IX
A MARRIAGE, AN ACQUISITION, AND A BREAKDOWN
To hear Chantal tell it, that first meeting was like something from a Tex Avery cartoon: When Bernard laid eyes on her, his eyeballs popped out of his head and jets of steam shot out of his ears. Everything considered, that’s probably not too far from the truth.
The time was late in the year 1980—September or October—and the place was Marc Meneau’s restaurant L’Espérance (with two stars, going on three), a converted manor house in the idyllically beautiful setting of Saint-Père de Vézelay, 50 kilometers north of Saulieu. In those days Bernard and Meneau saw rather a lot of each other.* Their proximity made them almost neighbors, and they shared many similar ideas about cooking and many similar woes of clientele in the off-season. Meneau knew Bernard would be dropping by that afternoon, and he told Chantal he was going to introduce her to someone. Good, she thought. Maybe it’ll be a new client. She was right, but it turned out to be rather more clientele than she had bargained for.
Chantal was quite something. Freshly divorced, she was a twenty-nine-year-old mother of two small children, and an exceedingly well-proportioned mother she was, too, with a perfectly coiffed blonde mane, flashing blue eyes, and a soignée manner as only French women know how to soigner themselves: not a hair out of place, not an accessory that didn’t match, and not a square millimeter of her fetching visage that wasn’t treated with exactly the right makeup, applied with a diamond-cutter’s attention to detail—the sort of woman you would expect to see walking a small white poodle. And—justement—she did indeed have a small white poodle (its name was Sophie), but her line of business was somewhat incongruous for the rest of the image that she projected: She was selling janitorial supplies.
A native Breton, Chantal had come with her parents to the Allier region in the depths of central France when her father set up an industrial hog farm there. After ten years of marriage to a garage mechanic, she divorced and settled in the cathedral city of Auxerre, at the northern edge of Burgundy. She needed a job to support her husbandless little clan, so she took to the road, presenting a line of German detergents and industrial cleaning supplies to businesses and organizations. Which is how she came to be in Meneau’s luxurious restaurant that autumn afternoon when Bernard Loiseau walked in.
“I was hardly knocked off my feet,” she recalled. “But he was. He was excité—exhilarated—and he couldn’t stop grinning—that marvelous smile of his that went all the way out to his ears. He was very, very nice and charming. He wanted to see me again.”
It’s not hard to imagine just how excité Bernard must have been. There he was, stuck in his provincial backwater for more than five years—five years of raging hormones backing up with nowhere to go—no girls, no play, no fun, nothing beyond card games and pétanque with the guys, and just the occasional unsatisfactory stab at the odd seduction or two that never worked out. For years everyone had been telling him that no matter how good his food was, the only way he could get three stars was to have a wife and family, because Michelin prized stability. And now, suddenly, here was this . . . this dreamboat, with a ready-made family! As if by magic, nearly three decades of being shy with girls disappeared in a flash. Come to Saulieu, come to Saulieu, I’ll buy every damn box of soap you’ve got in the car. That was the gist of it, anyway. Yes: Steam certainly did come out of his ears.
Chantal played it cool. Rebuffing the flurry of dates that Bernard suggested over the following days, she finally accepted a meeting a week and a half later. She crossed the threshold at the appointed hour carrying her samples and wearing her business face, but it was a very carefully prepared business face. After a cursory examination of the Côte d’Or’s needs in the way of sanitary equipment, the real meeting began: Lunch with the boss.
“He had everything set up in the little pink salon next to Dumaine’s dining room, where we could have privacy. I got the red-carpet treatment—Hubert and Claude Le Gall to wait on us, nice wines, everything. Oh, mon dieu, mon dieu, I thought, I’m not going to get much business done today.
“Bernard never stopped talking. He told me his life story. He knew lots of things about me, too. Obviously he had been asking Marc Meneau questions. He wanted me to taste everything. I’m always very careful about my figure, so I don’t eat much, but that day I had to have salmon and scallops and crayfish, because I told him I liked seafood. It was clear that he was interested in me—for him it was love at first sight [le coup de foudre]. But not for me.”
For the next year and a half, Bernard courted Chantal as assiduously as he had been courting Michelin. But in the world’s overcrowded and ancient history of the battle of the sexes, this little provincial chapter was strictly no-contest: Chantal was in charge all the way, as much at ease and confident in her feminine allure as Bernard was excitable, inexperienced, and groping. As if she didn’t already hold all the trump cards, she noted that he had “an enormous complex” about losing his hair. (By the time he was into his thirties Bernard was almost totally bald, except for a ring around his temples.)
She made him wait—which, of course, only increased his excitability. In the great sexual equation, as any economist could have told Bernard, there’s trouble ahead when the demand side outstrips supply so thoroughly as to be totally out of whack. Bernard did what he could to boost his side of the equation, in his own way. Unsurprisingly, this meant not poetry or music or long, soulful conversations, but lunch—lunch and dinner, too, when he could get away: Bocuse, Blanc, Ducloux, Lorain, Savoy. Nothing but the best. Oh, yeah, great: more foie gras, more crayfish, more champagne, more fattening desserts. Just the thing for winning a woman who watched her ligne like a junkyard dog watches his favorite 1983 Pontiac. Certainly there was the pleasure of sporting an emphatically decorative woman on his arm—excellent for the Loiseau image—but Bernard received precious little return for his emotional investment.
“He wanted to get married right away,” she explained. “He scared me sometimes. Every single day he asked me again to marry him, but I kept putting on the brakes. He would have done anything for me, he was so much in love. But I wasn’t in love with him. I had to think it over. After all, I had two children. But his melancholy touched me. He gnawed his nails until he drew blood. He was so impatient—he wanted everything, and he wanted it right away.”
There’s no melancholy like the melancholy of love. Poor Bernard was in deep water way over his head, a feckless amateur in le jeu de l’amour, chasing a woman far more experienced than he, who neither loved nor respected him. Recipe for disaster.
And yet she married him. Whether it was by his phenomenal force of persuasion, by calculation for the welfare of her two kids, or by simple fatigue from repulsing his assaults again and again, Chantal finally said yes. In June of 1982, Jean-Pierre Soisson, mayor of Auxerre and a prominent national politician, married the couple in a formal salon of his city hall. True to his word, in October, Claude Verger sold La Côte d’Or to his ex-commis, now a thirty-one-year-old chef with a growing national reputation, a flashy new wife, two stepchildren, and plenty of ideas. Verger’s style remained typical to the end. Keeping banks out of the transaction altogether, he financed Bernard himself, gaining about 50 percent on his initial investment, plus 10 percent interest. “Pay me back whenever you can,” he said, symbolically handing over the keys.
This was the situation at the end of that summer of 1982, as the Côte d’Or headed into another gloomy winter season: Bernard had two Michelin stars and was riding hell for leather toward the third, with a kitchen personnel of eight under his direction; a like number of service staff worked under Hubert as first maître d’hôtel, and a few local cleaning ladies and a laundress filled out the complement of employees; Chantal was in charge of the front desk, the rooms, and the decoration; and Bernard had a debt (probably at least $300,000 and perhaps as much as $500,000, but since it was a private deal, no figure has ever been given) to pay back to Verger, on his own terms and in his own time.
