Tigris looks up as I enter my study, her head to one side as she waits for my voice, but I give her only silence. The noise of the sans-culottes is louder now. They are inside the chateau, outraged at finding all the doors from the hall locked. I hope that I have left enough time and decide I have. It would have been good to be able to say a proper goodbye to Tigris but then what would be the point of washing so thoroughly? And I should have done it earlier if I wanted to do it at all.
Now, I think, do it now. But first there is this to say.
This is where I have to stop writing and let you imagine the rest.
Putting down the pen I pick up the razor I used to shave my head and check the edge, already knowing it is sharp. Then I check that my study door is locked and slip the robe from my shoulders and return to my chair, pulling it a little further into the middle of the room. I’m sitting naked in my chair with the razor in my hand, and Tigris is restless and growing upset. Her tail twitches and her eyes flick in irritation at the noise outside and the silence in here. Opening the razor, I watch it gleam in the candlelight, because it’s getting dark now and I’ve lit a candle. Virginie liked candles, Manon also. Women do. I smile, but not sadly. I’ve lived too long and been too lucky to die sad.
Tigris and I have shared what came to me from Versailles, and the offal from the bullocks killed to feed guests at my chateau. It occurs to me, what should have occurred to me before this: she is my closest companion. They say every man—and, for all I know, every woman—has one great love. I have always thought Virginie was mine, and Manon the peace that came after. Now I wonder if Tigris is not the greatest of my loves. The only one that’s really lasted. Men are killed for tasting human flesh and so are tigers. I have tasted this flesh, and Tigris has not. It will not matter to her if this is a meal she has eaten before in the way it matters to me. But she is hungry and I am ready.
There is courage in resignation but what I do now takes little courage. If I had free choice of how to end my life, this is how I would have chosen that it ends. Years ago I made a ragoût from meat cut from Tigris’s mother’s flank. The meat needed slow cooking for several hours to make it tender, and strong seasoning to make its sourness palatable, but I fried it first with onions and that seems to work for everything from tiger to rat.
Now it is Tigris’s turn. The poor animal is hungry and I can see no reason why she should not have one last meal. Drawing the razor diagonally across my wrist so that blood wells but I don’t bleed out too fast, I let blood drip to the carpet and watch Tigris’s nose twitch. She freezes for a second the way she always does when she smells food. She’s puzzled. She thinks it’s me in here with her, but she’s no longer entirely sure. Most of my smell is gone and I’m not talking to her as I would usually do, and now there’s the smell of blood, and she’s hungry. I at least have been hungry my entire life. I cut again a second time and a third, wincing at the pain, which is sharper than I had imagined. The fur along her back has risen now. Her head has turned to face me directly and she sinks low to the ground. I know what she looks like resting. This is not Tigris resting.
We are here, where we were always destined to be.
Some of this book is written on paper, some of it is simply the wash of my memories, much of it you have filled in for yourself. I thank you for listening to the ghost of a life now gone from a world that is dying. And though it pains me to believe it, deserves to die. The mob will ransack my chateau, rebuild it in time and as I’ve already said, one of them will become me. I wish it were different but suspect this is the truth of it. I want, more than anything, to say goodbye to Tigris. I want this more than I want to say goodbye to Manon or Hélène or my son. It cannot be. Gripping the razor one final time, I dig deep into my flesh in a vertical cut that opens an artery in the second before Tigris pounces. I fed on her mother, she feeds on me. Justice is served and the circle closed. I would live it all again.
Endnotes
Note 1
This work, reputedly the journal of Jean-Marie, soi-disant marquis d’Aumout, was found among the possessions of Citizen Duras, mayor of Limoges, following the execution of the Citizen Mayor for treason.
Note 2
Returned to Admiral Laurant d’Aumout, marquis d’Aumout, trusted confidant of l’empereur, on the orders of the president of the General Council of the Gironde.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my agent Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown, who stayed up one night to read the first draft of a novel then called Taste; Francis Bickmore, Editorial Director of Canongate, who telephoned part way through reading the newly renamed Master of the Menagerie, to say he loved the characters and would probably bid but wasn’t mad about the title; Lorraine McCann, for a stunningly good copy edit of what had become The Last Banquet; and finally, Sam Baker, for whom this book was written.
I jotted down the novel’s outline in a café over fifteen years ago, on a strip of paper torn from a napkin. (By which time Sam and I’d known each other for ten years and been married five.) I folded the strip into the back of a notebook, knowing I wasn’t grown up enough or good enough to write it. Over the following fifteen years I took it out twice, deciding both times I still wasn’t ready. At the start of this year I went hunting for the notebook, and with Sam’s encouragement started writing. This is the result.
Jonathan Grimwood December 2012
About the Author
Jonathan Grimwood has written for The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph and The Independent and numerous other magazines and newspapers. The Last Banquet is his first work of literary fiction. He divides his time between London and Winchester.
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