The Last Banquet

by Jonathan Grimwood

  Emile laughed. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve started to believe?’

  I stared at him. ‘I’ve always believed.’

  ‘In God the father, God the son and God the holy ghost?’

  ‘Of course not. But in something. We all have to believe in something.’

  ‘If we don’t . . . ?’ He let his question hang.

  ‘We start believing only in ourselves.’

  ‘Belief in God is the cause of war, superstition, irrationality . . . And has been the cause of those since time began.’ What Emile spoke was treason, and if not treason, then certainly blasphemy, but I’d heard it from him so often it barely registered. He was hunched forward, knuckles white around his wine glass from where his fists were clenched, like a boy trying to make an impression on the classroom. As he’d been when I first met him, a lawyer’s son sent to live among the children of impoverished nobles.

  ‘Without God the wars will get even worse.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ he said. And there our conversation ended. I told him there were things I needed to do and he nodded at my convenient lie. We clasped hands one last time and I crossed the room to talk to Père Laurant, who had made the trip from Paris. Each year seemed to age him faster than the one before and listening to him it was easy to understand why. He’d gone to the Sorbonne foreseeing a life of study and found himself in a world of politics, back­biting and intrigue made all the worse for being regarded as irrelevant by everyone else. Apparently his recent promo­tion was a poisoned chalice and a dozen atheists and heathens were waiting for him to fail. He added that he was drunk, apologised for his indiscretion and agreed with my suggestion that I have a servant show him to his chamber so he could rest. This was my last unwanted conversation of the day. After that, I bade my guests goodbye, Emile and his son among them, and went to repair the damage with my lover and my daughter.

  1768

  Mission to Corsica

  Five years separated my bidding goodbye to the last of those unwanted guests and a letter arriving from the king. Five years in which I tried to remake my heart and settled instead for a comfortable routine. Virginie’s death made me rich; that is, I’d always been rich if you regarded her money as mine, but now it was truly mine and I no longer felt guilty about spending it. So I had the kitchens rebuilt, installed a huge icehouse, extended the herb garden and had a second lake dug to house aquatic mammals sent from Versailles. I even had a wall thrown right around a small wood to give Tigris somewhere safe to wander.

  Manon took the place of my official mistress without being asked, and because I’d done my public grieving when Virginie was still been alive, few understood how hard her death hit me. Only once did the grief fight free; on a night when I walked down to the lake to get clear sight of the constellations. Walking back beneath the stars I started to sob, fierce tears mixing with ferocious anger. At what, I didn’t know. At Virginie leaving me perhaps. I felt a sense of abandonment and guilt. Only next morning did I wonder if perhaps I’d been the one to abandon her. Either way, we forsook each other before death gave us no choice.

  I married Manon eighteen months after Virginie died, in a quiet ceremony in my own chapel. It was a morganatic marriage, as I was noble and she was not. She took the title vicomtesse with the king’s permission, although most called her marquise from politeness. I doubt my servants understood the difference anyway. Charlot came to visit us twice, Jerome once. I met Emile in Bordeaux and we ate at his hotel, an indifferent meal to accompany indifferent conversation. I wondered later if he found the few hours we spent together as difficult as I did. Manon took over the running of the chateau and responsibility for Hélène. There was a familiarity in the way she talked to me that troubled some of our neighbours. Our conversation lacked the formality found in their marriages, our affections and occasional irritations, best kept behind closed doors, bled into open conversation. So be it. We were shaped by how we’d begun.

  I started to think of my life as clay. That day by the dung heap, my life was entirely malleable, soft to the touch and easy to shape. Slowly it dried and grew stiff, until I began to accept the shape it had because change was hard. One day in early summer, Manon found me in a potter’s shop, stripped to my shirt, which was splashed with clay water like earthy blood, the wheel spinning erratically as I treadled. A lump of drying clay twisted and twitched beneath my fingers. ‘Jean-Marie.’ She realised there were people around us, the potter’s family, his neighbours, a ragged apprentice younger than my son, and her tone softened. ‘What are you doing?’ From the way the apprentice hid behind Manon’s skirts, I wondered if he was the one sent to tell her where she might find me.

