High Bonnet Read online

  It was high rank for a youth just turned eighteen. The master was a Sicilian, gravely kind, with the petrel’s luck in a hurricane, and he had taught me to navigate by thumb, eye, and quadrant. No longer was I a cabin boy. I could now tread the deck of the Piccolo with a franc’s worth of gilt on my cap. There she was at her berth, rocking and jouncing in the tail end of a mistral, trim in the bright sunlight, and reeking of oil, wine barrels, and the woodsy smell of cork.

  The vender sang out his wares. The wind came laden with the odor of them, and I thought of the medlar tree in my uncle’s garden, and fell a-longing.

  “For a day or two I should like to be home.” I pointed. “That fruit—”

  The master turned his head. “Medlars! And it is April already!” With elbows on the table he cupped his stubbled blue jowl in his hands and sighed dreamily, staring at the basket. “And at Palermo the old Suora Micaela goes crying her medlars. ‘Nespole! Che belle nespole!’ Ah, the indigo sea of the Concha d’Oro, and the sherbet we bought at the carts to eat with the Suora’s fruit!”

  The next minute we were eating medlars, which is an art when done properly. You pinch off the bud, gouge down to the seeds, then tear away the peel, and pop the medlar into your mouth. The three lucent seeds drop out easily like bullets. And you wash the pulp down with a gulp of Muscatel that bears the Tuscan mark on a black label.

  By the time we had finished, the wharf and the Piccolo were wrapped in blackness, and fat Xavier in his cave back of the shop was fusing oil and wine in a great burst of flames. The incense of saffron was as magisterial as a fugue played on brass sirens. Xavier waddled over to us with the dish. Since it included young lobsters from the Porquerolles, and a good-sized rascasse, we prolonged our dinner until midnight.

  “The next voyage, then,” said the master when he saw me off on the autobus for the mountains above Nice.

  “To the next!”

  “Addio!”

  The vast Ajax-like arm that had conquered storms on the Mediterranean sketched a wobbly farewell in the obscurity of the arch. And Xavier, like a wine tun swathed in a sheet, waved a farewell like a benediction, as well he might, for I had spent a month’s wages.

  I never returned to the sea, nor ever saw the Piccolo again. It was the medlars.

  —

  My Uncle Abel was a confiseur, and I owned a tiny share in his concern—a bequest of my father, who had run through the rest of his inheritance before he joined the Foreign Legion and was lost in some Saharan combat. Abel’s nougat was one of the enduring memorials of Vence, a hill town renowned also for its panorama and its moteless air, which has the purity of crystal.

  His shop was a cavern in the Rue Miséricorde. Its windows were densely veiled with cobwebs, but from the door one could see Le Mounier, the soaring icicle Du Cheiron, and Caire Gros, frozen as it tried to stab heaven with its rose-azure spears.

  The town is of Romanesque archways, high rubble buildings, Ligurian towers built in the arrogant style of the Genoese cinquecento; the houses are of pink and ocher stucco, their harshness softened by time, the mistral, and the corroding fogs from the sea.

  Near by winds a stream in which dwell trout, carp, dace, and tench, with sage and mint growing on the banks. You can hook a fish there, then fling back and lodge it in the kitchen of Mère Solon’s tavern. This is a legend that brought many sportsmen to the tavern and made Mère Solon rich, but only three times was the feat performed.

  My uncle once did better, and won a fifty-franc bet at the tobacconist’s. He turned, as on a pivot, flicked a trout through the air, through the door, and splash into a pot of court-bouillon bubbling on the fire!

  By the time he had walked to the tavern, his dish of truite au bleu was smoking for him on the table, with a salad done in Mère Solon’s best vein, and a bottle of white Cavalaire, a gift to the champion fly caster of Vence.

  Or should I say the universe? Yes, assuredly the universe. It was rather a small fish, hardly a mouthful for my uncle, but inside of a fortnight it was said in Nice the trout weighed six pounds, and that my uncle had cast it into the pot from across the river.

  “Que diable!” said he. “How could I remember? I have caught and eaten twenty fish since then!”

