The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton’s apple or Watt’s steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. This is capable of expression by the formula TMB, for Taste > Memory > Book. Some time ago, when I began to read a book called “The Food of France,” by Waverley Root, I had an inverse experience: BMT, for Book > Memory > Taste. Happily, the tastes that “The Food of France” re-created for me—small birds, stewed rabbit, stuffed tripe, Côte Rôtie, and Tavel—were more robust than that of the madeleine, which Larousse defines as “a light cake made with sugar, flour, lemon juice, brandy, and eggs.” (The quantity of brandy in a madeleine would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub.) In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sautéed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece.
The primary requisite for writing well about food is a good appetite. Without this, it is impossible to accumulate, within the allotted span, enough experience of eating to have anything worth setting down. Each day brings only two opportunities for field work, and they are not to be wasted minimizing the intake of cholesterol. They are indispensable, like a prizefighter’s hours on the road. (I have read that the late French professional gourmand Maurice Curnonsky ate but one meal a day—dinner. But that was late in his life, and I have always suspected his attainments anyway; so many mediocre witticisms are attributed to him that he could not have had much time for eating.) A good appetite gives an eater room to turn around in. For example, a non-professional eater I know went to the Restaurant Pierre, in the Place Gaillon, a couple of years ago, his mind set on a sensibly light meal: a dozen, or possibly eighteen, oysters, and a thick chunk of steak topped with beef marrow, which M. Pierre calls a “Délice de la Villette”—the equivalent of a “Stockyards’ Delight.” But as he arrived, he heard M. Pierre say to his headwaiter, “Here comes Monsieur L. Those two portions of cassoulet that are left—put them aside for him.” A cassoulet is a substantial dish, of a complexity precluding its discussion here. (Mr. Root devotes three pages to the great controversy over what it should contain.) M. Pierre is the most amiable of restaurateurs, who prides himself on knowing in advance what his friends will like. A client of limited appetite would be obliged either to forgo his steak or to hurt M. Pierre’s feelings. Monsieur L., however, was in no difficulty. He ate the two cassoulets, as was his normal practice; if he had consumed only one, his host would have feared that it wasn’t up to standard. He then enjoyed his steak. The oysters offered no problem, since they present no bulk.
In the heroic age before the First World War, there were men and women who ate, in addition to a whacking lunch and a glorious dinner, a voluminous souper after the theatre or the other amusements of the evening. I have known some of the survivors, octogenarians of unblemished appetite and unfailing good humor—spry, wry, and free of the ulcers that come from worrying about a balanced diet—but they have had no emulators in France since the doctors there discovered the existence of the human liver. From that time on, French life has been built to an increasing extent around that organ, and a niggling caution has replaced the old recklessness; the liver was the seat of the Maginot mentality. One of the last of the great around-the-clock gastronomes of France was Yves Mirande, a small, merry author of farces and musical-comedy books. In 1955, Mirande celebrated his eightieth birthday with a speech before the curtain of the Théâtre Antoine, in the management of which he was associated with Mme. B., a protégée of his, forty years younger than himself. But the theatre was only half of his life. In addition, M. Mirande was an unofficial director of a restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, which he had founded for another protégée, also forty years younger than himself; this was Mme. G., a Gasconne and a magnificent cook. In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, M. Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot—and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, “we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace—no more ’34s and hardly any ’37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.”