  ‘Wondering if my life is really like clay.’

  She looked at the misshapen mess under my fingers and the potter hastened to assure her that working the wheel was hard and mine was a very good first effort, many did far worse in their first attempts and not everyone had the skill. I thanked him for his time, which embarrassed him, and washed my hands under a squeaking pump outside. The sun was hot enough to turn the remaining splashes of clay on my wrists to earthy scabs. They tasted of metals and salt, like raw liver or fresh blood.

  Père Laurant, who now styled himself Maître Laurant, wrote from the Sorbonne to say he heard I worked simply like a man of the people, stripped to the waist, and my love for the natural over the artificial was an inspiration. I don’t bother to reply. That didn’t stop him writing a pamphlet proclaiming the best of the French aristocracy as instinctively noble and quoting me as a suitably Rousseauian example. Jean-Jacques’ Du Contract Social ou Principes de Droit Politique had been published a few years before, and, like others, Père Laurant was busy trying to dress what already existed in new clothes to show we already had the framework for creating the best of all possible worlds.

  His pamphlet and my foolery with the potter’s wheel were behind the royal letter, although I only discovered that later. By the time it arrived, the estate was running smoothly, the animals had settled, even the proudest of my neighbours had begun to think of Manon as the chatelaine of Chateau d’Aumout, as long as they didn’t think too deeply. There was no reason for me to worry about leaving her, not that I was presented with a choice. But still I wondered at the words. The king requires your presence. That evening Manon asked me what was wrong and took the letter, and my silence as permission to read.

  ‘You must go.’

  ‘Of course I must. I just wish I knew what he wanted.’ I was fifty, married for the second time, with a son to take my place and a daughter soon ready to be wed. I had my kitchens, my recipes and my mountain of notes. I was a good subject of Louis XV, quiet and unambitious and untroublesome. What could the king possibly want with me?

  Manon and I make love that night and I doze in her arms, my wrist still trapped by her thighs, her fingers stroking my neck. ‘It might do you good,’ she says.

  I drag myself out of sleep enough to be querulous and feel her smile, her hand stilling for a moment as she waits for me to answer. The peacocks are noisy outside despite the darkness of the night and I can hear sabots crunch on gravel. A kitchen maid returning from a tavern or a groom sneaking into the village. In a quiet part of my mind, where Charlot is still thin and Jerome fierce, Virginie beautiful and I’m young, I envy them.

  ‘I like it here.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘You’re comfortable here, there’s a difference. Cross your heart and tell me honestly that you’re happy.’

  ‘I’m happy enough.’

  Manon sighs. ‘What is it? Is it us?’

  I assure her that it isn’t. And in the aftermath of that, because Manon’s good at letting silences lengthen and I always feel the need to fill them, I admit that nothing seems to matter as much as it once did. My waist has thickened in the years since Virginie died, the stubble beneath my wig has thinned and grey shows in the fur of my chest and groin. I tell Manon that I know I’ve ac
quired the habits middle age brings; that I eat more and taste less, I walk the same path through the gardens after lunch, lost in my thoughts and no longer see the trees and water around me. Sometimes Laurant trots at my side, very occasionally Hélène will deign to walk with me, but Tigris always comes. Her head nudging up under my hand if I ever forget she is there.

  ‘All the more reason to go.’

  ‘What about Tigris . . . ?’

  ‘You should think of your children first,’ Manon says. She prods my ribs with her elbow less gently than she could. ‘You should think of me.’

  ‘You would hate court,’ I tell her. ‘And Hélène is exactly the wrong age. As for Laurant, I’m taking him with me.’ Manon has other ideas. In the end I agree to leave Laurant to keep Tigris company. In return, Manon will protect Hélène, and I will hurry home as soon as I’m allowed. I’m required to make two promises: that I will spend as much time saying goodbye to my children as I do to my big cat, and that I will spend as long saying goodbye to my daughter as I do to my son. Rolling off Manon, which is where I’ve been while negotiating this, I kiss her cheek and feel her arms close around me.