In that last decade of les trente glorieuses, France was still prospering and the restaurant trade was doing well, so there looked to be reasonable cause for optimism—all the more so in that Bernard discovered that a jewel had fallen into his hands. His name was Patrick Bertron, a calm, reserved Breton of twenty whom Verger had hired just the previous March. Starting in pâtisserie and then moving on to the delicate, demanding seafood post, Patrick was already displaying a prodigy’s mastery of cooking technique but also, more important, an extraordinary ability to grasp Bernard’s often imprecise inspirations and translate them into finished dishes. Bernard quickly named him second, and the dialogue between the two men—the Chef and the chef—continued uninterrupted thereafter. Bernard the idea man never failed to pay tribute to Patrick the technician. “Patrick cooks Loiseau better than Loiseau,” he frequently told the press, and it was nothing but the truth. On the downside, the Côte d’Or was a wreck, but it was Bernard’s wreck. From the moment of acquisition, he devoted his entire salary, and every other franc he could squeeze from the business, to paying Verger back in monthly installments over a four-year period.
Well, almost every franc. There was this thing about cars. For years he had lusted to have a Porsche like Meneau and Maximin, and while he was still courting Chantal, a secondhand beauty had come to his attention. He snapped it up. Porsches are excellent for the image. They’re also ruinous for the pocketbook; completely apart from the purchase price, the little beauty cost a bundle to maintain—the insurance bill and the yearly registration fees were killers, and its mere presence on the road was an open invitation to every ticket-happy traffic cop. For once just a little bit reasonable, Bernard sold it to a client not long after his marriage.
In its stead, he bought a snappy, whippy 16-valve VW Golf GTI, and had a garagiste soup it up with a turbo to make it as speedy as the Porsche. That operation blew two motors. He gave up the race-driver image and settled for a black bourgeois BMW. No sooner was it delivered than Chantal ordered an identical one for herself. Hubert and the rest of the guys exchanged significant glances and shrugged their shoulders. What was going on here? They were supposed to be on an economy drive. Madame Loiseau, it appeared, was something of a spender. Bad sign.
Now that the Vergers had liberated the space, the freshly minted couple moved into their apartment above Dumaine’s dining room. It wasn’t much: a bedroom, a small living room, and a bathroom. Chantal requisitioned two of the hotel rooms for the kids and set to redecorating the place, drafting waiters and maîtres d’hôtel into hard labor as they came available. Most notable among her corps of volunteers were Hubert Couilloud and Eric Rousseau, a local boy who had come aboard as chef de rang—headwaiter*—the year before. Along with Claude Le Gall and Vincent Jousset, a chef de rang hired way back in 1979, Hubert and Eric formed the vanguard of Bernard’s little army of personnel de salle, a tightly knit team of auxiliaries (or helpers, or associates, or assistants, or mates—finding the right word to describe their status is almost impossible, because working alongside Loiseau, they were anything but simple employees), all of whom were passionately devoted to following Bernard’s quest for perfection and making those three stars happen. Stakhanovites for the cause of luxe, calme et volupté, they would have been the despair of any self-respecting union shop steward because, to a man, they would have walked through fire for Bernard and not charged overtime.
How could that happen? Everything about Bernard confounded the precepts of management theory, and yet he proved to be an astonishingly effective leader, motivating his people to a pitch of shared enthusiasm that was unparalleled anywhere in France. And it wasn’t as if he was dealing with simpletons. Au contraire: for the most part these young men were of superior intelligence—thoughtful, perceptive, and articulate—and they all knew very well that Bernard was a human encyclopedia of weaknesses and failings. He was impossible, unstable, self-indulgent, emotional, impulsive, confabulating, confounding, often craven and childish, and a host of other unflattering adjectives, too. And yet they marched in lockstep with him all the way to the end of the road. It’s difficult to explain. Nothing was ever simple with this man.
“We worked miracles for him,” said Hubert. “We did ten times more for Bernard than we would have done for anyone else. He gave us ambition. He made us believe anything was possible. Every day he pumped it into our heads that we were the best and we were going to make those three stars—let’s go, guys, you’re the best. We finally ended up believing it. It was a permanent stimulation, an obsession.”
Eric Rousseau smiled at the contradiction of it all, enjoying the memory of a thousand anecdotes that typified the Loiseau style. “He was naïve and paranoid, but at the same time he was generous and intelligent—and just so damn nice that we would forgive him for everything. Sure, he took himself for Napoleon, but he was our leader and we were with him all the way. If he yelled at us, he would come up afterward and apologize. Don’t pay any attention to that, he’d say—you know, that’s just the way I am. So he was the locomotive and we were the cars behind him. And you know something? We’ve always referred to the restaurant as chez nous—our place. Home. Even when we’re in our own houses today we say such and such a thing happened chez nous. Our wives don’t always appreciate that. But we were like a little family—especially when we had two stars and were angling for the third. That was a fantastic period.”
While their fellow maîtres d’hôtel and headwaiters in Paris passed their time sliding suavely around in tuxes and shiny shoes, then, in Saulieu the guys were mostly wearing bleus de travail—the French version of overalls—for the first two winter seasons of Bernard’s ownership. They painted Dumaine’s old rooms, patched up holes, changed mattresses, fixed electricity and leaky faucets, and generally scrubbed, polished, and shined the old place up to some semblance of its past glory. Clients were rare, so they had plenty of time. When perchance some gourmet turned up unannounced, one or two of them would hurriedly dive into formal clothes and handle the service. Then it was back into the bleus de travail, with Bernard cheerleading at the sidelines.
It was heroic stuff, but everyone knew it was just make-do, what the French call cache-misère—covering up the poverty of it all. Dumaine’s rooms were tiny, claustrophobic, and dark; the carpeting was moth-eaten and the toilets were those awful things called gyrobroyeurs—noisy bathroom Dispose-all units designed for boats and trailers that don’t have proper piping for a decent flush. (You don’t want to know more than that.) And just to make things perfect, the rooms all gave out onto the road, where motorbikes sputtered and trucks shifted gears.
Never mind: Bernard had a master plan in his head. It had been there for years, in fact. If he could just get enough loans, and if he could buy some adjoining properties—notably a big old boarding house facing out on the rue Jean Bertin—he could replace Dumaine’s twenty-four rooms with thirty magnificent suites, all of them turned inward toward the English garden that he would be planting in the courtyard, now just a vacant lot with some ratty old sheds. That would eliminate the noise from the street to create the calme. The luxe would come with the furniture and appointments of his future salons and dining rooms, and the volupté from his cuisine and his fine wines.
As Bernard dreamed of his Burgundian Abbaye Thélème, the earthly paradise of refined pleasures that Rabelais imagined in Gargantua, the year 1983 was preparing a series of events, omens, and portents that affected him in significant ways, throwing the dice of his destiny toward unexpected directions. The most immediately dramatic was the sudden death of Jean Troisgros, his master and inspiration but also his nemesis. Only fifty-seven years old, Jean died on a tennis court in Roanne. Examination pinpointed the cause as a coronary aneurysm, but all those uncounted hours standing in the heat of his stove and the permanent tension of making those twice-daily services perfect had to be a contributing factor. Just a cursory look around the Rhône-Alpes area shows that Jean shared his woefully short existence with some remarkable peers. Certainly Fernand Point had a weakness for champagne, but death came far too early for him all the same at only fifty-six. For Alain Chapel it was fifty-two, and Jacques Pic, fifty-nine. An even more striking example—more distant, this one—is Gilbert Le Coze, a handsome young Breton chef who took Paris by storm in the early seventies, then moved his restaurant, Le Bernardin, across the Atlantic and did even better in New York. Gilbert died in his forty-eighth year while working out in a health club not far from his West 51st Street address. Stress, overwork, and mad perfectionism can make a deadly cocktail.
