CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Basement, 1

CELLARS.

The Altamonts’ cellar, clean, tidy, and neat: from floor to ceiling, shelving and pigeonholes labelled in large, legible letters. A place for every thing, and every thing in its place; nothing has been left out: stocks and provisions to withstand a siege, to survive a crisis, to see through a war.

The left-hand wall is allocated to food provisions. First, basic ingredients: wheat flour, semolina, corn flour, potato starch, tapioca, oat flakes, sugar lumps, granulated sugar, castor sugar, salt, olives, capers, condiments, large jars of mustard and gherkins, cans of cooking oil, packets of dried herbs, packets of peppercorns, cloves, freeze-dried mushrooms, and small tins of sliced truffle; wine vinegar and pickling vinegar; chopped almonds, peeled green walnuts, vacuum-packed hazelnuts and peanuts, biscuits, aperitifs, sweets, bars of cooking chocolate, bars of dessert chocolate, honey, jam, tinned milk, powdered milk, powdered eggs, yeast, pre-cooked puddings, tea, coffee, cocoa, herb tea, stock cubes, tomato concentrate, harissa, nutmeg, bird pepper, vanilla pods, spices and flavourings, breadcrumbs, crispbread, sultanas, candied fruits, angelica; then come tinned foods: tinned fish, tuna chunks, sardines in oil, rolled anchovies, mackerel in white-wine sauce, pilchards in tomato sauce, hake Spanish style, smoked sprats, lumpfish roe, smoked cods’ roe; tinned vegetables: garden peas, asparagus tips, button mushrooms, baby runner beans, spinach, artichoke hearts, mange-tout peas, salsify, diced vegetable salad; as well as sachets of dried vegetables, split peas, lentils, broad beans, green beans; bags of rice, of pasta products: macaroni, vermicelli, pasta shells, spaghetti, crisps, mashed-potato flakes, and packets of soup powders; tinned fruit: apricot halves, pears in syrup, cherries, peaches, plums, packs of figs, boxes of dates, dried bananas, prunes; preserved meats and pre-cooked meals: corned beef, ham, terrine and rillette pâtés, chopped liver, liver pâté, boned meat in aspic, ox muzzle, sauerkraut, cassoulet, sausage and lentil stew, ravioli, lamb with potatoes and turnips, ratatouille niçoise, couscous, chicken with boletus and Bayonne ham, paella, and traditional veal blanquette.

The rear end wall and the larger part of the right-hand wall are reserved for bottles, stacked on their sides in plastic-coated wire racks in an apparently canonical order: first come the so-called table wines, then the Beaujolais, Côtes-du-Rhône, and that year’s white wine from the Loire, then the wines to be drunk young, Cahors, Bourgueil, Chinon, Bergerac; then the real wine cellar, the grand cave controlled by a wine list in which every bottle is entered by geographical origin, name of grower, name of supplier, vintage, date of entry, optimal maturity date, and, where relevant, date of leaving: Alsace wines: Riesling, Traminer, Pinot noir, Tokay; red Bordeaux: Médoc vineyards: Château-de-l’Abbaye-Skinner, Château-Lynch-Bages, Château-Palmer, Château-Brane-Cantenac, Château-Gruau-Larose; Graves vineyards: Château-Lagarde-Martillac, Château-Larrivet-Haut-Brion; Saint-Emilion vineyards: Château-La-Tour-Beau-Site, Château-Canon, Château-La-Gaffelière, Château-Trottevieille; Pomerol vineyards: Château-Taillefer; white Bordeaux: Sauternes vineyards: Château-Sigalas-Rabaud, Château-Caillou, Château-Nairac; Graves vineyards: Château-Chevalier, Château-Malartic-Lagravière; red Burgundy wines: Côtes de Nuits vineyards: Chambolle-Musigny, Charmes-Chambertin, Bonnes-Mares, Romanée-Saint-Vivant, La Tâche, Richebourg; Côtes de Beaune vineyards: Pernand-Vergelesse, Aloxe-Corton, Santenay Gravières, Beaune Grèves “Vignes-del’enfant-Jésus”, Volnay Caillerets; white Burgundy wines: Beaune Clos-des-Mouches, Corton Charlemagne; Côtes-du-Rhône wines: Côte-Rôtie, Crozes-Hermitage, Cornas, Tavel, Châteauneuf-du-Pape; Côtes-de-Provence wines: Bandol, Cassis; wines from the Mâcon and Dijon areas, ordinary wines from the Champagne vineyards – Vertus Bouzy, Crémant – and various Languedoc wines, wines from Béarn, from the region of Saumur, from Touraine, and wines from abroad: Fechy, Pully, Sidi-Brahim, Château-Maffe-Hughes, Dorset wine, Rhine and Mosel wines, Asti, Koudiat, Hochmornag, Egri Bikavér, etc.; and last of all come a few cases of champagnes, aperitifs, and various spirits – whisky, gin, kirsch, calvados, cognac, Grand-Marnier, Bénédictine, and, up on the shelving again, various cartons containing miscellaneous non-alcoholic beverages, effervescent and still mineral waters, beer, fruit juices.

