“You asked how Gregoire snared me. It was simple—simple enough for his dull wits to work out a method! How could I decline to share a conveyance, en route to and from the funeral, with my late aunt’s sole loyal retainer? How could I decline to agree when, in the hearing of her lawyer and his huissier, he offered to cook me her favourite meal if I would provide him with the cost of the ingredients? The sum was—well, let me say substantial. Luckily the lawyer, upon whom may there be defecation, was willing to part with a few sous as an advance against my inheritance.
“And what he gave me was the dish you sampled tonight. With neither garnishing nor salad nor . . . Nothing! He has never learned to cook anything else, for his father’s orders were explicit: eat this alone, and drink spring water. But he caught me at my most vulnerable moment. Overwhelmed by the subtlety of the dish, its richness, its fragrance, its ability to arouse appetite even in a person who, like myself at that time, is given over to the most melancholy reflections, I was netted like a pigeon.”
In horrified disbelief I said, “For almost a year you have eaten this same dish over and over, without even a choice of wines to set it off? Without dessert? Without anything?”
“But it does work!” he cried. “The longevity of my aunt is evidence! Even though during the Nazi occupation it was hard to find certain important spices, she— Wait! Perhaps it wasn’t modern pollution that hastened her end. Perhaps it was lack of those special ingredients while the sales Boches were overrunning our beloved country. Perhaps Gregoire kept them back from her, cheated the helpless old lady who had been the only one to help him when he was orphaned!”
“And kept her Elixir to herself, content to watch her brother die, and his wife, and their children and the rest of the family, in the hope of inheriting the lot, which she eventually did. And she then spent her fortune on the food because only Gregoire could tell her how much it was going to cost to buy the necessary ingredients.”
The Baron gaped at me. “You talk as if this is all common knowledge,” he whispered. I made a dismissive gesture.
“If the recipe works, what other reason can there be for the fact that the rest of her generation aren’t still among us?”
“Under the Directory—” he parried.
“If they’d known they had a chance of immortality, it would have made sense for them to realise their assets and bribe their way to safety. You said just now that you will have unimaginable time before you if what you think is actually true. Why didn’t the same thought occur to your forebears? Because this old bitch kept the news from them—correct?”
The corners of his mouth turned down. “Truly, life can do no more than imitate art. I invited you to treat this like a plot for a story, and thus far I cannot fault your logic.”
“Despite which you plan to imitate someone who shamed not only your family name but indeed her nation and her species?” I crushed my cigar into the nearest ashtray and gulped the rest of my liqueur. “I am appalled! I am revolted! The gastronomic masters of the ages have performed something approaching a miracle. They’ve transmuted what to savages is mere refuelling into a series of splendid compositions akin to works of art, akin to symphonies, to landscapes, to statues! To leaf through a book like Larousse Gastronomique is to find the civilised counterpart of Homer and Vergil—a paean to the heroes who instead of curtailing life amplified it!”
“I think the same—” he began. I cut him short.
“You used to think so, of which I’m well aware. Now you cannot! Now, by your own decision, you’ve been reduced to the plight of a prisoner who has to coax and wheedle his gaoler before he gets even his daily ration of slop. If a single year has done this to you, what will ten years do, or fifty, or a hundred? What use are you going to make of your oversize lifespan? Do you have plans to reform the world? How appropriate will they be when for decades your mind has been clouded by one solitary obsession?”
I saw he was wavering, and rammed home my advantage.
“And think what you’ll be giving up—what you have given up already, on the say-so of a half-moronic turnspit so dull-witted his father couldn’t teach him to read! This liqueur, for a start!” I helped myself to more again, and in exaggerated pantomime relished another swig. “Oh, how it brings back that delectable truite flambée au fenouil which preceded it, and the marvellous veal, and that salad which on your instructions was dressed as lightly as dewfall . . .”
I am not what they call in French croyant. But if there are such things as souls and hells, I think maybe that night I saved one of the former from the latter.
Given my lead, lent reassurance by the way I could see envy gathering in the Baron’s face, I waxed lyrical about—making a random choice—oysters Bercy and moules en brochette and lobster a I’armoricaine, invoking some proper wines to correspond. I enthused over quail and partridge and grouse, and from the air I conjured vegetables to serve with them, artichokes and cardoons and salsify and other wonders that the soil affords. These I dressed with sauces so delightfully seasoned I could have sworn their perfume was in the room. I did not, of course, forget that supreme miracle the truffle, nor did I neglect the cepe or the faux mousseron or the beefsteak mushroom which is nothing like a steak but gave me entree, as it were, to the main course.
Whereupon I