In the spring of 1983, a scholarly, soft-spoken Alsatian woman named Dominique Brunet passed her CAP (Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle) of cuisine in Paris. It was only the most basic of diplomas of the cooking trade, but Dominique, just thirty, had no intention of becoming a chef. As a teacher (applied food sciences and hygiene) in a Parisian technical lycée, she already held twin masters degrees, in biochemistry and microbiology; one she had earned in Strasbourg and the other in Paris. She took the CAP in order to add a practical, hands-on knowledge of cooking technique to her long theoretical training. She was also author of three standard textbooks on hygiene in restaurants: There wasn’t a food bug, a molecule, or a temperature factor on which Ms. Brunet could not learnedly discourse. People around her often said she would be the ideal wife for a cook. Fate was setting her up for a meeting with Bernard a few years later.
Also in 1983, the little food empire that Henri Gault and Christian Millau had built began to unravel. In the wake of a falling-out between the two friends, the guide and the monthly magazine were sold to the news weekly Le Point, and the title quickly went downhill thereafter. What had begun as a lively, original, contentious little competitor to the Michelin, reflecting the personality of two genuine journalists, mutated with the years into that ghastly corporate category of an “editorial product” with little but the names Gault and Millau to lend it credibility. After Le Point lost interest, the title was sold again and again. At last count, six or seven different owners have picked it up, the last being a French conglomerate (nickel mines, supermarkets, and vineyards) headquartered in New Caledonia, which promptly out-sourced the operation to a public relations outfit. Now compressed into a single snappy brand name, GaultMillau, it continues an editorial existence, but there is little of the sparkle of the grand old days. With Henri Gault dead, and Christian Millau comfortably retired and writing history books, the title they founded is progressively drifting toward irrelevance.
The final significant event of 1983 was the departure of Claude Le Gall. In itself this was not a big problem—although he was very much appreciated, another competent person could be found—but it had unforeseen consequences. Claude left because his wife had found a job in Paris. Characteristically, Bernard called around and arranged a position for him as maître d’hôtel in one of the top restaurants in Paris. Then he went looking for a replacement. That was where the unforeseen consequences arose.
Bernard remembered a maître d’hôtel with whom he and Chantal had spoken when they had dinner at a restaurant in nearby Semur-en-Auxois some months earlier. He was experienced, very capable, and spoke fluent English and Italian. He was married and had a kid, so he would surely be stable. On top of all that, he was handsome, too. That ought to please the ladies. He was, Bernard insisted, just the right one to replace Claude. Chantal shuddered inwardly, because she remembered that dinner in Semur-en-Auxois all too well; it was there that she had felt the ominous jolt of attraction, the coup de foudre that had been so notably absent for her in Saint-Père de Vézelay. And now he was coming to work in her place.
Today, now that so much water has passed over the dam, the “maître d’hôtel” is an established and yet shadowy figure of the folklore of La Côte d’Or. He is anonymous—no one even speaks his name around the premises—and referred to elliptically, as if he were not so much a person as the instrument of some preordained, dimly perceived destiny that had been awaiting them all. But the result was this: He and Chantal began a long, secret love affair. (Or one they believed to be secret.)
“We waited a whole year before our liaison began,” Chantal told me, “and then we were able to hide it very well for two years. We had a house where we met, and several other places, too, but we never actually set up household together. We lived out our passion. But I finally broke up with him. He stayed with his wife. C’était la vie.”
Today, Chantal speaks of her affair with the nameless maître d’hôtel in terms that recall airport novels, as if it were fated and she had no choice but to yield—star-crossed lovers and all that—but her conviction that she managed to keep it secret is delusional. The close daily contact of the illicit couple with Hubert, Eric, Vincent, and the others could not help but betray a host of tiny hints, expressions, eye contacts, and subtle intonations of voice that pointed unmistakably to the intimacy she was sharing with the newcomer to the dining room crew. As usual, then, everyone knew about it except the husband. And no one dared tell him.
Considering the extraordinary symbiosis existing between Bernard and his staff, it was hardly surprising that their feelings toward Chantal should have reflected the state of her relationship with the man who was her husband and their boss. What began with warmth and good will slowly degraded into animosity.
“She didn’t have much of a cultural level,” Hubert said, “but that didn’t matter, because she was a hard worker and very ambitious. We could appreciate that. Right from the start she pushed Bernard to buy the place from Verger and then to get the loans to fix it up. We could see that as a couple they weren’t doing too well, but they shared the same ambition. Their characters were very similar, in fact. Both of them had strong outgoing personalities, but she became pretentious and started acting like a typical nouveau riche. She was obsessed with her appearance, so she was always dieting. When she first came here she was in jeans, but very quickly she started playing the queen and buying expensive dresses. We didn’t like her. We liked her even less when she was yelling at Bernard out in front of clients, and then running off right and left to be with her lover. We were au courant, of course, all of us. But Bernard said nothing.”
“Chantal wasn’t cool with Monsieur Loiseau,” said Claude Le Gall, summing up the atmosphere he left behind in Saulieu. Like Hubert, Eric Rousseau was struck by the similarity of characters of the boss and his new wife, but the allegiance of the staff was entirely to Bernard, not this woman with the white poodle who knew nothing about the restaurant business. For his part, Bernard hadn’t known anything about living with a woman. With Chantal as his professor, he was fast learning that it wasn’t as simple as all that. The shared ambition was fine, but where that implied the wielding of power, sparks soon flew and the disputes became more and more frequent. The staff watched and waited for it all to come to some kind of climax, as it surely would have to one day.
Headstrong, demanding, and sure of herself, Chantal never expressed regret for the thoroughgoing act of infidelity into which she threw herself so soon after marriage. As she explains it today, it is as if the simple fact of living with Bernard was enough of a trial to justify her cuckolding. (The far-reaching and long-lasting influence of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary on French womanhood should never be underestimated.)
“Of course I was unhappy,” she told me. “Living with Bernard was like living with a kid. With him I had a third child to deal with, and he did as many stupid things as my own two kids. He wasn’t a woman’s man. Physically it wasn’t right between us, either. He wasn’t a man who could make a woman happy.”
“Chantal was Bernard’s apprenticeship for women,” Eric remarked, drawing a nice parallel between matrimony and gastronomy. “Trouble is, she got a big head—she wanted to be his equal. And in a place like this, there can only be one rooster ruling the coop. Things got worse and worse. Mind you, he wasn’t easy to live with, either. But toward the end we could see it was almost hatred between them. Bernard was just too nice. She took advantage of him.”
Trop gentil, trop généreux—too nice, too generous—the leitmotif returns again and again when those who knew him best speak of Bernard today. However difficult it may have been to live with his impetuous, mercurial nature, the distressing fact is that during his marriage to Chantal the only quarter from which he regularly received affection was his staff.
