“As I was about to say, those marvellous dishes were each a step along the path towards his supreme achievement. Ironically, for himself it was too late. Earlier he had been misled into believing that mercury was a sovereign cure for old age, and his frame was so ravaged by ill-judged experiments with it that when he did finally hit on the ideal combination he could only witness its effects on his son, not benefit in person.
“He left his collection of recipes to his son, having previously taught the boy to cook the perfected version by means of such repeated beatings that the child could, and I suspect sometimes did, mix the stuff while half asleep.
“But, possibly because of the mercury poisoning which had made him ‘mad as a hatter,’ to cite that very apt English phrase, Grégoire pere overlooked a key point. He omitted to teach the boy how to read and write.
“Finding that his sole bequest from his father was a satchel full of papers, he consulted the only member of the family who had been kind to him: a spinster lady, sister of the then Baron. She did know how to read.”
“This is supposed to be the lady you buried just under a year ago?” I demanded.
He gave me a cool look of reproach. “Permit me to lay all before you and reserve your comments . . . ?”
I sighed and nodded and leaned back in my uncomfortable, noisy chair.
“But you are, as it happens, correct,” he admitted when he had retrieved the thread of his narrative.
“I cannot show you the satchel I alluded to. Gregoire is keenly aware of its value, though I often suspect he is aware of little else outside his daily cycle from one meal to another. Only because it must have dawned on his loutish brain that he would have to make some adjustment following the death of my—my aunty did he force himself to part with it long enough for me and her lawyer to examine the contents.
“We found inside nearly eighty sheets of paper and five of parchment, all in the same crabbed hand, with what I later established to be a great use of alchemical jargon and an improbably archaic turn of phrase—seventeenth rather than eighteenth century, say the experts I’ve consulted. How did I get the documents into the hands of experts?
“Well, the lawyer—who is a fool—showed little or no interest in them. He disliked my aunt as you would expect a bigoted peasant to do, inasmuch as since time immemorial it had been known in the district that she lived alone except for a male companion and never put in an appearance at church. Moreover he was furious at having found that in the estate there was only a fraction of the profit he had looked forward to.
“However, he does possess a photocopier, and before Gregoire’s terror overcame him to the point of insisting on being given back all his precious papers, I had contrived to feed six or seven of them through the machine. If you’re equipped to judge them, I can show them to you. I warn you, though: the language is impenetrably ancient and technical. Have you wondered why my inheritance has not improved my façon de vivre? It is upon the attempt to resolve the dilemma posed by Grégoire’s patrimony that I’ve expended what meagre income my portion yields. New clothes, new furniture—such trivia can wait, for if what I believe to be true is true I shall later on have all the time imaginable to make good these transient deficiencies!”
He spoke in the unmistakable tone of someone trying to reassure himself. As much to provide a distraction which would help me not to think about that strange food as for any less selfish reason, I said, “How did Gregoire get his claws into you?”
He laid his finger across his lips with reflex speed. “Do not say such things! Gregoire is the sole repository of a secret which, had it been noised abroad, would have been the downfall of empires!”
Which told me one thing I wanted to know: among the halfdozen papers the Baron had contrived to copy there was not the recipe of the dish served to us tonight.
“But your aunt is dead,” I countered.
“After more than two hundred years! And I’m convinced she expired thanks to industrial pollution—poisonous organic compounds, heavy metals, disgusting effluents ruining what would otherwise be wholesome foodstuffs . . .”
But his voice tailed away. While he was speaking I had reached for the nuts, cracked one against another in my palm, and was sampling the flesh. There was nothing memorable about this particular nut, but it was perfectly good, and I found I could savour it. Moreover I could enjoy the rich smoke of my cigar. I made it obvious I was doing so—cruelly, perhaps, from the Baron’s point of view, for his eyes hung on my every movement and he kept biting his lower lip. Something, though, made me feel that my behaviour was therapeutic for him. I rubbed salt in the wound by topping up my glass of liqueur without asking permission.
“And in what manner,” I inquired, “did your aunt spend her two centuries of existence? Waiting out a daily cycle from one meal to the next, always of the same food, as you’ve said Gregoire does?”
The Baron slumped.
“I suppose so,” he admitted. “At first, with that delirious sensation on one’s palate, one thinks,