  ‘Come back happier,’ she whispers in my ear. I tell her I will and believe it. Visiting Versailles always makes me grateful I don’t have to live there.

  ‘You are the marquis d’Aumout?’ The boy who asks is about Hélène’s age–although a boy and a girl at fourteen are very different beasts. He has the hesitancy some boys get at that age, his voice is a scratchy embarrassment. We have not met for six years but the retinue behind him proclaims his rank.

  ‘Yes, Your Highness.’

  The dauphin smiles. ‘The marquis de Caussard said you were coming. How is . . . ?’ He sees me smile in turn. ‘The old cat is well?’

  ‘The old one died, Highness. She was old and sick. But the young one is as proud as a princess.’ Behind him cour­tiers stiffen. ‘And as beautiful,’ I add hastily.

  The dauphin laughs. ‘I wish I could see her.’

  ‘I will have her portrait painted for you.’

  My promise earns me a warm smile and a slight nod that I answer with a bow, and then the prince and his entourage move on, some smiling, others casting dark glances as if the dauphin’s kindness to me offends them. A few seconds later the rose garden is empty and I can hear their voices and laughter from a fountain beyond a hedge. If anything, Versailles feels a little more crowded and looks a little more tawdry than I remember. The laughter has a sycophantic edge. Unless I am simply more jaded.

  ‘That was well done.’

  The words come from behind me, and turning I see Jerome leaning on the arm of a blonde-haired girl who looks, at first glance, little older than Hélène. When I glance again I realise she might just be in her twenties. She shares startling blue eyes and a slightly pink complexion with a young man standing behind her. Her neckline is a little too low and the velvet of his frock coat slightly faded. She drops me a curtsy so perfect she must have grown up at court. The young man’s bow is equally polished.

  ‘You can go,’ Jerome tells them and they walk from the rose garden together. The girl touches the boy on his wrist to stop him looking back.

  ‘How was your journey?’ Jerome asks me.

  ‘Long, uncomfortable, boring.’

  He laughs, as if at a joke, and asks what I know of Corsica, laughing again when I tell him the national dish is brocciu, a ricotta-like cheese made from goat’s milk. And the island is famous for the quality of its ham, which is made from pigs fed in winter on sweet chestnuts and grazed in summer on the maquis, the wild herbs of the Corsican uplands.

  ‘You’ve read Diderot’s encyclopedia.’

  ‘I wrote that entry.’

  He glances around him. ‘You understand the encyclopedia is banned?’

  ‘I understand the king has his own set, as did la pompa­dour. No doubt you have copies of your own.’

  ‘That is beside the point.’ I’d always thought he’d grow to resemble the bear we’d joked he was in our youth but Jerome looks more like a bullfrog, all puffed chest and round belly and fat cheeks. It is three years since I’ve seen Charlot and I wonder how he’s aged and whether I’ve aged this badly as well.

  ‘You’re looking fine,’ Jerome says.

  ‘And you,’ I lie in my turn.

  ‘We’ll play a hand later?’

  I remember Charlot’s warning from years before and shake my head. ‘I’m useless at cards,’ I say. ‘I always have been. You know that.’ Jerome’s patronage comes at a price in this place, you play cards and his winnings are a tax. But I want nothing from him, and he wants something from me. I don’t see why he should have my money as well.

  ‘Still the country mouse.’

  ‘Says the palace cat . . . ’

  He laughs, and nods towards a path. I follow him towards a maze and guards step back from the entrance to let us pass. They accept Jerome’s order that no one but His Majesty or the dauphin should be allowed inside. ‘Now we can talk freely,’ he says, leading me deeper, until he reaches a bench and slaps himself down and lifts his wig to wipe his skull.

  ‘This has to do with His Majesty?’

  Jerome looks at me, obviously puzzled.

  ‘I had a message that His Majesty required my presence.’

