The Last Banquet (19 page)

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 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 hastily. 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 was 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 – which was actually cat and snake – 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 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 crumb 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 to crows. Eels from the Seine might taste subtly different to 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 newborn no longer died from the 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 to 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 Pére 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 piano 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.

1758
Hope

H
ope 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 wetnurse 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 teat 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 were 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.

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.

‘Forgive my question,’ Manon said. ‘It was insolent to ask.’

‘She almost died,’ I said fiercely. ‘He almost died too.’ Manon looked at the baby banging its head against her side. ‘He’s hungry.’

‘He’s never anything else.’

She turned without asking off the gravel into the mouth of the maze. The puzzle garden had been planted when Jean-Pierre was born and had grown, been cut, grown and been cut until the yew bushes were thick and their edges sharp. I knew the way by heart, having designed the puzzle, but I let Manon head towards a dead end, where a small bench waited for those who wanted to rest before finding their way back to try again. Laurant was grinding his face below her breast by then and mouthing at the cloth until dabs of saliva darkened it.

Nodding at the bench, I said, ‘Feed him.’

Manon sat without protest, matter-of-factly unbuttoning her shift. All I could see was the suddenly silent child and a squash of pink flesh behind. I stood and watched as my son guzzled. After a few minutes his hunger sated and he fell from the nipple, waking himself in the act of lolling. She tapped her finger to his mouth and he followed it until he found her breast again. Her nipple was the colour of raspberries from Laurent’s feeding and he drained that breast dry in the next minute before lolling back as drunk as I’ve ever been on wine. Manon hoisted him onto her shoulder and began to jiggle him until he burped. All the while keeping her arm across her chest to keep her breast hidden.