The Last Banquet (18 page)

I began to work on my theory that the taste of food should be treated not like the taste of wine but like music. There were rising notes, falling notes, harmonics. The perfect meal took all of these into account.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are . . .
A throwaway line in a letter of mine to Jerome, after he’d been boasting of his beef and root vegetables and other Normandy food, became a bon mot bandied about at Versailles and claimed by a dozen others. My simple comment that the years just gone had stretched our palates, and the discovery of cane sugar, and its different preparations, of alcoholic liquors, of white and red wines, vanilla, coffee and tea had given us flavours hitherto unknown, became a staple of commonplace books. Chefs in Paris dedicated their recipes to me, then chefs in Rome, and London, with which we were briefly at peace, and where all the best cooks are French anyway. Rousseau wrote to me. D’Alembert gave my theories an entry in the first edition of his
Encyclopédie.

I was proudest of my championing of the potato, a vegetable from the Americas that produced more food per acre than wheat. It was filling, nutritious and wholesome, and would, I was certain, if grown in sufficient quantity, save France in times of famine for all my peasants knew it as winter food for their cattle. Unfortunately, the similarity of its root shape to deadly nightshade convinced many it was poisonous. I had even seen my kitchen maids wash their hands after handling it. It didn’t help that the French Parliament had forbidden its cultivation on the grounds that potatoes caused leprosy, an absurdity I exposed by eating potatoes at every meal for a week and challenging the Faculty de Medicin in Paris to examine me and say I was ill. In the winter of 1753 Virginie fell pregnant and I realised I would need to make a new
redingotes Anglaise.
Although we were worried, she carried her baby to term and we named our daughter Hélène after Virginie’s favourite aunt.

Jean-Pierre was fourteen when we discovered his mother was pregnant and fifteen when we sent him to stay with his uncle Charlot in the week that Hélène was born. He travelled alone from Chateau d’Aumout to Chateau de Saulx, except for a coachman. I have no doubt his trip was as interesting as mine would have been at his age. He’d been offered a place at the academy in Brienne two years before this, but had chosen to remain at home and Virginie was happy with that decision. He liked his summer with Charlot so much that he returned the following year. And the year after that, with Charlot promising to introduce him at Versailles. It was here that tragedy happened and we were in the gardens at Chateau d’Aumout when we received news of it carried by a royal messenger. Jean-Pierre had been thrown from his horse while hunting with Charlot and the dauphin. He broke his neck in the fall and died immediately.

I can remember the moment of the letter’s arrival, the beads of sweat on the royal messenger’s face as he was shown to the knot garden Virginie and I had planted to mimic the one at Chateau de Saulx. I remember the deepness of his bow before he handed me the letter, and my voice faltering as I read Charlot’s words aloud to my wife and we reached the import of their meaning. I can remember Virginie’s sob, and the rustle of silk as she fell to the ground. I cannot remember what I thought at all. I suspect I thought nothing beyond the need to help Virginie. As for what I
felt
. . . I never cried for Jean-Pierre. But in the weeks that followed his death I walked the walks he and I used to walk when he was small; around the little lake, and through the knot garden as far as the monkey puzzle tree and back again. I walked them until my heels cracked and my ankles bled and the bones in my feet hurt as fiercely as if someone had broken them with hammers.

1757
The Lover

V
irginie took Jean-Pierre’s death badly as mothers do. She withdrew from family life and our threeyear-old daughter clung to me like a shadow, until I appointed a young woman from Limoges as Hélène’s nanny. Fierce and wilful, Hélène took after her grandfather in temper and her mother in looks. Perhaps I should have let her cling. It was only later I realised the child needed me to make up for her mother’s absence.