M. Mirande had to his credit a hundred produced plays, including a number of great Paris hits, but he had just written his first book for print, so he said “my publisher” in a special mock-impressive tone. “An informal sketch for my definitive autobiography,” he would say of this production. The informal sketch, which I cherish, begins with the most important decision in Mirande’s life. He was almost seventeen and living in the small Breton port of Lannion—his offstage family name was Le Querrec—when his father, a retired naval officer, said to him, “It is time to decide your future career. Which will it be, the Navy or the Church?” No other choice was conceivable in Lannion. At dawn, Yves ran away to Paris. There, he had read a thousand times, all the famous wits and cocottes frequented the tables in front of the Café Napolitain, on the Boulevard des Capucines. He presented himself at the café at nine the next morning—late in the day for Lannion—and found that the place had not yet opened. Soon he became a newspaperman. It was a newspaper era as cynically animated as the corresponding period of the Bennett-Pulitzer-Hearst competition in New York, and in his second or third job he worked for a press lord who was as notional and niggardly as most press lords are; the publisher insisted that his reporters be well turned out, but did not pay them salaries that permitted cab fares when it rained. Mirande lived near the fashionable Montmartre cemetery and solved his rainy-day pants-crease problem by crashing funeral parties as they broke up and riding, gratis, in the carriages returning to the center of town. Early in his career, he became personal secretary to Clemenceau and then to Briand, but the gay theatre attracted him more than politics, and he made the second great decision of his life after one of his political patrons had caused him to be appointed sous-préfet in a provincial city. A sous-préfet is the administrator of one of the districts into which each of the ninety départements of France is divided, and a young sous-préfet is often headed for a precocious rise to high positions of state. Mirande, attired in the magnificent uniform that was then de rigueur, went to his “capital,” spent one night there, and then ran off to Paris again to direct a one-act farce. Nevertheless, his connections with the serious world remained cordial. In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, he introduced me to Colette, by that time a national glory of letters.
The regimen fabricated by Mirande’s culinary protégée, Mme. G., maintained him en pleine forme. When I first met him, in the restaurant during the summer of the Liberation, he was a sprightly sixty-nine. In the spring of 1955, when we renewed a friendship that had begun in admiration of each other’s appetite, he was as good as ever. On the occasion of our reunion, we began with a truite au bleu—a live trout simply done to death in hot water, like a Roman emperor in his bath. It was served up doused with enough melted butter to thrombose a regiment of Paul Dudley Whites, and accompanied, as was right, by an Alsatian Wine—a Lacrimae Sanctae Odiliae, which once contributed slightly to my education. Long ago, when I was very young, I took out a woman in Strasbourg, and, wishing to impress her with my knowledge of local customs, ordered a bottle of Ste. Odile. I was making the same mistake as if I had taken out a girl in Boston and offered her baked beans. “How quaint!” the woman in Strasbourg said. “I haven’t drunk that for years.” She excused herself to go to the telephone, and never came back.
After the trout, Mirande and I had two meat courses, since we could not decide in advance which we preferred. We had a magnificent daube provençale, because we were faithful to la cuisine bourgeoise, and then pintadous—young guinea hens, simply and tenderly roasted—with the first asparagus of the year, to show our fidelity to la cuisine classique. We had clarets with both courses—a Pétrus with the daube, a Cheval Blanc with the guineas. Mirande said that his doctor had discounselled Burgundies. It was the first time in our acquaintance that I had heard him admit he had a doctor, but I was reassured when he drank a bottle and a half of Krug after luncheon. We had three bottles between us—one to our loves, one to our countries, and one for symmetry, the last being on the house.
Mirande was a small, alert man with the face of a Celtic terrier—salient eyebrows and an upturned nose. He looked like an intelligent Lloyd George. That summer, in association with Mme. B., his theatrical protégée, he planned to produce a new play of Sartre’s. His mind kept young by the theatre of Mme. B., his metabolism protected by the restaurant of Mme. G., Mirande seemed fortified against all eventualities for at least another twenty years. Then, perhaps, he would have to recruit new protégées. The Sunday following our reunion, I encountered him at Longchamp, a racecourse where the restaurant does not face the horses, and diners can keep first things first. There he sat, radiant, surrounded by celebrities and champagne buckets, sending out a relay team of commissionaires to bet for him on the successive tips that the proprietors of stables were ravished to furnish him between races. He was the embodiment of a happy man. (I myself had a nice thing at 27-1.)
