The Last Banquet (8 page)

‘The philosopher’s question.’

Charlot’s grin was approving. ‘And when?’ he said.

‘I was five, maybe six . . .’ I was too ashamed to say they’d starved to death in the ruins of a house they’d mortgaged deep into debt. ‘My brother died in the Lowlands. They’d bought him a commission in the cavalry. It was his first battle. They never recovered.’

‘They died of grief ?’

I shrugged. It was better than hunger.

Charlot looked at Jerome, who shrugged in his turn.

‘And your home?’ Charlot persisted.

‘Ransacked,’ I said. It was a grand word for a slow procession of shuffling
jacques
who wouldn’t meet my gaze, if they bothered to look in my direction at all. They’d arrived like ants, in a line, carrying away whatever they could on their backs. The house, the stables and the outbuildings had been stripped bare by the time le Régent arrived. I had no idea why they didn’t take the horse. Looking up, I realised I still had the room’s attention whether I wanted it or not. ‘By peasants. The duc d’Orleans hung them.’

‘Le Régent?’

‘He found my mother and father dead.’

‘And you?’ Jerome asks. ‘You were where?’

‘Eating beetles.’ Seeing his surprise, I say, ‘I was hungry. I was five.’

They nod, the boys in that room. They nod and mutter comments from the corner of their mouths, and someone offers me a slice of cake, as if I might be hungry still. The talk turns to what they’ve brought from home – cakes and cheeses, fresh bread, dried dates, a sweetmeat made from egg white and candied fruit – and I realise this school, this college, has proper holidays and pupils who have real homes. Emile no longer seems so exotic.

‘I didn’t know we were allowed to bring food,’ he whispers.

‘You will next time.’

The fight that night is fierce and ritualised.

The bigger boys face off against each other, the smaller boys match themselves – those, like Emile, who don’t really want to fight at all, find others who feel the same and pretend. We let them creep into our dorm an hour after lights out and then throw ourselves from our beds before the attack can properly begin. It is a night campaign and we fight in furious silence by the light of the moon through three long windows along one wall. A thickset boy punches me and flinches as I punch back. He hesitates and I punch again, seeing him clasp his hand to his mouth and look for an easier target. My stomach is a knot and my legs are shaking. I feel no excitement at the fight. I want to hide.

It is over in a handful of minutes.

Charlot stands, unbloodied. Jerome stands beside him with a swollen lip and a ferocious look on his face, his hands clenched into huge fists. He has the build of a cart horse. I stand slightly behind them, not ferocious and not unbloodied, but standing and ready. The rest crowd behind us and wait to see what happens next.

A boy with curls to his shoulders steps forward. ‘You,’ he says, looking at Charlot. ‘What’s your name?’

‘De Saulx,’ Charlot says. ‘This is de Caussard, and this d’Aumout . . .’

The boy scowls as if wanting to match our names to our faces. ‘This is Richelieu,’ he says, naming the house to which we’ve been assigned. ‘We win. We win at everything. You let us down and we’ll be back.’

‘And we’ll be waiting,’ Jerome says heavily.

‘We won’t let the house down,’ Charlot says. The boy takes it that Charlot speaks for all of us and that’s fine because he does. The older boys file out in silence and we hear them on the stairs. Common sense makes us wait to see if it’s a feint and they plan to return to finish what they’ve started but that’s it, the battle is done. None of the masters ask about our bruised lips and black eyes but I see the colonel at a distance in a corridor and he smiles.

Unlike my last school the masters change according to subject. They are severe, mostly military, and leave us alone if we do our work and give the right answers. I follow Charlot’s example and read the books I’m told to read, work out what is likely to be asked and read enough to answer those questions only. My marks are good. My horsemanship, almost as bad as Emile’s when we start, improves week by week. I enjoy sword work – the clash of steel, the noise of our practise, the chatter of the showers and the lazy exhaustion that takes us afterwards. They work us hard. They work us hard at everything.