The years of Jean-Pierre’s life had been good for us but bad for France. Louis XV, once loved, became hated. When Emile and I finally met, in Paris at supper with his family, Madame Duras told me in all seriousness that her local police were abducting the children of the poor so the king could bathe in their blood to heal his diseases. Since this was treason, I took Emile aside and told him he should guard what his wife said since not everyone was his friend. He looked at me a little strangely, and replied she said nothing everyone else in Paris was not already thinking. The execution of Damiens the following year, in the spring of 1757, made matters worse. The man had tried to murder Louis – of course he had to be executed. But four hours of public torture with molten lead poured into his wounds? While fools like Emile’s father-in-law paid seven hundred
livres
for a balcony on the Place de Grève so he could hold a party and watch a screaming halfwit die in agony . . . We disgusted Europe with our degeneracy. We disgusted ourselves.

The years of Jean-Pierre’s life had passed, as they do as we get older, ever faster for me. Although not so fast as they do now, where each New Year’s Day seems followed almost immediately by another with nothing but a few letters written and a few books read in between. I can remember weeks that lasted longer as a child than this last year. The day I sat with my back to the dung heap and watched the duc d’Orleans ride under the arch into my father’s courtyard felt longer than the whole of this last year of my life. Some days I feel I would like to find God, but we keep missing each other in the gaps in our lives. Well, my life, his eternity. The fact I don’t really believe in him probably doesn’t encourage him to approach. Virginie believed, properly and without question. I envied her that in the months following our son’s death, in between feeling irritated at how little she questioned what she’d been told. We took communion together each Sunday in the local church rather than invite the priest to come to our private chapel, and Virginie mouthed private prayers while I made the public responses and tried not to think ungodly thoughts about a local farmer’s daughter or the young wife of a wine merchant. My thoughts might stray but my hands did not and I thought she knew this. Evidently, she did not.

Virginie took a lover the year after Jean-Pierre died. Whether they were lovers in the physical sense I have no idea. Père Laurant was a young priest in the next village and she was five years his senior. She took her pain to him and somehow over the months that followed he did what I could not, lifted the grief from her shoulders and put the smile back on her face and eventually back into her eyes.

The benefice was mine and I could have dismissed him had I wanted. But he was liked by all for his freshness and lack of guile. His sermons were short, his penances lenient. It was whispered he’d read Voltaire and believed God had a use even for such a man. If they were lovers, and there were many who whispered that was true, and in the dark of the night my fears saw her naked above him, smiling down with those same dark eyes, I could have had him defrocked by the bishop, although if one was to defrock every village priest who slept with unhappy wives and lonely widows half the vicarages in France would fall to ruin.

Charlot solved the problem eventually.

He arrived unexpectedly one afternoon in the autumn of ’57, in the coach that had been so grand and new the year it collected us from the academy. Now it looked tarnished and outdated. He greeted me kindly and folded his sister in his arms and took her for a walk around the little lake until they reached a bench beneath a willow where they stopped to talk until the sun set behind the trees and the sky changed colour and the world shifted a little on its axis and for a while seemed to settle back into place.

Virginie came to my bed that night.

With the windows open and the sound of peacocks scratching on the gravel and a dog howling in the village, I heard a creak as the door between our rooms opened and the curtains of my room billowed as the night breeze was allowed free rein. A glimmer of white was framed in a square of darkness. ‘May I come in?’ it said.

‘Of course . . .’

Her hair was unbound and her feet without slippers, she lacked the lace shawl she usually wore around her shoulders. The night takes away the years. A woman by candlelight is younger than a woman in the light of an oil lamp, a woman in darkness younger still. I have no doubt the same is true for women when they look at men. Virginie seemed to me as young and as beautiful as in the first weeks we shared a bed. She hesitated, when she was halfway across the room, and I shifted on the mattress and pulled back the covers and she slid in beside me. That night neither of us really slept. Although for different reasons this time. We held each other, stiffly at first and then more naturally as we relaxed into the shape of each other’s body, and the tightness in her shoulders softened and she smiled when I kissed her hair.

We made love next morning, because she found that easier than doing so late at night. We never talked about why – though I knew. Virginie could dislike her body enough to feel uncomfortable around it when it was full. In the morning when the food had settled and her bowels and bladder emptied she could afford to be kinder to herself. We’re animals made complicated by the belief we’re something more.