“Il m’a aimée,” she says today—he loved me. But she never says “I loved him.” The conclusion is pretty much unavoidable: During the Chantal days, at any rate, Bernard’s only true marriage was to his house, his ambition, and his staff. And, ironically enough, it was a very good union, too, with an interplay of communication and cooperation that would have delighted any marriage counselor.
“Bernard had no secrets from us,” said Hubert. “He involved us in everything. Whenever he had a decision to make he consulted everyone, even the dishwasher. Everything was paradoxical about him. Strength and weakness cohabited in him. He catalyzed us by his energy and enthusiasm, but at the same time he was invaded by self-doubt. If one customer out of eighty was unhappy with his meal, it could destroy the whole evening for him. He didn’t need approval, he needed to be adored. Unanimously. And we did love him, too, in spite of his weaknesses. Or maybe we loved him because of his weaknesses. He was just so fragile and so human. A lot of people who didn’t know him well enough were skeptical about his sincerity because they felt he was always play-acting, and doing a number on them. It’s true. He did that. But it was only because he was trying to please them.
“More than anything else, he loved to make people happy. In all the senses of the word, he embraced everyone. Relationships with him were always strong—nobody could be indifferent to Bernard. He was a fundamentally good, warm person. He reached out to people with that native generosity of his. But he was also a great actor, so—yes—you can say he did do a number on people. He was playing a role because he wanted to make them happy. To seduce them.”
He didn’t seduce Chantal. With both his enthusiasm and his anxiety, he irritated her. Strangely, even his niceness irritated her. There was this quality about Bernard: he exasperated because he tried too hard. On paper, he had every quality a woman could desire: he adulated Chantal; he didn’t run after other women; he took in her children as if they were his own. But he irritated her.
“He was very, very nice with my children,” she admits, “and at the same time he put me on a pedestal. When I was coming down the stairs he would cry out to the staff: ‘Look at my wife—isn’t she beautiful?’ He kept telling me I was his third star. It was hard to deal with that. He took me for his guardian angel.
“And he could be so childish. He didn’t know how to shut up. When we were at dinners I always made sure to sit next to him so I could kick him under the table when he started saying stupid things. He multiplied everything by two. I used to give my kids fifty francs of pocket money a week, but then Bernard would slip them a five-hundred-franc bill. We really had a big fight about that. Then there was the thing about our diet. I was putting on weight, and I absolutely had to slim down. He was gaining weight, too, so I suggested that we both go on a diet. Well, I stuck to it and I lost those extra kilos, but not Bernard. He snuck off and ate roast chicken and French fries with my kids when I had my back turned. He was just like a kid.”
Being idolized and lavishly complimented while her children were affectionately cared for might strike many women as an enviable situation—so much so, perhaps, that they might even be persuaded to forgive the occasional unauthorized fried chicken whoopee—but for Chantal it was just further evidence of the many crosses she was obliged to bear in Saulieu. And that wasn’t all—Bernard wasn’t a good businessman, either. Chantal couldn’t stand the friends and cronies, all those journalist freeloaders and showbiz types who were eating for free. They put such a drain on the budget, she calculated, that she and Bernard could have built a beautiful duplex room in the hotel for the price of what those “guests” ate up during her time in Saulieu. Who needed these people, anyway?
Bernard did, of course. To cheer him up by their mere presence, for the notoriety that their articles gave him, for the reassurance that he really was a great chef, and for the jokes, the warmth, and the affection—much of it quite real—that flowed between him and these gastronomic courtiers who came so easily and frequently to Saulieu. Chantal was quite right: Bernard wasn’t a woman’s man. He was impelled, first, foremost, and entirely, by his three-star ambition and, within that, the easy camaraderie of the guys. He was never so happy as when he was off duck hunting or wine tasting or eating out with his friends in some low-life country bistro. No emotional strings attached to all that. He already had enough emotion to deal with all by himself.
There was plenty more on the way, too, but that lay several years ahead. For the moment, the overriding priority that occupied everyone was whipping their white elephant into something resembling three-star shape. In May of 1984, some nine months after his ill-judged hiring of Hubert’s second maître d’hôtel, Bernard made another decision, a good one this time: He engaged Bernard Fabre to take over the accounts of the Côte d’Or. With that, he essentially handed the entire business side over to a man he hardly knew.
On the surface it was a foolhardy move, but as usual with Bernard, there was a certain method in the madness. He was lucid enough to know that he was no good with figures and percentages and regulations, and that even if he tried, he would be so bored and impatient that he would surely make a botch of it. Verger was clever with that side of things, but now Verger was gone. Bernard would have to get it done some other way. Meneau told him he had an independent accountant from Auxerre working for him, a man named Bernard Fabre. Bernard gave him a call, and they agreed to a meeting at Saulieu at nine the next morning.
At nine sharp, Bernard stood by the front desk as an unprepossessing, dark-haired little man wearing a purple jacket and an expression of pained anxiety pushed open the door. “Bonjour,” he said. “I believe we have an appointment.”
“No,” said Bernard. “I’m expecting an expert comptable.”
“But I am Bernard Fabre. I am the expert comptable.”
Bernard did a brief double take, laughed, and ushered the visitor into his office. “But why did you say you didn’t have an appointment with me?” Fabre wondered.
“Because experts comptables are supposed to be old and fat and balding,” said Bernard. True enough, Fabre was none of the above. Just a couple of years older than Bernard himself, Fabre had arrived in Auxerre from Montpellier, deep in the south of France, where the chewy, gargly, syllable-compounding méridional accents are so thick that occasionally the speech can sound almost like another language. Fabre was marked for life as a southerner by that accent, but it did nothing to diminish the acuity of his gift for juggling figures on the little calculator that he carried with him at all times, and which he whipped out of his pocket at the slightest provocation.
It is a curious, if decidedly minor, fact of history that Fabre had come north not for business but for a reason that would baffle anyone who had not spent a few months in the south of France: he was fleeing the wind. Along with golf courses, a heavy population of old age pensioners, and a few million immigrants from North Africa, the French Midi is characterized by the seasonal winds that endlessly vent their aggression on the land and the people: the mistral and the tramontane from the north, the sirocco and the largade from the south and the levant from the east. Some people can take it and others can’t. “The wind that sweeps down from the mountains will drive me mad,” sang the méridional poet Georges Brassens in his interpretation of Victor Hugo’s poem “Gastibelza.” His words weren’t in jest. Fabre traded the warmth of the south for the chillier but still air of Burgundy, where he could calculate in peace.
Fabre spent the rest of that morning with Bernard and Chantal discussing how to finance the remodeling of the entry hall and building the first ten of the thirty new rooms and suites of Bernard’s dream master plan. Bernard insisted that they must not be just ordinary, comfortable hotel rooms, but beautiful and beautifully appointed individual retreats, each one different from the others, small architectural works of art in themselves that would be worthy of the elite “Relais et Châteaux” category: luxe, calme et volupté, indeed. By the time they wrapped up the meeting, Bernard was aboil with enthusiasm.
