The Last Banquet (33 page)

She looks to see if she’s being mocked, but I’m already making notes about her heritage below the four or five recipes she’s given me, and she decides I mean what I say.

‘How does alligator stew taste?’

‘Like leathery chicken.’

I can’t help but sigh.

To cook Celeste’s alligator stew

Fillet three pounds of alligator tail and put to one side. Make a basic oil-and-flour roux, using enough brown flour to stiffen a small wine glass of oil. Add three sliced onions, two red capsicum and two celery stalks and cook until the onion is clear. To this mixture add eight diced tomatoes and cook for another fifteen minutes. Once cooked, add enough fresh water to leave a thick sauce. Now add two crushed cloves of garlic, the juice of one lime, a teaspoon of salt, a tablespoon of dried and well-ground chillies, a glass of dry white wine, and another eight tomatoes that have been boiled to pulp with back pepper, strong treacle and half a glass of brandy. Cut alligator meat into inch squares and put into pan, ensuring the sauce covers the meat completely. Return to the boil and cook for at least three hours, adding water if necessary.
Tastes like leathery chicken.

Further questioning reveals alligator to be a white meat with a red-meat consistency, somewhat like chicken but with the texture of beef, and, if anything, a little denser and so needing a longer marinate or a slower stewing. Apparently it sits well with dried chillies and should always be served
piquanté.
I tell Celeste crocodile tastes more like turkey, in that the meat is dry and slightly musty. But that if one draws a cross – and I drew a cross – and divides the sections into chicken, beef, mutton and pork then it definitely falls within chicken but close to the line signifying the border with pork. I show her the pages of my latest journal, where recipes are categorised into four food groups – fish, fowl, meat and plant – and arranged alphabetically within each.

‘This has a purpose beyond taxonomy?’ she asks, before adding, ‘Which has a value, obviously,’ and looking to see if she has offended me. I tell her those who come after me will put a value on what I’ve done with my life. Either that or they’ll judge it worthless. Celeste smiles and takes my arm as we make our way downstairs to find the others.

We walk in the gardens, all of us together. Occasionally, one or two of us will sit and the others will keep walking until those sitting are out of sight. Manon likes Mr Franklin’s company and I find myself impressed by Celeste’s fierce intelligence. I imagine Versailles must do more than bore her. She must find it stifling. In an overgrown maze I had planted for Virginie I kiss Celeste, who seems neither surprised nor offended and kisses me back. She grips my wrist when I begin to raise her petticoats until I explain that I want only her taste and she relents. Mr Franklin smiles when he sees me later.

The week passes pleasantly and makes more of an impression on my memory than most of my recent weeks, which my mind discards as repetitions of weeks that have gone before and so in need of no memory. Celeste holds my arm as she walks, Mr Franklin leans on Manon and she steadies him a little as we make our way down the red brick steps at the back of the terrace. We’re about to see an animal killed, among other things.

Celeste shrugs when I say this and tells me she watched her father slaughter hogs back home when she was a child, and Mr Franklin tells me he’d been taught to wring a chicken’s neck, pluck it and gut it by the time he was seven. I say those are the skills we should be teaching our children and he laughs. ‘Tell me more about this experiment of yours.’

‘You can see it for yourself . . .’ We walk round the side towards the stables and the outhouses beyond. Tigris walks at my side, her head under my hand.

‘Who’s guiding whom?’ Franklin asked.

‘We guide each other.’

He smiles at my answer but stops in the door of the slaughter yard, suddenly uncertain. The gazelle stands in the middle of the yard, back legs already tied. Her sweep of horns curves back more elegantly than any sketch can capture; but her trembling is more than nervousness, her horns too heavy for all they’re beautiful. She’s grown too old and too tired to hold up her head.

‘Jean-Marie . . .’

‘It’s her time,’ I tell Manon. In one corner a huge range heats a copper cauldron big enough for me to bathe. Steam already rises from the water inside. The third part of today’s experiment is hidden in the shed. Usually it would be ready but I don’t want to ruin Mr Franklin’s surprise. He is looking carefully at a tripod crane I will use later. He looks with the keen gaze of someone who has carried out his own share of experiments.

‘My lord . . .’ A slaughter-man brings a bowl of entrails from something killed earlier and stops a safe distance from Tigris, who raises her head and sniffs the air, milky eyes restless. I decide it would be better if she remains outside the yard and lead her back the way we came.

