The Last Banquet (21 page)

I bowed, she curtsied.

‘The lions,’ Jerome said firmly. ‘We’re off to see the lions.’

If the palace was a zoo for people the menagerie at Versailles was a walled city for animals; entered through a huge arch and laid out in the baroque style with roads radiating from a two-storey central pavilion. Houses for animals had brick on three sides, and bars on the side facing the central pavilion. There were woodland areas for wolves, and an enclosure for ostriches where the ground had been scratched bare. Many of the enclosures within the walled city were filled with exotic birds, their wings clipped to stop them flying away.

‘Don’t say it . . .’

‘What?’ I looked at Jerome, who was regarding a field of tired-looking flamingos with something approaching sadness. His answer was halted by the sight of a uniformed keeper who bustled towards us and bowed low when he recognised Jerome.

‘My lord, I had no idea you were visiting.’

‘We’re here to see the lions. Well,’ Jerome ruffled Laurant’s hair, something my son usually hated, but the boy just grinned, ‘he is.’

‘Of course, of course.’

We were led through a crowd of courtiers watching an elephant being bathed and all bowed low to Jerome, and again to me, because being with Jerome obviously meant I mattered. I noticed this dance of politeness and deceit more these days. The bowing, the curtsies, the words used to turn aside questions and hide lies. When I said this without thinking to Jerome, as I would have said it without thinking at school, he stopped to look at me.

‘My country mouse,’ he said. ‘You should avoid the cats of the city.’

I flushed, because in part it was true. Life at Chateau d’Aumout had softened me and removed my ability to cope with crowds. The press around me, the number of people, the stink in the air . . . Jerome barely noticed but I did.

‘You think this is bad,’ Jerome said, when I complained of the smell. ‘Inside the palace is worse. The air here smells like a spring meadow compared to the stink in any of the corridors. Men piss against walls, women squat in cupboards rather than go outside into the rain. And the dogs, all those endless little dogs, they shit everywhere.’ He saw my horror and smiled. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘You can see for yourself.’

Laurant loved the lions, as I knew he would.

His Majesty had five of them, the biggest collection of any king in Europe. The male lay in lazy splendour while his wives circled slowly and occasionally snarled and bared their teeth at each other. There were no cubs, though the uniformed keeper said he was still hopeful. After the lions, Laurant was taken to see a rhinoceros and an anteater. The latest of the lions was a present from the Bey of Algiers, the rhinoceros the gift of some African king. The wolves came from Russia, but were the children of the children of the children of those originally sent.

‘And here we have the tigers,’ the uniformed keeper said.

I knew from the way he said it that there was a problem. Jerome, of course, barely noticed. He had always had an ability to ignore anything unpleasant unless put directly under his nose. An enviable talent for someone living here. Peering through the bars, Laurant wrinkled his own nose and looked uncertain. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

A huge tigress lay in one corner licking her front leg, which was raw almost to the bone. A cub, perhaps older than a cub, circled the straw in front of her, occasionally bumping into a water bowl left in the middle of the floor.

‘She’s dying,’ the keeper said.

Laurant’s lip trembled.

‘You shouldn’t have shown him this.’ Jerome’s voice was sharp. ‘There are happier sights, animals he’d be glad to see.’

‘My lord.’ The keeper bowed his apology, then hesitated. ‘My lord, what should I do about . . . ?’ He indicated the sick animal.

‘Let it die.’

‘It may take months, my lord. And the dauphin’s son . . .’ ‘What has His Highness to do with this?’

‘He cannot bear to see the tigress suffer, my lord. Because of this he has stopped visiting the menagerie . . .’ The dauphin’s son was a shy boy of seven or eight, given to tears and only important because his eldest brother had fallen from his rocking horse the previous year, taken a fever and died. Although in his early thirties, the dauphin had consumption. Suddenly Louis-Auguste was next in line after his sick father. Before this he had been virtually ignored.

Jerome looked worried.

‘And the cub?’ I demanded. ‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘Blind, my lord. Almost entirely. She came to us in her mother’s belly and it was a rough trip for both by all accounts.’ The mother was a gift from an Indian prince we had been bribing or threatening. The man was now dead, overthrown by his nephew with help from the English. His offering remained, as unhappy, flyblown and worthless as his memory.

