I was poised to start all over again at the beginning if I must; I had scarcely scraped the surface of even French cuisine, and beyond Europe lay China and the Indies and a whole wide world of fabulous fare. But I forbore. I saw suddenly that one shiny drop on the Baron’s cheek was not perspiration after all. It was a tear.
Falling silent, I waited.
At length the Baron rose with the air of a man going to face the firing squad. Stiffly, he selected a glass for himself from the tray beside the liqueur bottle, poured himself a slug, and turned to face me, making a half-bow.
“Mon ami, ”he said with great formality, “I am forever in your debt. Or at any rate, for the duration of my—my natural life.”
I was afraid he was going to take the drink like medicine, or poison. But instead he checked as he raised it to his lips, inhaled, gave an approving nod, closed his eyes and let a little of it roll around his tongue, smiling.
That was more like it!
He took a second and more generous swig, and resumed his chair.
“That is,” he murmured, “a considerable relief. I can after all now appreciate this. I had wondered whether my sense of taste might prove to be negated—whether the food I have subsisted on might entail addiction . . . The latter possibility no doubt remains; however, when all else fails there is always the treatment called le dindon froid”
Or, as they say in English, cold turkey . . . Whatever his other faults, I realised, one could not call the Baron a coward.
uAch!” he went on. “In principle I knew all you have told me months ago. You are right in so many ways, I’m embarrassed by your perspicuity. Am I the person to reform the world? I, whom they have encouraged since childhood to believe that the world’s primary function is to provide me with a living regardless of whether or not I have worked to earn it? Sometimes I’ve been amused to the point of laughing aloud by the silliness of my ambition. And yet—and yet . . .
“Figurez-vous, mon vieux, what it is like always to have a voice saying in your head, ‘Suppose this time the dish that sustained your aunt two hundred years can be developed into the vehicle of true immortality?’ There’s no denying that it’s a wonderful hybrid between cuisine and medicine.”
That I was obliged to grant.
“So, you see, I’m stuck with an appalling moral dilemma,” the Baron said. He emptied his glass and set it aside. “It occurs to me,” he interpolated, “that I may just have incurred a second one—perhaps infringing Gregoire’s father’s injunction about eating nothing except his food constitutes a form of suicide? But luckily I feel better for it, so the riddle can be postponed . . . Where was I? Oh, yes: my dilemma. If I break my compact with Gregoire, what’s to become of him? If there is no employer to provide him with the funds he needs to buy his ingredients and the kitchen and the pans and stove to cook them, will he die? Or will he be driven like a junkie to robbery and possibly murder? Mon brave, mon ami, what the hell am I to do about Gregoire?”
It was as though my panegyric on gastronomy had drained my resources of both speech and enthusiasm. Perhaps more of the liqueur would restore them; I took some.
“By the way,” the Baron said, copying me, “an amusing coincidence! While I was still in Guex-sur-Saone, I recalled . . . Are you all right?”
“I—I think so. Yes,” I said.
For a moment I’d been overcome by an irresoluble though fortunately transient problem. I was thinking back on the discourse I’d improvised about cookery when it suddenly dawned on me that I’d praised to the skies things I’d never run across. I hadn’t tasted half of what I’d talked about with such excitement, and as for the wines, why, only a millionaire could aspire to keep that lot in his cellar!
This digestif du Tertre must be powerful stuff on an empty belly!
Recovering, I said, “Please go on.”
“I was about to say that while poring over the papers of Gregoire’s that I’d managed to copy, I recalled what the patron of the Restaurant du Tertre had said about basing his digestif on an eighteenth-century recipe. Thinking that if he had such a recipe he might help me decipher some of those by Gregoire’s father, I went back to the restaurant, ostensibly of course to buy a bottle of their speciality—I did in fact buy that very bottle yonder.
“And when, having chatted with the patron for a while, I produced the most apposite-seeming of the half-dozen recipes I’d acquired, he was appalled. After scarcely more than a glance, he declared that this was identical with the recipe used for his liqueur, and was on the verge of trying to bribe me and prevent it coming to the notice of a commercial manufacturer!”
Chuckling, he helped himself to half a glassful.
“I mention that not so much as an example of how small- minded people in commerce tend to be—though is it not better that something outstanding should be shared if there is a means of creating enough of it, rather than kept for the private profit of a few?—nor even as a demonstration that the influence of the kitchens at my family’s château must have lingered long after the declaration of the Republic—no! I cite it as evidence that had he not been obsessed with his alchemical