“You look to me like a good guy,” he announced. “Now you’ve got to have lunch with me.” There spake the spiritual grandson of the man who told Robert Doisneau that no one could leave Point’s place without eating lunch. At table, Bernard had a final test for his visitor. Segregating one small green element from the tiny vegetables accompanying the braised sweetbreads, he lifted it on his fork and asked: “Do you know what this is?”
“Wild asparagus,” said Fabre instantly. “I’ve been picking them for years.”
“Toi, tu es un bon!” Bernard exclaimed with delight. “Je t’engage”—you’re a good one—you’re hired. So there it was: done deal. Essentially, Bernard was betting his financial future on the basis of asparagus identification, but why not? Considering some of the triumphs of corporate judgment that in later years would be navigating a few enormous world-class multinational companies onto the financial rocks, a chef’s gut instinct was probably as safe a bet as any high-flown boardroom strategy session. Fabre immediately opened a dossier on the first major renovations of the Côte d’Or since Dumaine’s days, and stood at Bernard’s side with his trusty calculator as he began negotiating his first bank loans. Nearly twenty years later, by the time they had completed the master plan to bring the Côte d’Or and its parent company, Bernard Loiseau S.A., to the final glory that he had imagined for it, Bernard would have laid his hands on just under 90 million francs (about $15 million), nearly a third of which came from the audacious unprecedented stock-market operation with which he was to cap his hustling for funds on the last day of 1998.
“In life you’ve got to know your limits and bring in people who know how to do what you can’t do yourself,” Bernard told me just as he was about to begin construction on those ten new rooms. “My wife is doing the decoration because that’s something she knows about. For all the money side, I have my financial expert, Bernard Fabre. A cook can’t handle everything himself.”
He was getting organized. It was clear that the kid I had known in the Barrière Poquelin had matured. Once he had decided that he trusted Fabre entirely, Bernard gave him carte blanche to handle the details of the money side. He took the bit in his teeth for everything else and charged ahead full speed. Ironically, although the years 1982–86, the Chantal years, slowly deteriorated into tears, recrimination, and divorce, they proved to be richly productive for him on the professional level. It was during this period that le style Loiseau flowered into a fully developed philosophy with its clearly delimited goals, rules, and techniques. Blissfully ignorant for most of this period of the horns growing atop his bald pate, Bernard was bursting with a new confidence, and the three stars were no longer a chimera but a prize he could almost taste. Nothing demonstrated that confidence better than the new identity he had stamped on his place. Certainly motorists arriving from Paris would see the familiar name La Côte d’Or on the left wing of the building’s face, but far more prominent, between the second and third floors, was the yard-high black cursive script: Bernard Loiseau and, twice as big as that, directly over the arcade of the main entrance, a huge reproduction of the curlicue “BL” logo that every waiter wore on his jacket lapel. The old Côte d’Or was his version of L’Hôtel Moderne, and he was effecting the same symbolic change that Jean-Baptiste Troisgros had made in Roanne when his boys took over the kitchen. But, lacking a Jean-Baptiste of his own, he acted like Napoleon at his imperial investiture and put the crown on his head himself.
“That’s deliberate,” he told me. “People outside of the country know La Côte d’Or much more than me. I did this on purpose for the media, so that they’ll speak about Bernard Loiseau. And that’s what’s happening. These days you’ve got to personalize. You can be the best cook in the world, but no one will come if they don’t know about you. I’ve got to fill this place up, because Saulieu’s been forgotten for twenty years. When I go by the dining room and see just fifteen clients, I get the hell away from there, it depresses me so much. But I’ve got eighty reservations for tonight—I’ve already got a hard-on.”
With his full-court press of personalization, Bernard was marching directly in the footsteps—once again—of his idol Paul Bocuse. The phenomenal force of Bocuse’s personality had always attracted the media like bears to honey, and he had never feared to further underline his presence by ringing declarations, huge signs or—supreme gesture of carefree brashness—having the entire façade of his restaurant painted in polychrome hues of scarlet, green, orange, and gold, as brilliant as a medieval illuminated manuscript. “Everybody knows that God exists,” Bocuse never tires of saying, “but the preacher still rings the bell.”
And God knows Bernard rang his bell, too. When he made it peal, it resounded in explosive little bursts of onomatopoeia: Schlak! Vlan!
“It’s got to be a splendor in the mouth,” he was saying. “An explosion of taste. Paf! Toc!”
The year was 1984, and Bernard was doing his sales talk on me. I was buying it, of course, like anyone else who ever found himself in a one-on-one situation six inches away from that human high-pressure zone in the white chef’s tunic, with that big, round, strong-chinned face looming forward behind that huge smile, as arms windmilled and fist smacked into palm to further underline what was already hyperbolic. The man was quivering with energy, so vibrantly enthusiastic, so happy to be given the opportunity to explain himself, and so obviously sincere that you felt a positive churl if you didn’t agree with him instantly, didn’t bitterly denounce Michelin for continuing to withhold the third star, didn’t marry him, didn’t shake your head over the injustice of Jean Troisgros’s archbishop remark, didn’t do twenty push-ups, or whatever other cause he might have been arguing for. If Bernard had been in his father’s shoes, he would have sold baby clothes to a Trappist monastery.
He was explaining le style Loiseau as he marched me double-time around his installation, showing off the improvements already completed—“pretty good, huh?”—and those that would be coming as soon as he could persuade the banks to spring for the further millions that he had asked for. Everything had a reason and a logic, and he wanted—he needed—me to know that what he was applying in his kitchen was nothing short of a revolution.
“We’ve got a new style of cuisine here, and it’s all based on the quality of the produce. If you’re willing to pay the price, you can get the best ingredients in the world, and with modern transportation you can get them faster than ever. In the old days the seafood arrived three days late, so cooks had to disguise the taste. Now we get everything within twenty-four hours, and you can have the real taste of what they are—schlak! Cooks got so accustomed to hiding the taste of the ingredients that people didn’t really know what they were eating anymore. Here I give the clients the pure tastes, the essences of the ingredients. There’s no sauce with my langoustines rôties au chou, just the prawn and the cabbage, and they taste like what they are. It explodes in the mouth—clack! When I serve salsify or celery root, you get the real taste of salsify and celery.
“You should be able to recognize what you’re eating, so I don’t deglaze with wines or alcohols, because that would change the taste. No thickening of sauces with flour or egg yolk, either. No cream, no fonds, no demi-glaces, no fumets de poisson, no fats at all except for a little bit of butter when I sauté things, then I pat it off with paper towel—there’s no restaurant in France that uses as much paper towel as we do here. When it comes to making a sauce, the other guys reach for their pots of crème fraîche. Me, I reach for water. Water’s the best thing in the world. It’s completely neutral, so it exactly adopts the taste of the ingredient. You get the real taste—paf! Clients don’t want to eat cream anymore. Here you can eat lunch and still have an appetite for dinner. I’m turning things upside down. In ten years everyone will be wanting to eat this way.”
It didn’t quite turn out that way, but the basic idea underlying his reasoning was perfectly sound. Big tummies were definitely out in the last quarter of the twentieth century; people wanted to be slim and were worried about cholesterol, too, so nonfattening, easily digestible gastronomy was the way to get customers flocking to Saulieu. For this, he would marry the best of what he had learned from his three masters, Troisgros, Verger, and Guérard. From Troisgros, classical French recipes with a light touch. From Verger, super-rapid, last-minute treatment of highest quality ingredients. From Guérard, his own variants on the prestidigitation of cuisine minceur.