To the far right, finally, between the wall and the door – a thick wooden palisade with iron braces, and two large padlocks for closing it – comes the maintenance, cleansing, and miscellaneous supplies section: stacks of floorcloths, cartons of washing powder, detergents, descaling liquid, bleach products for unblocking wastepipes, supplies of ammonia bleach, sponges, products for polishing floors, cleaning windows, shining brass, untarnishing silver, for brightening glassware, floortiles, and linoleum, broom-heads, Hoover bags, candles, spare matches, piles of electric batteries, coffee filters, soluble aspirin with added vitamin C, candle bulbs for chandeliers, razor blades, cheap Eau de Cologne in litre bottles, soap, shampoo, cottonwool, cottonbuds, emery nailfiles, ink cartridges, beeswax, paint pots, dressings for minor cuts, insecticides, firelighters, dustbin liners, flints for cigarette lighters, and kitchen paper towel rolls.

Cellars.

The Gratiolets’ cellar. Here generations have heaped up rubbish unsorted and unordered by anyone. Three fathoms deep it lies, under the watchful eye of a fat ginger-striped cat crouching high up on the other side of the skylight, tracking through the wire netting the inaccessible but nonetheless just perceptible scuttling of a mouse.

The eye, becoming slowly accustomed to the dark, could end up making out beneath the layer of fine grey dust heteroclite remains coming from each of the Gratiolets: the base and posts of an Empire bed, hickorywood skis having lost their spring long ago, a pith helmet that was of purest white once upon a time, tennis racquets held in heavy trapezoidal presses, an old Underwood typewriter of the celebrated Four Million model, which was held to be, in its time, and owing to its automatic tabulator, one of the most sophisticated objects ever made, and on which François Gratiolet began to type his invoices when he decided he had to modernise his accounting systems; an old Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré beginning with a half-page 71 – ASP sbs (Grk aspis). Colloquial for viper. Fig. Asp-tongue perpetrator of calumnies – and, ending with page 1530: MAROLLES-LES-BRAULTS (Dept of Sarthe, Mamers County); pop. 2,000 (vill. 950); an old cast-iron coatstand still holding up a raw-wool cloak patched with pieces of different colours and even different materials: the overcoat worn by Pte Gratiolet, Olivier, taken prisoner at Arras on 20 May 1940, released as early as May 1942 thanks to the efforts of his uncle Marc (Marc, the son of Ferdinand, was not Olivier’s uncle but his father Louis’s second cousin, but Olivier called him “my uncle” just as he said “uncle” to his father’s other cousin, François); an old cardboard globe, with quite a few holes; piles and piles of incomplete runs of papers: L’Illustration, Point de Vue, Radar, Détective, Réalités, Images du Monde, Cœmédia; on a cover of Paris-Match, Pierre Boulez, wearing a tuxedo, waves his baton at the première of Wozzeck at the Paris Opera; on a cover of Historia two adolescents can be seen, one in the uniform of a colonel in the Hussars – white kerseymere trousers, midnight-blue dolman with pearl-grey frogging, tasselled shako – and the other in a black cloak and lace cravat and cuffs, rushing into each other’s arms, above the following legend: Did Louis XVII secretly meet Napoleon II at Fiume on 8 August 1808? The most amazing mystery of French history finally solved! A hatbox full of curling photographs, of yellowed or sepia-tinted snapshots you can never remember of what, or taken by whom: three men on a country lane; that dark man of graceful carriage, with curling black moustaches, wearing light-coloured check trousers, is surely Juste Gratiolet, Olivier’s great-grandfather, the first proprietor of the block of flats, with friends of his, who might be the Bereaux, Jacques and Emile, whose sister Marie he married; and those other two, standing in front of the Beirut War Memorial, both with empty right sleeves and medals on their chests, saluting the flag with their left hands, are Bernard Lehameau, a cousin of Marthe, François’s wife, and his old friend Colonel Augustus B. Clifford, for whom he worked as interpreter at Allied Forces General HQ at Péronne, where, like the colonel, he lost his right arm when the said GHQ was bombed by Richthofen, the “Red Baron”, on 19 May 1917; and the other one, the obviously long-sighted man reading a book on a raked lectern, is Gérard, Olivier’s grandfather.

Beside it there is a square tin containing piles of seashells and pebbles collected by Olivier Gratiolet at Gatseau, on the Isle of Oléron, on 3 September 1934, the day his grandfather died, as well as a set of popular Epinal woodblock prints, wrapped in a rubber band, of the kind you used to get at school as a prize for a given number of merit marks: the one on top shows a meeting between the Czar of Russia and the President of France. This takes place on a ship. All about, as far as can be seen, are many other ships, the smoke from their funnels vanishing in the bright sky. Both Czar and President have rushed towards each other with long strides and are clasping one another by the hand. Behind the President stand two men. By comparison with the gay faces of the Czar and President, the faces of their attendants are very solemn, the eyes of each group focused on their master. Lower down – the scene evidently takes place on a top deck – stand long lines of saluting sailors cut off by the margin.