The first alteration in Mirande’s fortunes affected me so directly that I did not at once sense its gravity for him. Six weeks later, I was again in Paris. (That year, I was shuttling frequently between there and London.) I was alone on the evening I arrived, and looked forward to a pleasant dinner at Mme. G.’s, which was within two hundred metres of the hotel, in the Square Louvois, where I always stop. Madame’s was more than a place to eat, although one ate superbly there. Arriving, I would have a bit of talk with the proprietress, then with the waitresses—Germaine and Lucienne—who had composed the original staff. Waiters had been added as the house prospered, but they were of less marked personality. Madame was a bosomy woman—voluble, tawny, with a big nose and lank black hair—who made one think of a Saracen. (The Saracens reached Gascony in the eighth century.) Her conversation was a chronicle of letters and the theatre—as good as a subscription to Figaro Littéraire, but more advanced. It was somewhere between the avant-garde and the main body, but within hailing distance of both and enriched with the names of the great people who had been in recently—M. Cocteau, Gene Kelly, la Comtesse de Vogüé. It was always well to give an appearance of listening, lest she someday fail to save for you the last order of larks en brochette and bestow them on a more attentive customer. With Germaine and Lucienne, whom I had known when we were all younger, in 1939, the year of the drôle de guerre, flirtation was now perfunctory, but the carte du jour was still the serious topic—for example, how the fat Belgian industrialist from Tournai had reacted to the caille vendangeuse, or quail potted with fresh grapes. “You know the man,” Germaine would say. “If it isn’t dazzling, he takes only two portions. But when he has three, then you can say to yourself. . .” She and Lucienne looked alike—compact little women, with high foreheads and cheekbones and solid, muscular legs, who walked like chasseurs à pied, a hundred and thirty steps to the minute. In 1939, and again in 1944, Germaine had been a brunette and Lucienne a blonde, but in 1955 Germaine had become a blonde, too, and I found it hard to tell them apart.
Among my fellow-customers at Mme. G.’s I was always likely to see some friend out of the past. It is a risk to make an engagement for an entire evening with somebody you haven’t seen for years. This is particularly true in France now. The almost embarrassingly pro-American acquaintance of the Liberation may be by now a Communist Party-line hack; the idealistic young Resistance journalist may have become an editorial writer for the reactionary newspaper of a textile magnate. The Vichy apologist you met in Washington in 1941, who called de Gaulle a traitor and the creation of the British Intelligence Service, may now tell you that the General is the best thing ever, while the fellow you knew as a de Gaulle aide in London may now compare him to Sulla destroying the Roman Republic. As for the women, who is to say which of them has resisted the years? But in a good restaurant that all have frequented, you are likely to meet any of them again, for good restaurants are not so many nowadays that a Frenchman will permanently desert one—unless, of course, he is broke, and in that case it would depress you to learn of his misfortunes. If you happen to encounter your old friends when they are already established at their tables, you have the opportunity to greet them cordially and to size them up. If you still like them, you can make a further engagement.
On the ghastly evening I speak of—a beautiful one in June—I perceived no change in the undistinguished exterior of Mme. G.’s restaurant. The name—something like Prospéria—was the same, and since the plate-glass windows were backed with scrim, it was impossible to see inside. Nor, indeed, did I notice any difference when I first entered. The bar, the tables, the banquettes covered with leatherette, the simple décor of mirrors and pink marble slabs were the same. The premises had been a business employees’ bar-and-café before Mme. G., succeeding a long string of obscure proprietors, made it illustrious. She had changed the fare and the clientele but not the cadre. There are hundreds of identical fronts and interiors in Paris, turned out by some mass producer in the late twenties. I might have been warned by the fact that the room was empty, but it was only eight o’clock and still light outdoors. I had come unusually early because I was so hungry. A man whom I did not recognize came to meet me, rubbing his hands and hailing me as an old acquaintance. I thought he might be a waiter who had served me. (The waiters, as I have said, were not the marked personalities of the place.) He had me at a table before I sensed the trap.
“Madame goes well?” I asked politely.
“No, Madame is lightly ill,” he said, with what I now realize was a guilty air.