In fact, le style Loiseau wasn’t all that revolutionary. Bernard’s menus were replete with classics of French cuisine, and more specifically the great tradition of Burgundian cooking, but it was all dramatically lightened up. Since he was excessive by nature, though, his dedication to the lightness crusade could occasionally lead him astray. For a few of his developmental years, Bernard became identified as the Kim Jong-Il of la cuisine anti-sauce, a Dear Leader manner of absolutism that didn’t always go over too well with the hungry general public. A red mullet pan fried à l’unilateral—on one side only—and served with a dangerously vapid deglazing with water and a thin puree of chervil might have pleased a professional restaurant critic because it was light, unusual, and absolutely free of fattening agents, but it could also shock uninitiated customers paying prices that were already hovering near the three-star range, and who had been expecting a memorable chowdown in return for their money.
A dish like this offered a pertinent illustration of an important but little understood phenomenon affecting the world of haute gastronomie: Professional critics are not necessarily always beneficial to the restaurant trade and the wider eating public on which the trade re-lies. To begin with, these worthies can be just as opinionated, capricious, and self-important as any other mortal invested with a bit of power—there are no scientific guidelines for the very personal act of judging food—and, secondly, they sit plumb in the middle of the Seraglio Metaphor: too much of a good thing. As a result, their preferences do not always necessarily jibe with the best interests of their readers. Their unavoidable, besetting problem is that they live in permanent danger of getting the blahs over wonderful food. So regularly are they fed with it that they are frequently fed up with it, too—right to the gills. After a few days of packing away, for both lunch and dinner, a succession of the most divine creations that eager chefs can thrust at them, even the hungriest chroniqueur can become weary and sated. A surfeit of champagne, foie gras, truffles, crème brûlée, chocolate, and all the rest of the groaning board begins to appear as an aggression to the organism. The gourmets are on overload. What should be pleasure becomes agony; they’re not hungry anymore.
Certainly Henri Gault and Christian Millau were gifted, discerning analysts of French gastronomy, but their stomachs and their livers were often crying out for surcease as they plied their curious trade, and it is fair to pose a simple question: To what extent did the canons of nouvelle cuisine—the tiny, decorative portions, the evanescent sauces, the frequently precious and silly creations on huge plates—develop because these guys had the flagging appetites common to their profession, and were begging for mercy? For his part, Bernard was embarked on a constant crusade to please the critics who wrote the articles and awarded the stars. (Michelin stomachs, too, could tremble at the assault of two feasts a day, and the famous crise de foie, the most French of diseases, lurked just around the corner for all the professionals.) Consciously or not, Bernard was aiming his cuisine at the media’s opinion molders, and almost without exception these were Parisian sophisticates, weary veterans of the gastronomic wars who had seen it all, whose belts were feeling tight around the tummy and who were yearning for something delicate to nibble on—something like a little red mullet on a soothing splash of chervil purée.
But was this the right kind of cooking for the Burgundian bon vivants living in the vicinity of Saulieu, or for passing food fans who splurged a couple of times a year for an expensive but wonderful dining experience? Clients of this sort had the right to expect a sumptuous feast, not a dietetic demonstration. For the most part they would look indulgently upon a bit of butter and cream and demi-glace, because they tasted great. They might not always understand or care about the philosophical underpinnings of a little red mullet.
Eric Rousseau remembered a clearly disappointed client early in the Chantal years who approached Bernard as he stood at his habitual post by the front desk, where the bills were paid and where he was accustomed to receiving compliment after compliment. This gent was a good deal more forthright than the timid soul who had dared suggest mellowing out the taste of celery root puree. “Alexandre Dumaine would turn over in his grave if he could see this cuisine,” he grumbled.
His dignity affronted, Bernard mounted his high horse, made le grand geste, tore up the man’s bill, and asked him never to set foot in La Côte d’Or again. It was surely a satisfying moment for his ego, but it was not wise. Too many customers treated too haughtily can rapidly set off a chain reaction of comment that runs like lightning though the esculent grapevine, causing damage to a reputation that’s hard to undo. Even the greatest of chefs have to learn to swallow twice before barking back—and, to his credit, Bernard did. When Hubert reported more perplexed reactions to certain dishes that appeared too sparsely Calvinist and some sauces too watery, Bernard backed off and allowed the succulent richness of traditional French cuisine to flow back in.
He had only to think of Jean Ducloux, his predecessor by nearly half a century at the Côte d’Or, to be reminded of the joy that the great masses of normal customers, who do not share the spoiled-brat privileges of the full-time gastronomic professionals, experience in partaking of real classical French cuisine. When things were really bad in Saulieu, when the weather was down, the wind was whining through the cracks of his old barn, and the clients were little better than ghosts, Bernard’s greatest morale booster was to grab Hubert and a couple of the guys and rush on down to Tournus, where since time immemorial Ducloux had been serving the cooking he had learned under Monsieur Racouchot in Dijon and Monsieur Dumaine in Saulieu. And there, even as they were looking forward to homicidal postprandial combats of pétanque and bélote, they would devour Ducloux’s pâté en croûte Alexandre Dumaine, his perfect sautéed chicken, and his inimitable quenelles de brochet, confected of ground pike flesh, eggs, beef marrow, and suet (the thick white fat that encloses beef kidneys).
“All those pansies down in Lyon make their quenelles with panade [a mix of flour, eggs, butter, and milk], but I do it the old way, the right way, with beef fat!” Eyes blazing defiance from beneath his high toque and ill-fitting black wig, Ducloux would put up his dukes and proclaim the superiority of his method to anyone who wondered how he achieved the fantastic flavor and consistency of this absolutely unique dish. Pure beef fat—how perfectly shocking. Until he retired in 2004, Ducloux was probably the last cook in France to dare to cook with anything as dietetically incorrect as suet, but he knew something that the doomsayers of the flaxseed crowd will never know; its texture was perfect, and so was its taste. Call it irresponsible, call it a health hazard, but there was an honesty and nobility to Ducloux’s old-style cooking that no kiwi soufflé could ever achieve.
Bernard could not have agreed more enthusiastically as he wolfed down his portion of quenelle and slathered his bread through the last drops of sauce Nantua. Alas, this kind of gastronomic daring was not an option for him in Saulieu, not when his whole sales pitch was predicated on light cooking. Still, within the bounds of le style Loiseau, he did himself proud with his côte de veau fermier. Michel Piot, at that time the restaurant critic of the daily Le Figaro, labeled it as simply the best veal chop in the world, ever.
To begin with, it was huge: Bernard cut the meat as far as possible to either side of the central rib, flush against the two adjoining ribs, in effect using the meat of three chops to make a single one of outsized proportions. He seared it in a hot pan, browning its surface and sealing in the juices, finished the cooking in the oven for ten to twelve minutes, set it aside to repose for ten more minutes, then returned it to the oven for a last quick moment, just long enough to glaze its surface with a strong veal “juice.”