  ‘That’s a form of words,’ he says with a sigh. ‘I sent for you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I’ve bought Corsica.’

  Jerome’s story is long and complex, or maybe it’s short and simple and I’m simply too removed from politics to grasp it easily. He tells me Corsica has been a self-proclaimed republic for the last thirteen years, ruled by president Pasquale Paoli. This I know. I admire Paoli. Jerome doesn’t. As far as Jerome is concerned, Paoli is the only man in the world rash enough to let women vote in local elections. Worse than this, Paoli has established a constitution based on Voltaire. The real owner of Corsica is Genoa, only that Italian city is too weak to take it back from the rebels.

  ‘So Genoa sold its claim to you?’

  ‘Its rights,’ Jerome said. ‘But yes, basically that’s it.’

  ‘What has any of this to do with me?’

  ‘I want you to negotiate the island’s surrender.’

  ‘Jerome.’

  ‘I’m serious. The king wants this . . . ’ He caught my glance and shrugged, his shoulders heavy inside his brocade frock coat. ‘Well, I want this and the king agrees. He will raise Manon to the nobility, confirm her title as marquise, recognise as noble any children you might have . . . ’ Something must have shown in my face because he nodded. ‘Ahh,’ he said. ‘I wondered. Charlot said he thought you were simply being careful.’

  ‘We can’t have . . . ’

  ‘You can,’ Jerome said.

  ‘And Manon once did. But between us, nothing.’

  He clapped me heavily on the shoulder. ‘You have an heir. That’s enough.’

  ‘How am I to do this?’

  ‘You agree then?’

  ‘Do I have an option?’

  Jerome shook his head. ‘But I expected you to put up more of a fight.’

  The Fall

  I remember that I want to see the menagerie. Of course I do, but before we part that night, and I’m left in a squalid room that stinks so fiercely from a nearby latrine that no amount of gilded cherubs or paintings of pink-nippled shepherdesses can make good the smell, Jerome tells me he’s arranged for me to ride in the royal forest instead. This is a privilege apparently, one reserved for those in favour with the king. Two friends of his will accompany me. He knows they are looking forward to my company.

  ‘You’re sure I can’t supply you with servants?’

  My room has a commode, a basin for washing, a jug already full of tepid water. My cases have been brought up from the coach. ‘No,’ I say, shaking my head
and wishing only for some peace. ‘I can manage for myself.’

  ‘As you will.’

  Morning comes and with it a knock at my door. Jerome has sent me a serving maid whether I want one or not. She changes the water, empties my commode, draws back the curtains having asked permission. She leaves when I tell her she can go. A second knock an hour later produces a liveried messenger with a note from Jerome saying he’s waiting, and Armand and Héloïse with him, if I’d like to join them. Since I’m already wearing breeches and my riding coat I have the messenger show me to the stables, a set of low buildings I would never have found for myself.

  ‘Sleepyhead,’ Jerome says.

  There’s something forced about his greeting but I smile anyway and nod to his companions, the young man and fair-haired girl I saw briefly the day before. The boy bows and she curtsies and grooms bring out our horses, already saddled and brushed to the shine of newly fallen chestnuts. Jerome’s animal is huge, and still it dips dangerously under his bulk as he clambers onto his saddle. The young man mounts easily and I realise the girl is waiting for me to help her. She smiles her thanks and Jerome laughs.

  ‘Héloïse de Plessis,’ he says. ‘And Armand de Plessis. There’s no need for me to give your name. Everyone knows the marquis d’Aumout.’

  We set off with a single servant on his own animal, leading a second animal loaded with wicker panniers. Jerome and I lead, the other two ride behind us and the servant and the pack horse go last. Courtiers bow or nod stiffly to Jerome as he passes. He barely notices. The royal forest is a wood filled with neat little bridges over bubbling streams. A grotto squints from between mossy rocks. A spring rises high on a grassy slope where no spring could rise and trickles over gleaming gravel into a little pool below. Butterflies fill the air around us.