That Christmas I spend with Emile and his family. A quiet week filled with questions about the academy and our new friends. Madame Duras seems content with our answers and impressed with the casual way Emile talks about the marquis de Saulx and the vicome de Caussard and a few of the others, as if they’re the closest of friends. Just occasionally I feel him watching me as if worried I’ll contradict and say they’re my friends really, but he grows more confident as the week progresses, and why shouldn’t he claim their friendship? We go around in a group of four and if occasionally I find Charlot regarding Emile as if examining an interesting specimen . . . Well, he uses that expression often, sometimes on me. I am the dung-hill philosopher, without family or home, and to the best of his belief content with that.

Charlot lives in a huge chateau, obviously. One of several belonging to his family. His mother is beautiful, his father is brave, his family are rich beyond belief. In someone less cavalier the idle boasting would grate. Somehow Charlot carries it off. He takes our homage and protects us lazily. If a Richelieu boy in our year is in trouble with an older boy, Charlot deals with it. He treats everyone as his equal: those younger than him, those older than him, even masters. It takes me two terms to realise he barely sees servants. Another term to realise no one else in my year sees them either. Even Emile learns to look through them. I stop to talk to a red-haired laundry maid and she’s so shocked she turns scarlet and rushes away. She’s young, probably no older than me. The next time she sees me she turns on her heels and hurries back the way she came.

‘Jean-Marie . . .’ Charlot and Jerome are in the corridor behind me. ‘You can’t make friends with loons,’ Charlot scolds. It’s the name we use for servants.

‘He doesn’t want to
make friends
,’ Jerome says.

I blush. ‘She’s a person.’

Charlot rolls his eyes. Jerome smirks. They next time we see her, both of them are exaggeratedly polite and she retreats with tears in her eyes. ‘She only likes philosophers,’ Jerome says. But that’s it. She refuses to come near me again.

Emile goes to stay with an aunt the next summer and I stay at school, somehow happier to be free of his family and have time for myself. I prepare my own food in the kitchens, which amuses the cooks until they realise I know what I’m doing. In between, to keep the colonel happy, I make mixtures that smoke, flash and explode. Filling a paper tube with three kinds of gunpowder I nearly lose my fingers when all three ignite at once before I’m ready. My next tube has cardboard spaces between the powders and a series of linked but separate wicks. The colonel comes to see what I am doing.

‘Add colour,’ he says.

To the flash, the smoke or the explosion? I wonder. In the end I add them to all three and produce something between a flare and a firework that flashes red, smokes a ruddy pink and then explodes in an impressive blast of vermillion. By the time Charlot, Jerome and Emile return from their holidays I have created tubes that will flare, smoke and explode in reds, greens and blues. The colonel is more convinced than ever that I have a fine future in one of the artillery regiments. ‘Show off,’ Charlot says.

Jerome laughs. ‘Ignore him,’ he says, his Normandy accent thicker than ever from a summer spent at home. ‘He’s just jealous.’

‘I was bored,’ I say. As close to an apology as I can manage.

‘Next summer you must come home with me,’ Charlot says carelessly. ‘You’ll amuse my sisters.’

A year passes and summer comes round. Charlot has forgotten or never meant it. He spends the summer at Jerome’s chateau. I spend it at the school. With the others gone, the red-haired laundry maid no longer hurries away at the sight of me and lets me inside her petticoats. The taste on my fingers is acrid, stronger. Roquefort to JeanneMarie’s new Brie. I note both their tastes in my book, with the dates, and resolve to find a girl with fair hair to see if she tastes different again. The laundry maid disappears as summer ends and I discover she’s newly married. By then the others are back, talking about the cold faces turned to them by the girls they love. Except for Charlot, who remains as languid as ever, slouched in his battered chair in the bigger study we’ve been given this year. He tells us nothing, I realise. His tales are of hunts and parties and could be pretty stories from a book.

His friendship with Jerome has grown watchful. Jerome’s stomach has shrunk as his shoulders have strengthened. Our Norman bear looks dangerous now. Dangerous and amused and somehow stepped back from the bustle around him. The maids stare after him, looking away when they’re noticed. Some of the boys too. He’s the dark shadow to Charlot’s lazy sunlight. On the afternoon of the first day back talk turns to our ambitions. Charlot tosses off some bon mot about maids deflowered and boars killed and Jerome rounds on him. ‘That’s it? The limit of your ambition?’

‘And to be a good duke when the time comes.’

While I’m still marvelling that Charlot is prepared to admit that much, Jerome turns away peevishly. The rest of us shift uncomfortably.