He presented me with a carte du jour written in the familiar purple ink on the familiar wide sheet of paper with the name and telephone number of the restaurant at the top. The content of the menu, however, had become Italianized, the spelling had deteriorated, and the prices had diminished to a point where it would be a miracle if the food continued distinguished.
“Madame still conducts the restaurant?” I asked sharply.
I could now see that he was a Piedmontese of the most evasive description. From rubbing his hands he had switched to twisting them.
“Not exactly,” he said, “but we make the same cuisine.”
I could not descry anything in the smudged ink but misspelled noodles and unorthographical “escaloppinis;” Italians writing French by ear produce a regression to an unknown ancestor of both languages.
“Try us,” my man pleaded, and, like a fool, I did. I was hungry. Forty minutes later, I stamped out into the street as purple as an aubergine with rage. The minestrone had been cabbage scraps in greasy water. I had chosen côtes d’agneau as the safest item in the mediocre catalogue that the Prospéria’s prospectus of bliss had turned into overnight. They had been cut from a tired Alpine billy goat and seared in machine oil, and the haricots verts with which they were served resembled decomposed whiskers from a theatrical-costume beard.
“The same cuisine?” I thundered as I flung my money on the falsified addition that I was too angry to verify. “You take me for a jackass!”
I am sure that as soon as I turned my back the scoundrel nodded. The restaurant has changed hands at least once since then.
In the morning, I telephoned Mirande. He confirmed the disaster. Mme. G., ill, had closed the restaurant. Worse, she had sold the lease and the good will, and had definitely retired.
“What is the matter with her?” I asked, in a tone appropriate to fatal disease.
“I think it was trying to read Simone de Beauvoir,” he said. “A syncope.”
Mme. G. still lives, but Mirande is dead. When I met him in Paris the following November, his appearance gave no hint of decline. It was the season for his sable-lined overcoat à l’impresario, and a hat that was a furry cross between a porkpie and a homburg. Since the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin no longer existed, I had invited him to lunch with me at a very small place called the Gratin Dauphinois, on the Rue Chabanais, directly across from the building that once housed the most celebrated sporting house in Paris. The Rue Chabanais is a short street that runs from the Square Louvois to the Rue des Petits Champs—perhaps a hundred yards—but before the reform wave stimulated by a Municipal Councillor named Marthe Richard at the end of the Second World War, the name Chabanais had a cachet all its own. Mme. Richard will go down in history as the Carry Nation of sex. Now the house is closed, and the premises are devoted to some low commercial purpose. The walls of the midget Gratin Dauphinais are hung with cartoons that have a nostalgic reference to the past glories of the street.
Mirande, when he arrived, crackled with jokes about the locale. He taunted me with being a criminal who haunts the scene of his misdeeds. The fare at the Gratin is robust, as it is in Dauphiné, but it did not daunt Mirande. The wine card, similarly, is limited to the strong, rough wines of Arbois and the like, with a couple of Burgundies for clients who want to show off. There are no clarets; the proprietor hasn’t heard of them. There are, of course, a few champagnes, for wedding parties or anniversaries, so Mirande, with Burgundies discounselled by his doctor, decided on champagne throughout the meal. This was a drôle combination with the mountain food, but I had forgotten about the lack of claret when I invited him.
We ordered a couple of dozen escargots en pots de chambre to begin with. These are snails baked and served, for the client’s convenience, in individual earthenware crocks, instead of being forced back into shells. The snail, of course, has to be taken out of his shell to be prepared for cooking. The shell he is forced back into may not be his own. There is thus not even a sentimental justification for his reincarceration. The frankness of the service en pot does not improve the preparation of the snail, nor does it detract from it, but it does facilitate and accelerate his consumption. (The notion that the shell proves the snail’s authenticity, like the head left on a woodcock, is invalid, as even a suburban housewife knows nowadays; you can buy a tin of snail shells in a supermarket and fill them with a mixture of nutted cream cheese and chopped olives.)
