The Last Banquet (17 page)

‘You wish to manufacture and sell condoms?’

‘I want to know how they are made, how long they last, what is the best quality that can be produced.’ Pulling out my notebook, I reached into my pocket for my tiny silver inkwell, flipped open the lid and fitted a nib to the shaft of a pen, putting them all on the cleanest section of bench I could find. My actions convinced him I was serious.

‘My secrets are expensive.’

‘More expensive than other men like you?’ The price was unimportant, within reason, but there are certain rituals to be observed when dealing with someone like this.

‘There are no other men like me,’ he said flatly. ‘I am the best.’

‘Which is why I am here and not with them.’

He smiled, flattered. And named a price for his knowledge that was probably double what he expected but still less than Virginie would spend on a single dress. We settled on a little less but still enough for him to believe he’d driven a hard bargain. As we worked – and he taught me as a master teaches an apprentice, by showing me how and then making me try for myself – he lectured me on the value and uncertain history of condoms. They were named for an English earl who gave some to his king, in an effort to stop him having so many bastards; they were named for a French Colonel Cundum; they were old as history itself; they were relatively new. It seemed their history was whatever the customer wanted it to be. ‘Take the lamb’s intestine and wash it in water for several hours . . .’ He scowled as my mouth opened for a question and then he shrugged. I was paying him.

‘Does it have to be lamb?’

‘Lamb is traditional.’ He considered the point. ‘But I can see no reason why you should not use another animal if the idea of lamb offends you.’

I nodded for him to go on.

‘After washing, mash it gently in a weak solution of lye.’ He tapped the bucket of milky liquid. ‘And then turn it inside out and mash it again. After that, scrape away the sticky membrane very, very carefully, and then we do this.’ He took the scrap of entrail from me and led me outside, where he used wooden tongs to hold my offering and threw a small handful of sulphur onto a hot plate, pushing the tongs into the smoke. ‘Now wash it in soap and water, blow it up to check for holes and tie it off at six or seven inches. You have a
baudruche.
’ The man looked at my offering, and rolled his eyes. ‘One so bad I doubt I could even give it away but a
baudruche
all the same.’

‘And how do I make it better?’

‘You practise.’

‘No, how do I make it better than the ones you sell? How do I make it cleaner, thinner, more supple? How do I make it
better
?’ He sighed. Another gold coin later I left with the knowledge of which bit of entrail was best to use, and a secret method for preparing this bit supposedly known only to the condom-maker to the Ottoman sultan and the man teaching me. I also left with the address of a glass-maker who would and, apparently, frequently did make dildos for the finest families. The glass-maker was where I headed early next morning, and it was only after explaining exactly what I wanted, which was a life-size dildo, no larger and no smaller, correctly shaped and mounted upright on a wooden base like a small statue, that I found the market the Moors had mentioned, in the shadow of a shipyard.

‘That,’ I said. ‘What kind of goat is it?’

The old man I addressed looked for help to a boy who hurried over to act as his grandfather’s translator, or great-uncle’s, or whatever the relationship was. They were undoubtedly family, sharing cheekbones and mouths in the way Charlot and Virginie shared deep-set and ridiculously beautiful eyes. ‘It’s a sheep that looks like a goat.’

The animal’s horns were large and swept out and backwards, its throat, chest and front legs covered with long yellowy-brown hair. Its tail hung to its heels. It looked like a goat to me. ‘Smell it,’ the boy said at a whisper from the old man.

The old man was right. The animal lacked a goat’s distinctive stench and, now I looked closely, it lacked the beard as well. Other than that, it was so goat-like as to be indistinguishable. Nearby stood two bleating kids and their mother. ‘What do you call them?’ I wrote
Arudi
in my notebook and agreed a price for their delivery to my hotel, payment on delivery.

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 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 eggplant, cut into slices and squeeze between two plates with a small weight on top to remove sourness (drain away any liquid). Now sear meat in frying marinade mix to seal, adding extra olive oil if necessary, then add peppers and eggplant, 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.

*
There is a naturally-occurring pouch in intestines where the big and small intestines meet, called the caecum, which is ideally shaped for the human male member. Unlike condoms made from lengths of intestine, those fashioned from caecum do not require tying, sewing or sealing at the top. This makes them more comfortable. All condoms can be soaked in milk or water before use but the best redingotes Anglaise-maker in Marseilles recommends dressing caecum condoms only with first-pressing olive oil.
Wash well after use and hang out to dry.

1748
Charlot Marries

T
he 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
legitimée 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 knew 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 to a steady pace. Gearing was used to adjust the speed. An artist from Paris came down at the king’s demand 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.