‘She’ll be safe?’ Mr Franklin asks me.

‘No one will disturb her.’

His bark of laughter says that was not his worry.

‘She’ll sleep,’ I say. ‘After eating she always sleeps.’ Taking his arm, I turn him back to the door into the yard and we go in together. The men are waiting. It is a blue-skied day, the kind you remember for ever as a child, and welcome for the ease it brings when old, for all it lacks the significance it once had. Celeste asks what I’m thinking.

‘You’re not old,’ she says, when I tell her. ‘Now show Ben your experiment. He likes things like this.’ She’s right, he’s watching closely.

They kill the gazelle cleanly. Now is the real moment. The doors to the brick shed open and two men drag out a hand cart.

‘A jar?’ Mr Franklin asks.

‘Bound tight with strips of canvas.’

He walks to the edge of the cart and feels the thickness of the glass jar and looks carefully at its canvas swaddling. He’s already worked out what the canvas does and I let him tell me. He’s right, like rope wound round an old cannon, it helps to stop the glass from shattering under the pressure and heat. Mostly it does. Not every glass survives boiling. I tell Celeste we could buy a farm with what that jar cost and Manon’s glance is sharp. ‘It will become cheaper,’ I say hastily, ‘as more jars are made and the glass foundry perfects the art. Knowledge always comes at a price.’

Mr Franklin is looking thoughtful. His face is heavy and the flesh beneath his chin rests on the starched linen of his stock. I suspect he looks better as an old man than he did when young, as if the ruined grandeur of his face was something he had to prove the right to inherit. An experimenter himself, he can see the work that has gone into this. My butchers work fast, and the newly skinned, gutted and beheaded animal is manhandled into the jar. A block and tackle then lifts the jar high enough to be lowered into the cauldron. Men scramble up ladders to tip in buckets of brine until it is almost full and then a huge cork seal is wrestled into place and hammered down. Now it must simmer, although I’m not sure for how long. Half a week perhaps. If that’s not enough I’ll try a week for something this size next time.

‘I understand the theory,’ Mr Franklin says. ‘But what’s your aim?’

‘To make good food widely available the whole year round and abolish famine. Let me show you . . .’ We head back to the chateau, Tigris rising sleepily to her feet and falling into step as I pass. There is still blood in her bowl and on the gravel behind us but she has licked her face clean. In the larder the air is chill and the flagstones cold under our feet, the shelves around us laden with glass jars and resting cheeses. Wind-dried hams hang from the ceiling, mixed with strings of onion and garlic. Sacks of potatoes rest by a wall.

‘Remind me to talk to you about those,’ I say.

Mr Franklin nods, eyes fixed on our prize. A young warthog is upended in a jar, bristly-skinned and madly grinning through murky brine, its head twisted grotesquely. Evidence of the accident that killed it. Until today this was my biggest experiment. I would have liked to bottle the gazelle whole too, but her beautiful horns prevented it.

‘Would you like to . . . ?’

Celeste looks at the hammer and chisel I take from a shelf and shakes her head. Mr Franklin tells me I should have the honour. So I chip away the sealing wax with which the cork is fixed and prise the lid free. The brine smells sweet enough and no foulness rises from the warthog as I dunk my arm in the liquid to my elbow, jab the chisel into the warthog’s shoulder and rip flesh away. Celeste, Mr Franklin and Manon shake their heads when I hold it out, their movements synchronised and unconscious. We say we want new experiences, but the opposite is true, and ever more so as we grow older. Tigris wrinkles her nose at the saltiness of the morsel so I eat it myself. The pork is as bland and near-tasteless as only pig can be when boiled without herbs or spices. ‘A year,’ I say. ‘That’s how long it’s been in here. Just think . . . With this method we can keep meat indefinitely. Store it in times of plenty against the famines to come.’

‘Like Joseph,’ Celeste says. ‘With his dream of seven rich years and seven lean.’

‘Exactly like that,’ Mr Franklin says. He claps me on the shoulder. ‘A noble idea,’ he tells me. ‘A worthy experiment.’

I’ve been worried this week has been about more than my company or sight of my experiments, and now I’m certain. When he suggests we take a walk round the garden as there’s something he wants to ask me, I’m not even surprised.

‘What is it?’