Mirande finished his dozen first, meticulously swabbing out the garlicky butter in each pot with a bit of bread that was fitted to the bore of the crock as precisely as a bullet to a rifle barrel. Tearing bread like that takes practice. We had emptied the first bottle of champagne when he placed his right hand delicately on the point of his waistcoat farthest removed from his spinal column.
“Liebling,” he said, “I am not well.”
It was like the moment when I first saw Joe Louis draped on the ropes. A great pity filled my heart. “Maître,” I said, “I will take you home.”
The dismayed patronne waved to her husband in the kitchen (he could see her through the opening he pushed the dishes through) to suspend the preparation of the gendarme de Morteau—the great smoked sausage in its tough skin—that we had proposed to follow the snails with. (“Short and broad in shape, it is made of pure pork and . . . is likely to be accompanied . . . by hot potato salad.”—Root, page 217.) We had decided to substitute for the pommes à l’huile the gratin dauphinois itself. (“Thinly sliced potatoes are moistened with boiled milk and beaten egg, seasoned with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and mixed with grated cheese, of the Gruyère type. The potatoes are then put into an earthenware dish which has been rubbed with garlic and then buttered, spotted with little dabs of butter, and sprinkled with more grated cheese. It is then cooked slowly in not too hot an oven.”—Root, page 228.) After that, we were going to have a fowl in cream with morilles—wild black mushrooms of the mountains. We abandoned all.
I led Mirande into the street and hailed a taxi.
“I am not well, Liebling,” he said. “I grow old.”
He lived far from the restaurant, beyond the Place de l’Etoile, in the Paris of the successful. From time to time on our way, he would say, “It is nothing. You must excuse me. I am not well.”
The apartment house in which he and Mme. B. lived resembled one of the chic modern museums of the quarter, with entrance gained through a maze of garden patches sheathed in glass. Successive metal grilles swung open before us as I pushed buttons that Mirande indicated—in these modern palaces there are no visible flunkies—until we reached an elevator that smoothly shot us upward to his apartment, which was rather larger in area than the Square Louvois. The décor, with basalt columns and floors covered with the skins of jumbo Siberian tigers—a special strain force-fed to supply old-style movie stars—reminded me of the sets for “Belphégor,” a French serial of silent days that I enjoyed when I was a student at the Sorbonne in 1926. (It was, I think, about an ancient Egyptian high priest who came to life and set up bachelor quarters in Paris in the style of the Temple of Karnak.) Three or four maids rushed to relieve Mirande of his sable-lined coat, his hat, and his cane, topped with the horn of an albino chamois. I helped him to a divan on which two Theda Baras could have defended their honor simultaneously against two villains of the silents without either couple’s getting in the other’s way. Most of the horizontal surfaces in the room were covered with sculpture and most of the vertical ones with large paintings. In pain though he was, Mirande called my attention to these works of art.
“All the sculptures are by Renoir,” he said. “It was his hobby. And all the paintings are by Maillol. It was his hobby. If it were the other way around, I would be one of the richest chaps in France. Both men were my friends. But then one doesn’t give one’s friends one’s bread and butter. And, after all, it’s less banal as it is.”
After a minute, he asked me to help him to his bedroom, which was in a wing of the apartment all his own. When we got there, one of the maids came in and took his shoes off. “I am in good hands now, Liebling,” he said. “Farewell until next time. It is nothing.”
I telephoned the next noon, and he said that his doctor, who was a fool, insisted that he was ill.
Again I left Paris, and when I returned, late the following January, I neglected Mirande. A Father William is a comforting companion for the middle-aged—he reminds you that the best is yet to be and that there’s a dance in the old dame yet—but a sick old man is discouraging. My conscience stirred when I read in a gossip column in France-Dimanche that Toto Mirande was convalescing nicely and was devouring caviar at a great rate—with champagne, of course. (I had never thought of Mirande as Toto, which is baby slang for “little kid,” but from then on I never referred to him in any other way; I didn’t want anybody to think I wasn’t in the know.) So the next day I sent him a pound of fresh caviar from Kaspia, in the Place de la Madeleine. It was the kind of medication I approved of.