‘What do you want?’ I ask Jerome.

‘What does any man want? To make my mark. I should have been born when my grandfather was. A man could be great then.’

‘Today is better,’ Emile protests. ‘We have science. We have thinkers. Superstition is vanishing. We are building better roads. New canals.’

‘To carry what?’ Jerome asks. ‘Apples to places that have apples? Stones to places that have stone? Superstition will never vanish. It taints peasant blood like ditchwater.’

Emile blushes and turns away. I wonder how many generations he’s removed from that insult – his grandfather, the religious turncoat? I know how far I’m removed. One generation. Jerome would consider my mother a peasant. If he made an exception for her, he’d include her father without thinking about it. One of the villagers hung by the duc d’Orleans for stealing was my mother’s cousin.

My salvation where Jerome is concerned is that my father was
noblesse d’épée
, descended from knights. At least half our class are
noblesse de robe
, from newer families granted titles for civil work. Jerome lists what France needs: a strong king, which we have in Louis le bien-aimé, now twenty, and already tired of the ugly Polish woman they’d married him to and beginning to bed good French mistresses. A strong king, a strong treasury, a strong army. France must be the most feared state in Europe.

‘It is,’ Charlot says mildly.

‘We must make her stronger.’

Boys around him are nodding and I wonder what it is like to have that degree of belief in anything, even as part of me is mocking his fervour and noticing Charlot’s amusement. Emile turns, blurts out, ‘We have a choice.’

‘Between what?’ Jerome demands.

Emile puts his hands behind his back, rises onto tiptoe and rocks back. It looks like something he’s seen his father do. ‘Between reason and ritual. Between what we can still discover and what we’ve been told to believe. Between the modern and the old.’

‘And if I want both? Jerome asks.

‘You can’t have them. They contradict each other.’

Charlot laughs and around him boys smile. ‘Enough seriousness,’ he says. ‘Let’s open our hampers.’ He pats Emile on the shoulder as he passes, a move both comforting and dismissive, as if petting a dog. As always, knowing my strange obsession with taste, my friends let me try whatever they’ve brought from home. A wind-dried ham from Navarre that cuts so finely the slices look like soiled paper and melt on the tongue like snow. A waxy cheese devoid of taste from the Lowlands. Anchovies pickled in oil and dressed with capers. All of the boys bring bread. Two days old, three days, five – depending on how long they’ve had to travel. It must be what they miss most. The loaf Emile brings is pure white. Jerome’s is solid as rock. He swears his cook doesn’t knead the dough so much as punch it, pick it up and slam it on the table like a washerwoman beating clothes on rock. It can take an hour before she decides it’s ready.

They watch me take their offerings. Occasionally I’ll open my eyes after I’ve tasted something particularly fine and catch them looking at each other and smiling. I don’t mind; at least I don’t mind that much. Some of them, I suspect, barely taste what they eat.

‘Try this, philosopher,’ Charlot says. The pot he holds is small and sealed with clarified butter. He hands me a knife and tears off a chunk of oily bread and indicates I should dig through the butter to what lies beneath. The taste I know – goose liver. But this is rich beyond description.
Parfait de foie gras
. ‘Now clear your palate with this.’

He hands me a second pot and a tiny spoon. This pot is sealed with cork and the darkness beneath has mould that he tells me to scrape away. The sourness of the puréed cherries cuts through the richness of foie gras. He laughs at my expression and I think no more about it until a year passes and summer comes round again and Charlot stops me in a corridor to say, ‘You must see our cherry trees.’ I look at him, remembering that earlier invitation.

‘The colonel agrees,’ Charlot says. ‘My father has already talked to him.’

1734
The Injured Wolf

‘M
y mother . . .’  ‘Will be distant but polite. Your father, whom I will see when I first arrive at Chateau de Saulx and again when we leave, will be too busy to bother with either of us in between. Your sister Marguerite, who I may not call Margot unless she invites me, is beautiful, distant, cold and older than me. I must not fall in love with her. Your middle sister Virginie may be friendly, she may be reserved, who knows. But Élise, your littlest sister, will crawl all over me and want piggybacks. Your mother thinks she is too old for piggybacks so I must refuse . . .’