I stare at our bedroom ceiling, seeing the light of the candle flame lap at the darkness with every flicker of the wick. Cobwebs in one corner show where a maid has been lax in her duties.

‘Jean Marie . . .’ Manon speaks sharply. Something she only does when we’re alone. ‘What is troubling you?’

I could say what troubles me is the way she touches the back of Mr Franklin’s hand, and the way he leans in to listen to her speak, but then she could charge me with the attentions I’ve been paying to Celeste, who has a mind as sharp as a freshly-stropped razor, flesh like velvet and a taste like sour honey. And yet, what rankles hurts more than anything that might have passed between Mr Franklin and my wife. He is here because of Charlot, now one of the great ministers of the realm. Ben has been told, and he tells me he believes what he has been told, that I have influence with Charlot in a way few others have. I say Charlot is my friend, quite possibly my only real friend and, complex as that friendship sometimes is, I will do nothing that could harm him. Mr Franklin assures me that what he wants from Charlot can only add to his greatness. He wants me to write a letter asking Charlot to reconsider.

‘Reconsider what?’ I ask.

It seems Charlot is opposing additional aid to the Americas. He says the kingdom cannot afford it, and Jerome agrees; but the marquis de Caussard quibbles at the cost of everything and it is to Charlot that the new king will listen. Mr Franklin wants me – as a good man, as a modern man – to write to Charlot and say supporting America is something we should do. We should offer aid. More than this, we should enter a military alliance, and sign an accord that neither side will make peace with England without the other. In addition, American independence must be a non-negotiable condition of that peace.

Charlot can persuade the king and Mr Franklin believes I can persuade Charlot. He has travelled all this way to plead his cause with me. He has been summoning his courage all week to ask me to do this. He hopes that I will understand and agree.

‘Why did you think he was here?’ Manon asks.

‘You knew he wanted this?’ I sit up with the shock of that thought, swing my bare legs out into the cold air and stop on the edge of the bed, uncertain where my feet should take me.

‘I knew he wanted something. It was obvious. Why else would he come?’

‘To see my experiments.’

Manon tucks herself behind me, rests her chin on my shoulders and wraps her arms around me as she always did when she was young. ‘My poor boy,’ she says. ‘There is a war on. The American colonies are fighting for their lives. They have more important things to think about than how to grow potatoes or bottle a gazelle . . .’ We sit like that for some minutes, and then she reaches down to find me. I crawl back into bed and fall asleep between her thighs and wake in her arms. As always when I wake like that the world seems kinder.

1784
The Loris

T
he Treaty of Alliance with the Americas was signed the following spring at the Hôtel de Crillon, with the approval of King Louis XVI and in the presence of Charles, duc de Saulx. Nine weeks after that, on 17th March 1778, my daughter’s husband informed the English government in London that France recognised the United States of America as an independent nation and ally forever. I wrote asking her to congratulate him on his part in history. She didn’t bother to reply. It occurred to me then that both my children had deserted France, not that I blamed them. Hélène had her life in London. Laurant lived in his ship, wherever that took him, which seemed to be everywhere but here. I didn’t blame them. The sourness I’d first tasted in the air at Versailles years earlier had spread across France like malign marsh fog. Where there had been misery there was now misery and anger. I began to believe that only a truly fierce wind could strip away its sourness.

A few years later I said that to a neighbour at a Christmas party and he looked at the people around us and said he didn’t understand what I meant. Shortly afterwards, just before the party ended, he found me alone and told me he agreed. Charlot wrote in the spring to say I was being watched by the police and should guard my words. I asked by reply how he knew, and he told me by return that they reported to him and I’d do well to concentrate on my animals. I wrote back suggesting he concentrate on his – since the inhabitants of my zoo were better-housed, bettertreated and better-tempered. His reply was typically Charlot: to take my mind off sedition he was sending me an oddity a distant sultan had sent to the king.

‘My lord . . .’

I looked up from my desk and made myself smile. The servants would have preferred that I left my study door shut and made them knock, so I could growl at them to go away or hurry up and come in. Sometimes I think half the ritual in our houses is for their benefit. I might need girls to carry water from the kitchen for my bath. But a woman to oversee them, overseen by my housekeeper, overseen by my master-of-house? The man who warms the towels, the man who brings my tea, and my valet . . . Never mind the underfootmen waiting outside my bathroom door. And they wonder why I hide in my study.