I received a note from Mirande by tube next morning, reproaching me for spoiling him. He was going better, he wrote, and would telephone in a day or two to make an appointment for a return bout. When he called, he said that the idiotic doctor would not yet permit him to go out to a restaurant, and he invited me, instead, to a family dinner at Mme. B.’s. “Only a few old friends, and not the cuisine I hope to give you at Maxim’s next time,” he said. “But one makes out.”
On the appointed evening, I arrived early—or on time, which amounts to the same thing—chez Mme. B.; you take taxis when you can get them in Paris at the rush hours. The handsome quarter overlooking the Seine above the Trocadéro is so dull that when my taxi deposited me before my host’s door, I had no inclination to stroll to kill time. It is like Park Avenue or the near North Side of Chicago. So I was the first or second guest to arrive, and Mme. B.’s fourteen-year-old daughter, by a past marriage, received me in the Belphégor room, apologizing because her mother was still with Toto—she called him that. She need not have told me, for at that moment I heard Madame, who is famous for her determined voice, storming at an unmistakable someone: “You go too far, Toto. It’s disgusting. People all over Paris are kind enough to send you caviar, and because you call it monotonous, you throw it at the maid! If you think servants are easy to come by . . .”
When they entered the room a few minutes later, my old friend was all smiles. “How did you know I adore caviar to such a point?” he asked me. But I was worried because of what I had heard; the Mirande I remembered would never have been irritated by the obligation to eat a few extra kilos of fresh caviar. The little girl, who hoped I had not heard, embraced Toto. “Don’t be angry with Maman!” she implored him. It was a gathering so familial that it recalled the home scenes in “Gigi.”
My fellow-guests included the youngish new wife of an old former Premier, who was unavoidably detained in Lille at a congress of the party he now headed; it mustered four deputies, of whom two formed a Left Wing and two a Right Wing. (“If they had elected a fifth at the last election, or if, by good luck, one had been defeated, they could afford the luxury of a Center,” Mirande told me in identifying the lady.) “C’est malheureux, a party without a Center. It limits the possibilities of maneuver.”) There was also an amiable couple in their advanced sixties or beginning seventies, of whom the husband was the grand manitou of Veuve Clicquot champagne. Mirande introduced them by their right name, which I forget, and during the rest of the evening addressed them as M. and Mme. Clicquot. There was a forceful, black-haired man from the Midi, in the youth of middle age—square-shouldered, stocky, decisive, blatantly virile—who, I was told, managed Mme. B.’s vinicultural enterprises in Provence. There were two guests of less decided individuality, whom I barely remember, and filling out the party were the young girl—shy, carefully unsophisticated and unadorned—Mme. B., Mirande, and me. Mme. B. had a strong triangular face on a strong triangular base—a strong chin, high cheekbones, and a wide, strong jaw, but full of stormy good nature. She was a woman who, if she had been a man, would have wanted to be called Honest John. She had a high color and an iron handgrip, and repeatedly affirmed that there was no affectation about her, that she was sans façon, that she called her shots as she saw them. “I won’t apologize,” she said to me. “I know you’re a great feeder, like Toto here, but I won’t offer you the sort of menu he used to get in that restaurant you know of, where he ruined his plumbing. Oh, that woman! I used to be so jealous. I can offer only a simple home dinner.” And she waved us toward a marble table about twenty-two feet long. Unfortunately for me, she meant it. The dinner began with a kidney-and-mushroom mince served in a giant popover—the kind of thing you might get at a literary hotel in New York. The inner side of the pastry had the feeling of a baby’s palm, in the true tearoom tradition.
“It is savory but healthy,” Madame said firmly, setting an example by taking a large second helping before starting the dish on its second round. Mirande regarded the untouched doughy fabric on his plate with diaphanously veiled horror, but he had an excuse in the state of his health. “It’s still a little rich for me, darling,” he murmured. The others, including me, delivered salvos of compliments. I do not squander my moral courage on minor crises. M. Clicquot said, “Impossible to obtain anything like this chez Lapérouse!” Mme. Clicquot said, “Not even at the Tour d’Argent!”