She made me go slowly the first time, grinned when I took her hard and finally crawled on top of me, as she’d done in the early days, and rode herself to relief, collapsing in a sprawl on my chest and biting my shoulder when I slapped her buttocks. She put aside her sadness that morning, as if it was a burden she’d been waiting for the year just gone to put down. Without saying . . . At least without saying clearly, we knew we’d agreed to resume our life as a couple and try for another son. Jean-Pierre could not be replaced but we would try to replace him anyway.

Charlot left at the end of the week and took Père Laurant with him to a new post at the Sorbonne. It was a big promotion for a village priest, albeit a young and intelligent one who should probably not have been a village priest in the first place. He went with the new duke’s patronage, and Virginie’s tears, as she watched her family’s old coach trundle away. A few years later Père Laurant wrote a treatise explaining away the contradiction between God’s kindness and the world’s cruelty, and dedicated it to Charlot and an unnamed muse. By then Laurant was born. I let Virginie have the name since I knew, from the time between the coach’s departure and the baby’s birth, that the child was mine. Besides she had an uncle called Laurant and said the child was named for him. I pretended to believe her.

1758
Responsibilities

L
aurant’s birth gave me a new heir and lost me a wife. The woman I’d loved and briefly lost to another and got back, mostly through her brother’s good graces as much as any virtues I might have, vanished again and remained gone. My second son was born in the summer of 1758, two years after the death of the brother he’d never meet, and a little over twenty years after Virginie and I married. It was a bad birth and lasted longer than she or any other woman could endure. Her screams were so fierce I abandoned the chateau and walked in the woods praying to a God I barely believed in to let her live if he had to make a choice between mother and child. The labour left her ripped, and pain clouded how she looked at the child. She’d part-fed her other children but could barely stand to have Laurant in the room and gave him over to the servants within days. I kept waiting for the Virginie I knew to reappear. She had to be in there somewhere. But her eyes remained dull and her gaze fixed on her feet and I’d find her frozen on a chair blank-eyed but crying. ‘I’m fine,’ she’d say.

Pretty much all she ever said.

She repeated it to me, to the doctor, to her brother who came to see the new heir to the marquisate his father had worked so hard to have transferred. In desperation I sent to Paris, to the Sorbonne, for Père Laurant, the man for whom I believed the child was named. He came at once, trundling through the night over rough roads through banditinfested forests to arrive dust-covered and exhausted. I showed him into her room and took another turn around the gardens. I no longer cared what anyone thought.

Père Laurant sought me out several hours later. He looked drained and exhausted and older than in my memory. Paris had been unkind to him and his skin was blotched from poisons in the water. The year away had taken the hair from the crown of his head and thickened his waist and broadened his shoulders so they stretched the cloth of his cleric’s gown. His was a face pretty in youth and coarsening with age. Round faces do that.

‘Well?’ I spoke as I would to my village priest and he bridled, swallowing his pride in the next second. The man had been alone in the room of my wife for the last several hours and my heir was possibly named for him, I felt entitled to be short.

‘Marquis . . .’

The silence stretched between us and I used the beating seconds to pour us both a glass of wine, putting it silently on the table in front of him. The servants were banished, gone from the room and gone from the corridor outside the door. This was a conversation I was determined to have in private. Although there was little conversation to be had. Père Laurant expressed his regrets at how he found my wife, muttered a platitude about God’s healing kindness and asked what the doctor had said. Since the doctor’s answer was much the same as his, give her time and trust in God, I thanked him for coming so far, offered him the use of a chamber and told him to stay for as many days as he liked. He left that afternoon looking as dusty and exhausted as the horses that brought him.

Maybe I was wrong to translate ‘give her time’ as limiting my visits to her bed. All the same, our lives became separate and the door between our chambers remained closed far more often than not. Some weeks it was locked, others unlocked; I never discovered the logic behind her choice. That she was reading gave me faint hope. Anything was better than sitting at the window staring out at the lake.