Hungry and stranded, we made the acquaintance of the Baron: a youngish man—I’d have said thirty-two and prematurely world-weary—lean, with a certain old-fashioned elegance, and out of place. I’d exchanged a word or two with him earlier in the day, when he’d chanced on me standing about as usual waiting for one of the organisers to put in an appearance so I could find out what was happening, and asked me whether a member of the public might attend the movie then showing, since he had a few hours to kill. Seemingly he had enjoyed the picture, for he had stayed over or come back for another.
Emerging now, drawing on unseasonable gloves with an air of distraction as though he were vaguely put out by the absence of a coachman to convey him to his next destination, he spotted and remembered me, and approached with a flourish of his hat to thank me for the trivial service I’d performed.
My answer was doubtless a curt one. Sensing something amiss, he inquired whether he might in turn be of assistance. We explained . . . choosing, of course, terms less than libellous, though we were inclined to use strong language.
Ah! Well, if we would accept a suggestion from someone who was almost as much a stranger as ourselves . . . ? (We would.) And did we have transportation? (We did, although my car was at the hotel twenty minutes’ walk away.) In that case, we might be interested to know that he had been informed of a certain restaurant, not widely advertised, in a village a few kilometres distant, and had wondered whether during his brief stay in Guex he might sample its cuisine. He had precise directions for finding it. It was reputed to offer outstanding value. Were we. . . ?
We were. And somehow managed to cram into my car and not die of suffocation on the way; it’s theoretically designed for four, but no more than three can be comfortable. Still, we got there.
The evening proved to be an education—on two distinct levels.
I found myself instantly compelled to admire the deftness with which our chance acquaintance inserted data about himself into a discussion about an entirely different subject. Even before I came back with the car the others had learned about his aristocratic background; I noticed he was already being addressed as Monsieur le Baron. His technique was superb! Always on the qui-vive for new tricks that might enable me to condense the detail a reader needs to know into a form which doesn’t slow down the story, I paid fascinated attention. Almost without our noticing that he was monopolising the conversation, we were told about his lineage, his ancestors’ sufferings at the rude hands of the mob, the death of the elderly aunt for whose funeral he had come to Guex, a lady of remarkable age whose existence he had been ignorant of until a lawyer wrote and advised him he might benefit under her will . . . (The French are far less coy about discussing bequests than are we Anglophones.)
But on the other and much more impressive hand, within—I swear—five minutes of our being seated in the restaurant, the word had got around behind the scenes that someone of grand standing was present tonight. In turn the waiter—it was too small a restaurant to boast a head waiter—and the sommelier and the chef and finally the proprietor put in their successive appearances at our table as M. le Baron proceeded with the composition of our meal. He laid down that there should not be an excess of fennel with the trout, and that the Vouvray should be cellar-cool and served in chilled glasses but on no account iced, which would incarcerate its “nose” and prevent it from competing with the fennel (he was right); that with the subsequent escalope de veau Marengo one should not drink the Sancerre of which the patron was so proud but a Saint-Pourgain only two years old (he was right about that too), just so long as the saucier did not add more than a splash—what he actually said was une goutte gout-teuse, a phrase that stuck in my mind because it literally means “a drop with the gout”—of wine vinegar to the salad dressing. And so on.
I was not the only one to be impressed. When we had finished our dessert, the owner sent us a complimentary glass apiece of a local liqueur scented with violets, wild strawberries, and something called reine des bois which I later discovered to be woodruff. It was so delicious, we asked where else it could be got, and were told regretfully that it was not generally available, being compounded to a secret recipe dating back two centuries or more. Well, one meets that kind of thing quite frequently in France . . .
Let me draw a veil over the arrival of the bill, except to mention that after my eyes and the Baron’s had met and I’d summed up the situation I let an extra fifty-franc note rest for a moment on the table. The dexterity with which it became forty-two francs twenty reminded me of the skill of a cardsharp. I don’t think even the waiter noticed.
Well, he was after all in Guex on the sort of business that doesn’t conduce to commonsensical precautions; attending a funeral, I wouldn’t think to line my billfold with a wad of spare cash against the chance of going out to dinner with a group of foreign strangers. I let the matter ride. The meal had been superb, and worth far more than we were being charged.
Whether for that reason, though, or because he had found out