“And what do you think of my little wine?” Mme. B. asked M. Clicquot. “I’m so anxious for your professional opinion—as a rival producer, you know.”
The wine was a thin rosé in an Art Nouveau bottle with a label that was a triumph of lithography; it had spires and monks and troubadours and blondes in wimples on it, and the name of the cru was spelled out in letters with Gothic curlicues and pennons. The name was something like Château Guillaume d’Aquitaine, grand vin.
“What a madly gay little wine, my dear!” M. Clicquot said, repressing, but not soon enough, a grimace of pain.
“One would say a Tavel of a good year,” I cried, “if one were a complete bloody fool.” I did not say the second clause aloud.
My old friend looked at me with new respect. He was discovering in me a capacity for hypocrisy that he had never credited me with before.
The main course was a shoulder of mutton with white beans—the poor relation of a gigot, and an excellent dish in its way, when not too dry. This was.
For the second wine, the man from the Midi proudly produced a red, in a bottle without a label, which he offered to M. Clicquot with the air of a tomcat bringing a field mouse to its master’s feet. “Tell me what you think of this,” he said as he filled the champagne man’s glass.
M. Clicquot—a veteran of such challenges, I could well imagine—held the glass against the light, dramatically inhaled the bouquet, and then drank, after a slight stiffening of the features that indicated to me that he knew what he was in for. Having emptied half the glass, he deliberated.
“It has a lovely color,” he said. “But what is it? What is it?” the man from the Midi insisted.
“There are things about it that remind me of a Beaujolais,” M. Clicquot said (he must have meant that it was wet), “but on the whole I should compare it to a Bordeaux” (without doubt unfavorably).
Mme. B.’s agent was beside himself with triumph. “Not one or the other!” he crowed. “It’s from the domaine—the Château Guillaume d’Aquitaine!”
The admirable M. Clicquot professed astonishment, and I, when I had emptied a glass, said that there would be a vast market for the wine in America if it could be properly presented. “Unfortunately,” I said, “the cost of advertising . . .” and I rolled my eyes skyward.
“Ah, yes,” Mme. B. cried sadly. “The cost of advertising!”
I caught Mirande looking at me again, and thought of the Petrus and the Cheval Blanc of our last meal together chez Mme. G. He drank a glass of the red. After all, he wasn’t going to die of thirst.
For dessert, we had a simple fruit tart with milk—just the thing for an invalid’s stomach, although Mirande didn’t eat it.
M. Clicquot retrieved the evening, oenologically, by producing two bottles of a wine “impossible to find in the cellars of any restaurant in France”—Veuve Clicquot ’19. There is at present great to-do among wine merchants in France and the United States about young wines, and an accompanying tendency to cry down the “legend” of the old. For that matter, hardware clerks, when you ask for a can opener with a wooden handle that is thick enough to give a grip and long enough for leverage, try to sell you complicated mechanical folderols, and, when you go on insisting, tell you that effectual things are out of fashion. The motivation in both cases is the same—simple greed. To deal in wines of varied ages requires judgment, the sum of experience and flair. It involves the risk of money, because every lot of wine, like every human being, has a life span, and it is this that the good vintner must estimate. His object should be to sell his wine at its moment of maximum value—to the drinker as well as the merchant. The vintner who handles only young wines is like an insurance company that will write policies only on children; the unqualified dealer wants to risk nothing and at the same time wants to avoid tying up his money. The client misled by brochures warning him off clarets and champagnes that are over ten years old and assuring him that Beaujolais should be drunk green will miss the major pleasures of wine drinking. To deal wisely in wines and merely to sell them are things as different as being an expert in ancient coins and selling Indian-head pennies over a souvenir counter.