  The very next month, the elections were to be held. Why not, asked many citizens, why not put up Abel Gallois for mayor? Why not, indeed? His fame was resounding. The trouble was, every party—Leftist, Centrist, Rightist—had already selected its candidate. Besides, M. Gallois was anti-Clerical and an Anarchist, the sole Anarchist in the village. Etienne Dosso, the wine cooper, said the honor had somehow to be conferred, and that, since there was no Royalist party on the rolls, why not assemble one? It was done, and my uncle, his protests being set down to modesty, was elected mayor by a majority nothing short of staggering.

  A man of ability, the philosophers tell us, can apply his energy in any direction. They were wrong in this instance. As an angler my uncle had talent; as a nougat maker he had genius of a high order; as a statesman he displayed only mediocre gifts, though his bulk and portentous roar were like nothing since Mirabeau. But noblesse oblige, and he was a patriot. From head to foot he equipped himself with the habiliments of mayor—silk hat, frock coat, sash, and staff—at the cost of two thousand francs, and on Bastille Day closed his shop, and paraded in lone dignity through the village, magnificent, yet humble in spirit, visiting the remotest lane on the hillside, so that the indigent old gooseherds might view passing over their own doorstep the symbol and personification of the Republic.

  His affairs did not suffer from this devotion to the labors of office. Visitors came up by the hundreds, and the Syndicat had an enormous sign, paid for by the electors, hung over the front of the shop, and it was carved out in the shape of a bouquet, with the legend: “Homage from the World to Nougat Masséna, and Abel Gallois, King of Confectioners.”

  As with M. Antoine Carême, whose dinners as chef to Talleyrand rendered the Congress of Vienna so memorable in diplomatic history, sugar was my uncle’s outlet for expression. True, gifts were bestowed upon him with an uneven hand. With roulette, the little horses, and rouge-et-noir he had inferior luck. It was a pity! He would go to Nice every two weeks, sometimes with Dosso, the wine cooper, and the Baroness from the hotel, mad gamblers all, and return, strapped, but bragging.

  He was gone again when I arrived home. The mimosa trees were beautiful, their yellow paniches like hard yolks pressed through a sieve. The medlar trees were plucked; I should have known what to expect, with my uncle within reach of a ripe one.

  I pried open the back window and crawled into the shop.

  It was silent, the temple of the Nougat Masséna—a vast crypt, dusty-white with starch, its rafters looped with snowy cobwebs as large as sails, as enduring and broomproof as if woven of silver, hanging over the racked tables like drapes on a catafalque.

  In the dimness where one could see little, in a silence that was complete except for the doves on the roof tiles, the olfactory nerves were the one channel to the senses. It was a fragrance of citron, almond, honey, ratafia, pistachio, apricot, kirsch, and vanilla, entrancing in its subtlety, no one perfume keyed above the rest; it was Oriental, yet simple and familiar, like the vision of an Ouled-Nail girl dancing on sweet fern.

  The other room, paved with slabs, had a range sunk into the wall, table and chairs, and a large disordered cot.

  I leaned out the front window. An apprentice was ringing mallet on hoops before Dosso’s shop. Farther down, the gendarmes were before their office, twisting their mustaches and talking with the extreme importance of gendarmes in a village where nothing ever happens. At the other end of the street was the hotel.

  It was pretty hollow now, Vence, with my uncle, Dosso the wine cooper, and the Baroness gone. The two men were twins in girth, exuberance, and digestive powers. The Baroness, an English lady, was their pet, their mascot at the casino. She was a blowsily plenteous woman, weighing not an ounce less than three hundred pounds, with the jol
liest laugh in Vence. Her income was minute, barely enough to keep the average British spinster in tea and caraway buns. She expanded it by painting crags and trees, thumping hard on the canvas with thumb and palette knife. “Pointillisme—c’est de la boue!” It was muck, but it was stuff that sold.

  Twice a month she arrayed herself in court robes—those well-tended vestiges of her former grandeur—balanced a paste tiara on her head, and rode down to the casino at Nice. It was all or nothing when the Baroness played at baccarat.

  Sometimes she left her tiara at the pawnshop, but she observed her return with a repast that seldom varied. She dined, this prodigal daughter, on a plate of red mullets; toadstools cooked in cream; a grouse with orange sauce, and stuffed artichoke hearts à la Mornay; an herb salad; then a flan, or a Grand Marnièr bombe, with Ventadour cheese and a plate of cherries. Burgunday always followed along, two bottles, and then a cup of Armagnac to seal the palate with dryness.