The preparation of what Bernard called his juices—whether veal, beef, lamb, or fowl—was something of a gastronomic profligacy in itself. He sacrificed prime cuts of each sort of meat by cooking them separately in a big sauteuse and removing the grease before deglazing them with water. He then transferred the sacrificial meats to a second receptacle and continued the cooking, with water and aromatic herbs, for several hours, until they had rendered up everything they had to give, in the form of a rich, syrupy essence, or jus—juice. Forty kilos of veal, for instance, yielded no more than five kilos of jus, but the flavor, the color, and the texture justified the sacrifice. It was with this jus that he deglazed the pan in which the veal chop had cooked, and with which he also brushed its surface for the final decorative glazing in the oven. This procedure—deglazing with juice from the previous “sacrificial” deglazing—he called cuisine à deux temps (two-stage cooking); the sauce that ennobled the chop and accompanied it to the dining room was the product of this double deglazing, bound and thickened with foie gras. The result on customers’ plates may have resembled other veal chops they might have consumed, but rare, indeed, were those who could guess at even a fraction of all the fussy, painstaking steps the chops had gone through before being set down before them. It was spectacularly good, spectacularly deep in taste, and as free of nasty, indigestible fats as human culinary ingenuity could possibly devise.
“Okay, guys, let’s go—we’re the best. We’re going to knock them on their asses tonight!”
It was with variations on this theme—exhortations as passionate as a college football coach before a big game—that Bernard began the service each day, lunch and dinner, during the high season of the warm months, when the roads were clogged with travelers and the Côte d’Or’s dining areas filled to near overflowing. Every kitchen worker, from Patrick Bertron, his newly promoted second, all the way down to the lowliest commis and apprenti, had the same three-star goal etched into his brain, because Bernard never let them forget it. His disconcerting inability to hide anything was paralleled and balanced by a constant process of consultation. His practice of asking everyone’s opinion on everything, right down to that of the dishwasher, would probably have resulted in a chaos of undisciplined jabbering under a different kind of boss, but with Bernard it meant a permanent dialogue. By its simple human contact, this dialogue built the ideal kind of synergy that professors with retroprojected charts try to teach in business schools; everyone around Bernard felt implicated in the life and the success of the Côte d’Or. Over the years, the staff’s complicity with Bernard developed into a bond that was as much personal as it was professional.
Pierre Loiseau recalled an evening in the eighties when he dropped by Saulieu unannounced. Bernard hustled him into the kitchen like a master of ceremonies, spread his arms, and announced: “Les gars—mon père!”—hey, guys—meet my father. “Bon soir, monsieur,” they all shouted in return, as courteous as all French young men and women have always been taught to be. The father was touched by the son’s gesture, but more significant for the Côte d’Or was the demonstration for the personnel that they were important enough to be introduced to the boss’s close family. Gestures of this sort were never known to Bernard’s guests, but they, too, formed a part of le style Loiseau. Where the Troisgros brothers continued the trade’s ancient tradition in commanding through terror, Bernard invited his underlings into the family and even his own life. He didn’t know how to do it any other way.
“I was surprised,” Verger said with unfeigned admiration many years later. “He didn’t do it like any of the other chefs, but he turned out to be an excellent leader of men.”
During the service, Bernard conducted his orchestra from the traditional position of the Chef: standing at the passe—the stainless steel platform where he received waiters’ order chits, and where the freshly prepared plates were set down beneath his eyes for a final once-over before being confided to the waiters again for delivery. It was there that he was at his most impossibly and tyrannically perfectionistic because if there is anything that sends a great chef into transports of Homeric indignation, it is the sight of an imperfection or disharmony so infinitesimally slight as to have escaped the attention of all his colleagues down the line, those who have been preparing the plate that has now reached its ultimate point of judgment before disappearing into the dining room. If Bernard Naegellen of Michelin admiringly compared Bernard Pacaud to a dog, he would have needed to consult a new bestiary to find a fitting description for Bernard in those crucial years when his second star was in hand and he was stalking the third. Something between a hawk and a tiger might do it: a griffin, perhaps.
“Mon pauvre ami, ça ne vaut pas trois étoiles.” Those big brown eyes might have been moist with compassion, but he would have bounced the sweetbreads or the pigeon all the same, right back to where they came from, if his laser eye found a single atom out of place.* “My poor friend, that’s not worth three stars,” he would say, and he did—over and over again.
Bernard reacted that way all the time, whether he was referring to a pillowcase, a piece of furniture, or an ill-placed slice of truffle, and he said it with the implacable righteousness of a drill sergeant on inspection who can tolerate a toothbrush only when it is perfectly aligned north by northwest. The same unbending rigor was applied in the dining room, of course. If for some reason—the call of nature, the call of business, whatever—a client left the table just as a dish was set down in front of him, Hubert would order the plate returned to the kitchen, not to be kept warm but to be made all over again. You do it right. You either want three stars or you don’t.
Once the service was well under way and Bernard was satisfied that his assistants had the rest of the meal well in hand, he habitually ducked out of the kitchen for a look into the dining room. Unlike many of his illustrious peers (Bocuse, Georges Blanc, the Troisgros brothers), he never entered the dining room to mingle with his guests, for fear of interrupting their enjoyment of the meal, lest the two or three minutes of his presence at tableside lower the perfect temperature of the pigeon or the turbot. Standing bareheaded (he never wore a toque) in a corner at the edge of the door, staying carefully out of the way of the to-and-fro flow of waiters and maîtres d’hôtel, he cast an anxious eye from table to table trying to divine, from facial expressions, from the speed of fork and knife, from activity of the waiters, whether the clients were satisfied. When he saw a plate carried out only half consumed, he rushed into the kitchen in its wake like a lawyer after an ambulance, and peppered the waiter with questions: What did he say? Why didn’t he like it? In other words: What have I done wrong?
That anguished query inhabited Bernard down to the marrow and, I daresay, it lingers within some intimate recess of most his fellow Frenchmen, garrulous and self-assured as they are on the surface, but stricken with doubt and anxiety in the profound depths of their national soul, down there where the snakes of guilt crawl. Through all the masses, confessions, and catechisms, the shut-ups and the hold-yourself-straights of their childhood, French kids get the shameful, sinful state of their base humanity ritually hammered into their little heads. Bernard, with six years of living under the thumb of the priests at Massillon, got it in double-strength doses. And just in case there was ever an odd day when he managed to feel clean and virtuous, there was always good old Original Sin lurking around the corner. No matter how hard you try, you’re still screwed by heredity, straight from Adam. Guilty as charged. Saint Paul himself said so. Idealist and perfectionist, but self-doubting behind his gasconade bluffs, Bernard was a perfect patsy for culpability.
It worked on him twenty-four hours a day. Every afternoon and evening, when the service was finished and the apprentices were beginning the twice-daily cleaning of the kitchen—scraping, rubbing, hosing down, and mopping until it sparkled like a detergent ad—Bernard ritually folded his apron into the same obsessively neat little rectangle, wrapped the strings around it just so, and stashed it on the stainless steel shelf space that was his alone. Then he’d walk out and post himself by the front desk to socialize with the departing clients. After years of practice he learned to conceal his anger and indignation if ever some slight criticism slipped in among the flood tide of compliments, but it stuck in the back of his head, where the priests had implanted St. Paul’s brilliant inspiration. Then it would come back to haunt him in the middle of the night, hand in hand with all his other demons.
