces do that.

  ‘Well?’ I spoke as I would to my village priest and he bridled, swallowing his pride in the next second. The man had been alone in the room of my wife for the last several hours and my heir was possibly named for him, I felt entitled to be short.

  ‘Marquis . . . ’

  The silence stretched between us and I used the beating seconds to pour us both a glass of wine, putting it silently on the table in front of him. The servants were banished, gone from the room and gone from the corridor outside the door. This was a conversation I was determined to have in private. Although there was little conversation to be had. Père Laurant expressed his regrets at how he found my wife, muttered a platitude about God’s healing kindness and asked what the doctor had said. Since the doctor’s answer was much the same as his, give her time and trust in God, I thanked him for coming so far, offered him the use of a chamber and told him to stay for as many days as he liked. He left that afternoon looking as dusty and exhausted as the horses that brought him.

  Maybe I was wrong to translate ‘give her time’ as limiting my visits to her bed. All the same, our lives became separate and the door between our chambers remained closed far more often than not. Some weeks it was locked, others unlocked; I never discovered the logic behind her choice. That she was reading gave me faint hope. Anything was better than sitting at the window staring out at the lake.

  I knew that in any city I could find brothels, there were enough of them. Not that I needed to go that far. A dozen innkeepers between my estate and the nearest town would have turned over their daughters, wives or sisters for coin. The first place I stopped was a staging post, offering cheap rooms and cheaper food to farmers and shopkeepers and sour-faced bourgeoisie who looked appalled by the crowds and the noise. The dining room was full, the public bar overflowing with drunken locals. Couples staggered into the afternoon, laughing, their arms around each other. I looked at the dozen youths and girls scurrying to serve customers and wondered how many were conceived against the wall at the back of that very inn.

  I rode on and stopped just beyond the next town, dust on my boots and in my throat. The innkeeper’s daughter had black hair falling in filthy curls around her shoulders, a soiled white blouse boiled so thin it billowed every time her breasts shifted. The landlord saw my gaze and came across, his eyes dark with calculation and greed. No price was mentioned and I had no idea if he’d sold her before. He simply told me what a good girl she was, how hard she worked, how devoted to her mother, who watched from the kitchen door. I nodded to say I understood and took my place in a private room upstairs and waited for the girl to serve me.

  ‘My lord.’ She curtsied clumsily and looked to see if I was impressed.

  I smiled and some of the tension left her face.

  ‘Should I get you food, sir?’

  Or shall I simply pull up my dress? I understood the words she left unspoken and told her to fetch me bread and cheese. The bread as fresh as she could find and the cheese as old. She checked to see she’d understood what I’d said and scut­tled from the room, her shoulder and hip pushing against me as she went. When I looked after her she was blushing. She stopped at the top of the stairs and took a deep breath before descending.

  ‘Sir, my mother has this.’ She unwrapped warm bread that stank of yeast and took the imprint of my thumb in its cooling crust. ‘And this is the cheese.’ Beneath an upturned bowl lay an eighth of Camembert so rancid it could walk off the plate, next to a fat sliver of goat’s cheese white with bloom. She looked at both doubtfully.

  ‘You said old . . . ’

  ‘So I did.’ I covered the Camembert with the bowl before it could sour the room. ‘You can take that back . . . ’ Like duck’s egg soaked in horse urine and buried for a hundred days in the Chinese style, some tastes do not need repeating. I’d already tried Camembert ripened beyond the point of deliquescence and felt no need to try again. She trotted away with her tray, the rotting cheese and upturned bowl and hurried back a moment later, face warm from climbing the stairs. ‘Sit,’ I told her.

  She did and watched me trim away mould until I was left with a sliver of goat’s cheese the colour of tallow and the texture of hard wax. Cutting a slice, I laid it across a strip of bread crust and offered it to her. She chewed two or three times, swallowing hast
ily. When I offered her another bit, she shook her head, looking anxious that she might have offended me and said, ‘I’ve eaten,’ by way of explanation.