‘Do what you need to,’ Jerome ordered.

Everyone except Laurant knew a death sentence had just been passed for both animals. I thought of the sullen beast caught in the musket fire of soldiers afraid to come too close, of a pistol held to the cub’s head. I’ll be honest, it was not entirely for my son’s sake I spoke out. I wondered about the taste of tiger meat and knew both carcases would be wasted.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Send the beast to me . . . No, I’ll take both with me.’ The plan formed as I thought about it. Turning to Jerome, I said, ‘Tell his young Highness the tiger and her cub have gone to live happily in the country – where the air will make her better. I will write to him of her happiness in her old age.’

‘Jean-Marie . . .’

‘I have the space, the gardens are walled . . . We can find her somewhere to live out her days. The cub will do well enough and being blind will limit her range.’

‘You’re serious about this?’

I nodded. Laurant was grinning, at the thought of having a tiger at home, most probably. And Manon, whom I’d almost forgotten was there, was watching me with a slightly strange expression. I raised my eyebrows, inviting her to speak. The woman hesitated, glanced at Jerome and said, ‘Do you mean to make it travel in the coach with us?’

Jerome roared with laughter, but I knew that was not what had been in her mind, and resolved to find out what had been later. Laurant was tugging my hand.

‘In the coach,’ he begged. ‘In the coach.’

‘There’s not room,’ Jerome said diplomatically. ‘She would need a carriage of her own . . . We’ll lend you one.’ He turned to the uniformed keeper and said. ‘There must be a cage on wheels or somesuch we could use?’

The man hurried off to find it.

‘Show the comte the lions again.’ Understanding that Jerome meant Laurant, Manon glanced to me for approval and then hurried off, leaving me with my old school friend, who began smiling. ‘You never cease to impress me.’

I wondered what he found impressive but he was still busy smiling. A moment later, he clapped me on the back so hard I stumbled forward and had to grab the bars. The tiger snarled and her cub looked round but that was it.

Felis tigris
said their plaque.

‘Which one’s felis?’ Jerome laughed to show it was a joke and he remembered enough Latin to know this was their species. But I liked the conceit and decided that should be their names: the mother would be Felis and the cub Tigris.

‘Lord Master of the Menagerie . . . I can’t believe I didn’t think of it for myself. You have no idea how hard it is to keep coming up with new positions.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Perhaps a Lord Master of the Gardens. A Lord Master of the King’s Maze. I’ll need to think, there must be others. This war with the English is ruining us. How much will you give?’

I looked at him.

‘For the position of Lord Master of the Menagerie? Don’t worry, there will be no official duties and you don’t even have to live here if you don’t want, since the king hasn’t demanded it . . .’

‘Jerome, I can give you nothing.’

He scowled in a way I remembered from school. A sudden black cloud that could lead to a fight or blow over. This one blew over as he considered my position. The chateau was mine, given me, as he probably knew, through the good graces of the old duc de Saulx, Virginie’s father. The monies from the rents kept me in hunters, books and small objet d’art. They even allowed me to save enough for a porcelain dinner service, which had been my aim for the last five years. This was not the kind of sum that would interest the comptroller of the king’s household, and even if it was, I wanted the china more. But I wanted the tiger also, and that must have shown in my eyes because Jerome sighed and chewed at a nail. ‘Say the position came with an income of seven and a half thousand livres . . . Let’s be generous and make it ten thousand. Say you were to remit this income to my office for ten years . . .’

‘You pay me but I don’t take the money?’

Jerome nodded happily. ‘That would work and it would set a price for similar new positions at court, which is always useful.’ He thrust out his hand and I took it, feeling his fingers fold around mine as we shook on this strange agreement. As always he had the strength of a bear.

I stayed one night at Versailles, in a guest room provided on Jerome’s orders. My chamber was grand but dusty, foulsmelling from a flowerbed below my window used by many as a latrine. I saw a procession of buttocks that evening, female and male, quickly bared and wiped and put away. I have no idea where Manon and Laurant slept but it was not in the same corridor. In my time at Versailles I ate a breakfast of brioche and cream, an afternoon picnic of chicken breast in aspic, ending the day with pork loin in puff pastry served with clove-spiced apple purée. The brioche melted on the tongue, the chicken was perfectly carved and obviously fresh – and the pork and pastry confection was so hideously overcooked I had the first taste again to make sure. All the food from the kitchens seemed to have an underlying sourness. I wondered if I imagined this so perfectly did it mirror how I felt about the palace? I was about to ask Jerome what he thought of the pork he was cramming into his mouth and swallowing, without chewing or tasting, when I realised he could tell me nothing useful. In an hour he wouldn’t even remember whether it was pork or lamb.