  Her jests and booming laughter fanned the windows like the mistral. The landlady and the staff adored her. That amorphous bulk, crowned with the tiara, cast luster upon the hotel and was, after the nougat, the town’s chief pride.

  The Armagnac gone to the last drop, her eyes glazing, she held a cigarette to her lips. That was her ritual. She had the true gourmand’s distrust of tobacco. She smoked only as a penance, and to correct any slight tendency to excess at the board. After three or four puffs her opulent forearm, like a sack of semiliqueous fat, looped delicately at the bangled wrist, fell; the Baroness was asleep.

  That was the signal for the landlady to call down the street: “M’sieu Abel! M’sieu Dosso!”

  And that in turn brought the cooper and my uncle up on the trot, and they carried the Baroness upstairs to her room.

  If Dosso was drunk, or playing cards at the tavern, and my uncle was intent over his boiling sirup, with eyes glued to the thermometer, help was got elsewhere. The little gendarmes came up sedately, hatless, taking long breaths to collect strength for the task ahead of them.

  It took maneuvering to lift themselves upright, with the Baroness on their heads, and grope their way to the stairs. Nothing of them was visible under that mammoth bulk in black silk, as shapeless as a cloud, except their quaking legs, which seemed always on the verge of snapping like pipestems. It was a relief to the watchers in the hallway when the group, like a four-legged monster, tottered into the front room, and a thud assured them that finally the Baroness was on her bed.

  The gendarmes came down triumphant but fatigued, and got a tumbler of marc apiece for their pains. We sipped it—I got my share for carrying up the tiara—at the abandoned table, men privileged to be in the service of the second most illustrious person in Vence.

  “Hey! What cheese!” mumbled the older gendarme, trying some on a cracker. “Ventadour?”

  “Well, not quite.” Madame’s eyes were limpid with trouble. “It’s Thome de Savoie, aged in brandy. Ah, if she finds out, will I ever hear the end of it!”

  As it was, she heard nothing but praise. The Baroness had a large, tolerant heart, and her kindness was infinite. I am grateful to her. She insisted on talking with me in English.

  —

  It was pitch-dark, with a gale thrumming at the tiles, and lashings of rain. My uncle crashed in first, soaked and blown, but with breath enough to give me a torrential welcome. Then a clasp from the valiant Dosso, all but unrecognizable in tie and coat, for the casino demands the last punctilio of elegance; and then the hand of the majestic Baroness to kiss.

  “Not a soldo left!” bellowed my uncle. “A great night! So, Dosso?”

  “Formidable!”

  They flung off their wrappings. We built a fire, dragged up some chairs, and had a round of brash, red Niçois wine.

  “I brought them here for dinner,” said my uncle. “And what have we got?”

  He peered into the cupboard, into a meat safe hanging outside the back door, and into some musty sacks under the sink—nothing more than a loaf of bread and a pint of veal-knuckle soup in a casserole! Dosso roared as he stretched himself out in his chair and smacked his thigh. The Baroness, despite her famished state, smiled with wan yet unconquerable hope.

  “Given the material—pullets, and so forth—anyone can make a dinner. But from nothing—ah, you watch me! I think I have some pâté in here.”

  He went into the crypt, and we shadowed him as he made his search. The perfume of the nougat was still full, still entrancing. My uncle pried cubes from the rack molds, ratafia nougats, fine samples of his craft, blooming with a peach-like duvet.

  “Taste them.”

  “Perfect!”

  “More. Taste the pistachios this time.”

  “Admirable!”

  “Mustapha’s prime.” My uncle brayed a pistachio in his palm and waved it under Dosso’s nose. “Oily and green. The most delicate hint of terebinth.”

  “Away with it!” bellowed Dosso, recoiling. “Poison!”

  The Baroness sniffed at it faintly, and remarked it was pleasant. My uncle loudly began to champion his pistachios.

  What was any perfume to Dosso and the Baroness, wet and ravenous, who would have sold Mustapha and his orchard, and thrown in all Egypt, for a thick steak?

  I tightened my belt, left all that tragicomedy behind, and sped through the rain to the grocer’s. Its shutters were up. The hotel was a black tomb. A café was open, and after much pleading I was allowed to buy a saucer of liver paste, a lettuce, and two withered tangerines.