  I ate the rest myself while she watched. The taste was divine. As I ate I tried to guess her age—and realised it was impossible. Thirteen? Fourteen? Younger than Jean-Pierre when he died. Perhaps Virginie’s age when we first met. Too young for a man like me, even one in search of withered dreams.

  I left the girl with a gold livre and a handful of greasy sou. If she had sense, she’d give the gold to her father and keep the smaller coins for herself. I also left her untouched—at least by me—and rode home, torn between shame at the instinct that took me there and delight at the taste of the cheese. I knew I needed to find another outlet for my needs.

  I took a mistress, the wife of a doctor who’d treated Laurant when he was sick. My neighbours discovered soon enough and treated her as one would expect, with a mixture of envy and disdain. Her husband being my physician provided enough respectability for my coming and going to her house to pass almost without comment. I have no idea if Virginie knew or cared. Or even if the doctor did. Our affair began in summer and ended in the autumn as the leaves were turning. She cried.

  In desperation, I turned to food. My recipes becoming ornate, my tastes more complex. At school my attempt to recreate the Dragon & Tiger dish the colonel had told me about was basic and disappointing. So I refined it, and revised it, and experimented, and though I finally came up with a heavily seasoned stew that was passable, I realised that cat and snake were best eaten separately and I preferred snake to cat anyway. In a month I cleared the chateau grounds of adders, and arrived at two recipes that amused me. The bouillabaisse involved treating snake like fish, the fried dish involved treating it like chicken.

  Three-snake bouillabaisse

  Take two each of adder, grass snake and slow worm and gut, skin, cut into sections and let soak in salted water while you fry in a pan three diced onions, six unbroken bulbs of garlic and six ripe tomatoes, skinned over flame and seeded, in a cup of good olive oil. Add the snake, cover with boiling water and add cayenne, salt, fennel and saffron to the liquid, plus parsley, thyme, rosemary, black peppercorns and tarragon all bound in a small muslin parcel, simmering the ingredients together until the oil, water and tastes have mixed. Separate the snake from the broth and serve with thickly sliced potatoes on the same dish. Pour the broth individually over thick slices of pain de campagne rubbed with raw garlic. A rouille of oil, egg yolk and garlic maybe floated on top. Tastes like fish.

  Fried snake

  This is far simpler. Gut, skin and cut into finger-length sections a snake and let soak in salted water while you beat together three egg yolks, a tablespoon of olive oil and a little sour milk. Whisk the egg whites until stiff and fold into the mixture. Prepare a bowl of crumbs from stale bread, mixed with coarse black pepper. Dip the snake pieces into the egg mixture, dredge through the pepper crumbs and fry imme­diately in an inch of good oil. Eat while hot. Tastes like chicken. (The above recipe can be used for frogs’ legs. Use only the upper section of the rear legs and season with lemon juice. Alternate pieces of snake and frog dredged in the pepper mix and cooked on a skillet make for an interesting exercise. The similarities of texture, taste and afternote are closer than the differences.)

  I served these two dishes to my guests and was compli­mented on both. But the truth is taste no longer excited me in the same way. I had eaten everything France had to offer. One pig, one mouse, one owl tastes much like another. Ravens taste little different from crows. Eels from the Seine might taste subtly different from those from the Garonne but they are still eels, even if sauced with a mixture of lovage, dill, celery seed, fried mint and rue, and garnished with pine nuts and honey, as served to the Emperor Tiberius and recorded in De Re Conquinaria by the Roman epicure Apicius.

  At a loss, I began improvements on the estate and in the lands beyond, doing things I could have done long before. The marsh was drained in a single season. Huge ditches were cut to take the waters, until long straight lines sliced a landscape that had always been chaotic before. The marsh plants died, of course. The small animals that had lived at the ragged water’s edge died out or moved away. The ducks had nowhere to land that winter and the hunting was bad. Villagers went hungry, refused to eat the cartloads of potatoes I provided and openly cursed me. Their newborns no longer died from marsh fever but now their mothers had no food to feed them or themselves. I tried to undo the worst of the hunger, even knowing that the really destitute were never dangerous, that it was those on the edge of destitution who could be led against those they held responsible. Even knowing this, I released grain from my own granaries at prices so low the local merchants complained. The peasants, of course, said I overcharged.