The next morning, quite unexpectedly – to me at least – I was introduced to the dauphin’s son as the man who would be giving the sick tiger a happy home. The small boy peered at me nervously, glanced at his grandmother, glanced back and risked a smile. The queen, a round-faced Polish woman, was so surprised she also smiled. Courtiers and servants alike bowed me out of the palace.

To celebrate my new post as Lord Master of the Menagerie I ordered a 200-piece set of Chinese porcelain from the English East India Company, paying their agent half in advance. It was to bear the d’Aumout coat of arms on the rim and a lion, tiger, elephant, rhinoceros or giraffe on the main part of the plate. They were to be painted by local artists from engravings I included with my order.

The porcelain took many months to arrive. Felis and her cub arrived rather sooner. They were with us within the week. Virginie was appalled and Hélène scared but Laurant loved them both. He called Felis
old cat
and Tigris
new cat
and petted the second and helped me dress the sores of the first. I was proud of him.

1763
Virginie

T
he porcelain dining set with the d’Aumout arms arrived over a year after I ordered it. It had been carried, I was told, by Chinese barge and river boat and on the backs of peasants across wild mountains before being loaded into more river boats and barges to be carried to the coast and loaded onto an English merchantman. It was thus delivered to Bristol from where a French lugger arranged by Emile carried it to Bordeaux from where I went to collect it myself, taking Laurant to see the boats and Manon to look after him while I was busy. Three pieces out of two hundred broke on a journey that took my plates halfway round the world.

I paid the captain for transporting my cargo from England, and stopped at my bank to remit the other half of the original costs to the East India Company’s agent in London. Then I had the strange Chinese boxes loaded onto my own carts – well-packed in straw – and sent them back to Chateau d’Aumout with outriders to keep them safe. I kept three plates and three cups from the crate I’d opened last, and we ate our supper from these in the upper room of a hotel I’d taken for myself that morning, having arrived early and told the owner to accept no further guests and dismiss those he already had. My fear was that the mayor of Bordeaux or governor of the province might hear of my presence and offer me lodgings at their mansions. I had no desire to stay with them nor with the bishop nor any of the local dignitaries. The owner of the hotel glanced doubtfully at my gilded coach with its brightly painted coat of arms when I said I expected my arrival to pass unnoticed, but shut his courtyard gates and warned his servants not to gossip.

His wife took Laurant for the day, I went to oversee the unloading of my porcelain and Manon went to the market at my suggestion, returning with fresh Brie, new-made bread and a fist-sized lump of unsalted butter tied in the muslin in which it had been lifted from the churn. That night we ate at an oak table in my room, Manon, Laurant and me. The table rocked slightly when I leant on it until Manon stuffed the butter muslin under the shortest leg, watched by a dim reflection of herself in a dusty and flyspecked glass.

‘Sleep now,’ I told Laurant.

He looked up from his bread and his head drooped with tiredness before his mouth could open to protest. Smiling, Manon scooped him up and carried him to a side room. I could hear her chatter and the silence as my son knelt by his bed to say his prayers. She returned, still smiling, and sat when I indicated.

‘I should sleep soon, my lord. If you’re finished with me.’ Her figure had filled a little in the years she’d been with us, her skin had improved and her hair was almost always clean. Breadcrumbs dusted the front of her dress and she blushed when I leant forward to brush them away. Something put the taste of milk into my mouth and I felt my groin stir as memory matched the taste to that afternoon in the maze when I employed her. She said nothing when I reached for the buttons of her dress. Perhaps she always knew it would come to this. It occurred to me that maybe the easy companionship I found in her company was false and intended to bring me here. Then again, maybe it was real, because without it I’d have coaxed her into my bed long before. Everyone at Chateau d’Aumout assumed I already had.