“He was the most jovial person you could imagine, but then he would suddenly come crashing down from his high,” Chantal remembered. “He used to wake me up in the middle of the night. ‘Do you think we’re going to keep the two stars?’ he would ask me. He had to be permanently reassured. ‘If I lose a star I’ll blow my brains out,’ he said. ‘If you ever leave me, I’ll kill myself’—he told me that, too.”
So there it was. By then he must have known. The mere suggestion that Chantal might think of walking out on him indicates that he knew something was going on, even if he wasn’t sure of how serious it was, and was probably afraid of finding out. The turmoil in his head would have mixed anguish with fear, but if Bernard was transfixed with jealousy, he was no Othello. He was a nice guy, not an avenging soldier. He was a cook. Fleeing confrontation as usual, he temporized and worried, bottled it all up inside him and kept up a good face. Nor was Chantal a Desdemona, for that matter. She was a girl who had been around, and she really was having a go with the Saulieu equivalent of Cassio. Bernard’s pusillanimity in the face of her faithlessness could only increase her disdain for the man-child with whom she had imprudently agreed to share her life. The marriage was doomed.
It was a very strange period. Things were getting better and better and worse and worse at the same time. By 1985 the first nine Relais & Châteaux hotel rooms, three of them striking duplex suites, had been completed, and Bernard had bought the little parcelles of land lying behind the main building, torn down the old sheds there, and replaced them with the soothing greenery of a landscaped garden. Bernard was appearing more and more frequently on the radio and television shows of his freeloading media friends, racing up to Paris at the crack of dawn for a quick taping, then racing back down to preside over the lunch service. Highest professional recognition was arriving, too.* The Guide Hachette had named him “Cook of the Year,” and GaultMillau, more enamored than ever of his light, bright concoctions, had raised his “grade” to its absolute summit: 19.5 out of 20. No one in France had gone higher.
The casual visitor to Saulieu in 1985 and 1986 would have found a vastly improved hotel, a charming, dynamic chef backed by a devoted staff, and an inventive cuisine accented with garden herbs, truffles, and light deglazings. He served his roast lobster with a shellfish jus “mounted,” at the last minute, with butter—and even that butter would disappear in later years as he perfected his techniques. Bernard’s celebrated nettles made a surprising detour to become a sauce for poached oysters, his ragout of spring vegetables and chicken livers was a piece of pure last-minute wizardry, and the baby leeks he discovered from a nearby grower, served with his fricassee of veal sweetbreads and kidneys, looked like they must have been plucked from the ground with tweezers. A generalized chorus of approval rang out from all the guides and critics. Everything seemed hotsy-totsy in Saulieu, then. Young Bernard was going places.
But the direction could be downward, too, a lot more than anyone realized. He had not completed even a third of his building program; he was still working in Dumaine’s rotten old kitchen, he had maxed out on the bank loans that would permit him to carry on with the renovation, and there weren’t enough new customers coming in to cover the alarming rise in expenses since his marriage. He rattled around his half-empty palace talking a mile a minute, buttonholing anyone who would listen, assuring passing journalists that he was the greatest, grinning a grin that appeared ever more forced, as he posed for any silly idea any photographer threw out at him,* and the relationship with Chantal was little better than venomous coexistence. Hubert, Eric, Patrick, and the others watched and waited.
It was around this period that I experienced a little interlude with Bernard, whose distressing significance became apparent only several years afterward, when the whole tragic mess had played itself out. Following him around at a gallop from room to room, admiring what he had accomplished, hastily scribbling notes on what he had planned for the future, and simply struggling to keep track of the high-speed flow of words tumbling out in that sonorous baritone of his, I snatched a moment of respite to pose a question that struck me as obvious, but which, it seems in retrospect, had not been so obvious to many of those who were close to him. Bernard, I said, you’re just so damn manic. Are you “up” like this all the time? Isn’t there a pendant to this—don’t you ever slow down? Don’t you get depressed? The chirpy, cheerful pumpkin face suddenly went blank, and he fixed me with a long gaze. When he answered it was almost a whisper. “You’ve got no idea,” he said, “how far down I go when I fall.”
It was one of those statements that become memorable only too late, after the worst had already happened. Most others around Bernard had come across hints and premonitions of this sort, but dismissed them out of hand because only moments later he was sure to suddenly spring back to his galvanic, resolute self. Not to worry—Bernard was just being Bernard again, that was all. He was suffused with such a force of life that no one could imagine the strength of his demons, not while that explosive energy of his was charging everyone else’s batteries. “I’m going to live to one hundred and twenty!” he used to boast. That was typical Bernard, and around the Côte d’Or his friends could just about believe it.
To me, he had merely dropped a dark hint, a suggestion. To others he had opened up a good deal more, and a good deal more explicitly. In the stunned weeks after those doleful days of February 2003, after the worst had happened, a French journalist named Jean-Pierre Géné recalled a wild ride through the Morvan countryside a dozen years earlier, when Bernard was personally (that was typical of him, too) driving him to the town of Montbard to catch the fast train back to Paris. Bernard was holding forth, as usual, about the cooking trade in general, his experiences in it and, in particular, how he had lived the last days of the Chantal period.
“Cuisine is a business for crazies,” he told Géné. “You see me at the wheel of my car here, but not so long ago I had my shotgun under my chin. I was all set to blow my top off. My maître d’hôtel was dipping into the till and into my wife, too. That’s enough to make you blow your brains out, isn’t it?”
The reference was to the trauma he had lived in the fourth year of his marriage, 1986, when the boil finally burst. Unable to hide from the obvious anymore, too deeply and thoroughly plunged into cuckoldry to try saving face any longer, worried sick about money, Bernard finally cracked on one of those cold, drizzly, hopeless winter evenings when the dining room was almost empty. Hubert, his best friend and the coolest head in the house, was the one to whom he turned for solace.
“That was his first big depression,” Hubert explained. “That night, around eleven p.m., after we had wrapped up the dinner service, he suddenly fell into my arms, bawling like a baby. ‘Hubert, I can’t take it anymore,’ he said. ‘I’m at the end of my rope.’ We went to the little salon with the fireplace to talk it out. We sat there all night, right through to six a.m., with Bernard crying and talking nonstop. I told him what counted for us was him and the Côte d’Or, because we believed in it as much as he did. We were behind him all the way, and we’d do everything to make it work.
“That reassured him. He had been afraid that maybe Chantal had taken a kind of ascendancy, and he wasn’t sure where the personnel stood, for him or her. I told him we didn’t give a damn about Chantal. The thing to do now was get the divorce and get out of the marriage as cheaply as possible. He was petrified about what Michelin would think and what the papers would say if he divorced, but finally he came around and agreed with me. From that moment on, he became himself again.”
Within a few months, divorce proceedings had begun and both Chantal and the famous maître d’hôtel had left Saulieu—separately, as it turned out: he back to his wife and child and she to the Paris region, where she lives today with her third husband.
Bernard, for his part, did not remain alone for long, because something new and good was rapidly developing from a chance encounter at the tail end of 1985; he finally met Dominique Brunet, the slim, scholarly Alsatian woman whom everyone always said would make a terrific wife for some lucky cook.