  I rebuilt roads, planted windbreaks, began building a school for the children of merchants and prosperous farmers. Voltaire himself wrote to me saying he approved of my work and my diligence. He’d heard I was a scientist. I wrote back denying it. The most I could claim was that I kept a book of the things I’d eaten, how they tasted and how that taste made me feel. If wine from vines grown on flinty slopes tastes different from wine from the valleys surely meat should be the same? I’d had my cattle herd split into four, I told him. Split into four and nurtured on uplands and lowlands, rich ground and poor. And having had four cows slaughtered I ate beef from each and discov­ered I could tell without being told which had been raised where.

  Voltaire wrote back a long letter on the nature of taste and begged me to write to him again with news of my experiments. My reputation in the neighbourhood rose. Père Laurant wrote from Paris that he was master of a college now, to ask about the health of my wife and to say he’d heard I corresponded with Voltaire.

  Dear Père Laurant,

  Virginie continues to favour a quiet life and solitude. But I can truthfully say that your visit helped her find an element of peace that had been missing from her life since the birth of our son, and for this I am glad . . .

  Not grateful, simply glad. That was the truth of it.

  She saw him and her mind settled enough for her to stop weeping in corners over the damp pages of a poetry book or be found sobbing at the harpsichord as she played endlessly some country tune she must have overheard in the village. Seeing him again let her fall out of love. The thin boy who’d arrived in the village in an oversized cassock was gone. A thickset academic with hair already beginning to recede and a myopic gaze had taken his place. Seeing one destroyed her memory of the other. I asked if she wanted to invite him again and Virginie shook off my suggestion as if I’d had the ill manners to mention an embarrassing cousin.

  Hope

  Hope came for me from the strangest of quarters. On a day I’d expected to spend only a few minutes at most approving a replacement wet nurse for my new son. Her name was Manon and the look she gave me was amused. I felt she understood how absurd a world it was where she was required to rent out her teats for another child’s use so the mother should not have the inconvenience of feeding the child herself. Although maybe it was finding herself talking to the marquis because the marquise was too busy staring out of a window to notice the negotiations taking place in front of her that twisted the village girl’s mouth into a rueful grimace.

  The first thing I noticed about Manon was her freckles. The second, that her breasts were so full with milk they strained against a shift that was drab brown and recently washed. Her face was also recently washed and I had no doubt her straw-coloured hair had been rinsed through. She had the look of someone wearing her best in hope of making a good impression. All the same, that knowing smile undermined her politeness. It was amused and a little sharp. If it had been a herb it would have been hyssop. If a wine, a local white from the flinty soil above the quarry. She caught my gaze and looked away, wondering if she was in trouble. The curtsy she dropped spread her hem across the dusty floor.

&nbs
p; Virginie frowned vaguely. A book lay open but unread on her lap. Her hair was scraggly at the temples where she kept worrying it with her fingers. She looked as she’d looked for months, sullen as a cloudy sky that threatens to tip over into rain. Like everyone else in the chateau I waited and waited and waited for the storm that never came.

  ‘Come with me,’ I told Manon. ‘And bring my son . . . ’

  She lifted Laurant from the floor at my command and tucked him casually against her hip. Virginie watched us go like a child watching leaves blow across the grass. With vague interest but little understanding of what made a leaf move.

  ‘She’s ill,’ I said before we reached the end of the corridor. ‘You must understand the marquise is ill and make sure Laurant behaves quietly around her.’

  The girl nodded meekly. As we reached the bottom of the stairs and headed for the front door Manon opened her mouth, only risking a question when we stood outside. ‘It was a bad birth, my lord? If I might ask . . . ’

  I thought back to the white-faced midwife, and the hovering priest who’d arrived to stand outside the door long before my man found me fishing the lower stream. I’d entered Virginie’s bedroom to a child as bruised as if the midwife had dragged it from my wife’s splayed legs and kicked it into a corner.