  As I hurried back over the cobbles, half strangled in the gale, a phalanx of geese came charging up the narrow alley. Roughed by the wind, they were in vexed humor, squalling like mad—a lost herd, possibly from Ventadour or Sospel. As well meet a gang of Apaches! In a doorway I stood as flat as a poster whilst they squalled past, heads thrust out, wings thundering, looking like so many hurtling tenpins. They numbered two hundred, at least, for I stood counting by the light of the alley lamp as pints of water coursed down my neck.

  I saw my chance and hurried on, just as the rearguard espied me. A goose may be erratic, but it is never dense. Loathing discomfort, as sybaritic as a peacock or a swan, it prefers a warm shelter to a hammering in a gale. The entire phalanx clamored about me, waist-high, smiting with their beaks and wings as hard as shutters, taking me for the cause of their misfortunes. I fought to the door and wriggled in. My uncle peered out, astonished, into a blizzard of feathers.

  “The hook! The hook—in Heaven’s name!”

  He thrust the pothook into the night, and pulled in a vast, fighting harpy of a goose, larger than a condor. It stilled, and then it got tossed into Dosso’s embrace; he stood guffawing mightily, patting its bosom. He plucked it, flashed an inch-long blade, and in small time all that was potentially edible of the goose quit its skeleton. Into a copper saucepan it went, then into the oven, for Dosso had stoked up a roaring fire.

  “Croustades, Abel—heh?”

  My uncle mixed and baked four deep little trays of puff paste. The Baroness tore the lettuce and shook up a dressing of ropy oil and tart apricot juice. In the reverberating oven, a private inferno, the goose crackled under the spooned unguent of wine, herbs, condiments, and tangerine essence. That was my task, to drip the unguent on its glazed breast.

  As in a trance, I being famished, and the odors throwing me back to a little water-front eating place in Valencia famous for its baked fowl and sauces, I added a fat pinch of bitter chocolate. And I had learned a thing or two aboard the Piccolo! I boiled down a pitcher of the veal stock with the unguent, tangerine peel, a bulb of garlic, and a nip of coriander, and allied it with roux.

  “Gaudeamus igitur—” rolled my uncle’s voice with lusty splendor in the rafters. He wore a purple shirt with arm bands of flounced ribbon, a yellow belt and yellower shoes; in bulk and face he resembled Dumas.

  Plates rang on the bleached pine table; wine gurgled into the tumblers. I laid segments of the bird in the croustades, covered them with the sauce, and slid a helpi
ng before each.

  Bus-riding, gambling, and cooking had stayed us from nutriment so long that we were voracious. Dosso bit first.

  “Ah!”

  It was such a cry as would be wrenched from an old peasant woman at her first pyrotechnic display, seeing a remote ball of fire, so high in the velvety heavens that it couldn’t mount farther, lip out a delicious burst of stars.

  We ate steadily, with condonable grossness; in silence, save for the champing of Dosso’s mastiff jaws and the click of the lady’s rings on her tumbler. It was the instinctive silence of gourmands.

  There is often a jealousy between our senses, which so often hinder one another; and they are the more envious the more highly they are trained. Discourse, however witty and brief, would have been out of place. Montaigne speaks of the ill custom of popular and base men, who call for minstrels or singers at table, whereas men of concept and understanding abhor such boorish distraction. Alcibiades, a man exquisitely skillful at making good cheer, prohibited even a distant flute at the place of feasting.

  The Baroness ate with eyes half drooped, like a pigeon’s in flight, allowing the croustade to splinter under her excellent teeth. She dabbed with lumps of bread and pushed them, dripping with sauce, into her mouth in absorption, as if listening to the orchestration of flavors echoing against the soundingboard of her palate.

  The sauce was unlocking memories that her infancy had bequeathed her of Rhone vineyards blinding white in sunshine; Provence with its “garlic-scented smile”; the buttery in her ancestral kitchen, with its rows of herb canisters; the dry rattle of coriander, as evocative of Egypt as the flutes in Aïda; tangerine peel, with its regal pungence and aroma; the butter and chives recalling a tangy cow yard and mossy-walled garden by the Mediterranean shore where she had gathered shells into her pinafore.

  The bird eaten, we pushed aside our plates. The salad bridged the gap to the wine, the oil clearing the tongue, the apricot juice a corrective for the taste buds. Then we drank wine.