Despite these convictions of mine about wine, I should never have tried a thirty-seven-year-old champagne on the recommendation of a lesser authority than the blessed M. Clicquot. It is the oldest by far that I have ever drunk. (H. Warner Allen, in “The Wines of France,” published circa 1924, which is my personal wine bible, says, “In the matter of age, champagne is a capricious wine. As a general rule, it has passed its best between fifteen and twenty, yet a bottle thirty years old may prove excellent, though all its fellows may be quite undrinkable.” He cites Saintsbury’s note that “a Perrier Jouet of 1857 was still majestical in 1884,” adding, “And all wine-drinkers know of such amazing discoveries.” Mr. Root, whose book is not a foolish panegyric of everything French, is hard on champagne, in my opinion. He falls into a critical error more common among writers less intelligent: he attacks it for not being something else. Because its excellences are not those of Burgundy or Bordeaux, he underrates the peculiar qualities it does not share with them, as one who would chide Dickens for not being Stendhal, or Marciano for not being Benny Leonard.)
The Veuve Clicquot ’19 was tart without brashness—a refined but effective understatement of younger champagnes, which run too much to rhetoric, at best. Even so, the force was all there, to judge from the two glasses that were a shade more than my share. The wine still had a discreet cordon—the ring of bubbles that forms inside the glass—and it had developed the color known as “partridge eye.” I have never seen a partridge’s eye, because the bird, unlike woodcock, is served without the head, but the color the term indicates is that of serous blood or a maple leaf on the turn.
“How nice it was, life in 1919, eh, M. Clicquot?” Mirande said as he sipped his second glass.
After we had finished M. Clicquot’s offering, we played a game called lying poker for table stakes, each player being allowed a capital of five hundred francs, not to be replenished under any circumstances. When Mme. B. had won everybody’s five hundred francs, the party broke up. Mirande promised me that he would be up and about soon, and would show me how men revelled in the heroic days of la belle époque, but I had a feeling that the bell was cracked.
Ileft Paris and came back to it seven times during the next year, but never saw him. Once, being in his quarter in the company of a remarkably pretty woman, I called him up, simply because I knew he would like to look at her, but he was too tired. I forget when I last talked to him on the telephone. During the next winter, while I was away in Egypt or Jordan or someplace where French papers don’t circulate, he died, and I did not learn of it until I returned to Europe.
When Mirande first faltered, in the Rue Chabanais, I had failed to correlate cause and effect. I had even felt a certain selfish alarm. If eating well was beginning to affect Mirande at eighty, I thought, I had better begin taking in sail. After all, I was only thirty years his junior. But after the dinner at Mme. B’s, and in the light of subsequent reflection, I saw that what had undermined his constitution was Mme. G.’s defection from the restaurant business. For years, he had been able to escape Mme. B.’s solicitude for his health by lunching and dining in the restaurant of Mme. G., the sight of whom Mme. B. could not support. Entranced by Mme. G.’s magnificent food, he had continued to live “like a cock in a pie”—eating as well, and very nearly as much, as when he was thirty. The organs of the interior—never very intelligent, in spite of what the psychosomatic quacks say—received each day the amount of pleasure to which they were accustomed, and never marked the passage of time; it was the indispensable roadwork of the prizefighter. When Mme, G., good soul, retired, moderation began its fatal inroads on his resistance. My old friend’s appetite, insufficiently stimulated, started to loaf—the insidious result, no doubt, of the advice of the doctor whose existence he had revealed to me by that slip of the tongue about why he no longer drank Burgundy. Mirande commenced, perhaps, by omitting the fish course after the oysters, or the oysters before the fish, then began neglecting his cheeses and skipping the second bottle of wine on odd Wednesdays. What he called his pipes (“ma tuyauterie”), being insufficiently exercised, lost their tone, like the leg muscles of a retired champion. “When, in his kindly effort to please me, he challenged the escargots en pots de chambre, he was like an old fighter who tries a comeback without training for it. That, however, was only the revelation of the rot that had already taken place. What always happens happened. The damage was done, but it could so easily have been averted had he been warned against the fatal trap of abstinence. ♦
(This is the first of a series of articles.)
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