CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

Servants’ Quarters, 10

HENRI FRESNEL, the chef, came to live in this room in June nineteen nineteen. He was a sad-hearted Southerner aged about twenty-five, short, dry, with a thick black moustache. He had quite stylish ways of doing fish and shellfish dishes, and also vegetable starters: raw artichokes in pepper and salt, cucumber in dill, courgettes with turmeric, cold ratatouille flavoured with mint, radishes in cream and chervil, capsicum with basil, plum tomatoes in Provençal thyme. By way of homage to his long-dead namesake (the inventor of the optical lens, or lentille) he had also invented a recipe for lentils cooked in cider and served cold with a sprinkling of olive oil and saffron on toasted circular slices of the kind of bread used for the dish known as pan bagnat.

In nineteen twenty-four this man of few words married the daughter of the sales director of a sizable cooked-meats supplier at Pithiviers specialising in the celebrated lark pâté which gives the town one part of its renown, the remainder deriving from its famous almond cake. Bolstered by the reputation his cuisine had acquired, and correctly reckoning that Monsieur Hardy, far too concerned with promoting his olive oil and casks of anchovies to the exclusion of all else, would not give him the means to build on it, Henri Fresnel decided to go it alone, and with the help of his young bride Alice – who put her dowry into it – he opened his own restaurant in Rue des Mathurins, near the Madeleine. They called it La Belle Alouette. Fresnel manned the hotplates, Alice managed the dining room: they stayed open late at night, to attract the actors, journalists, night birds, and high-lifers who thronged the area, and their reasonable prices combined with the very high quality of their cuisine soon meant that they had to turn customers away, and the light-coloured wood panelling of their small dining room soon began to sport autographed snapshots of music hall stars, leading actors, and boxing champions.

Everything went swimmingly, and the Fresnels were soon planning for the future, thinking of having a baby and of leaving their cramped flatlet. But one morning in nineteen twenty-nine, when Alice was six months’ pregnant, Henri disappeared, leaving his wife a laconic note explaining that he was dying of boredom in his kitchen and was off to make his long-cherished dream come true: to be an actor!

Alice Fresnel reacted to this news with surprising calm: the very same day she hired a chef, and with uncommon energy she took over the running of the business, letting go only for the time it took to deliver a chubby-cheeked baby boy whom she baptised Ghislain and put out to a wet-nurse straight away. As for her husband, she made no effort to find him.

She saw him again forty years later. In the meantime, the restaurant had gone downhill and been sold; Ghislain had grown up and gone into the army, and Alice lived on in her room on the income from her savings, poaching a turbot on the side-plate of her enamelled cooker, or simmering a stew or a blanquette or a hotpot which filled the servants’ staircase with delicious smells, and with which she provided feasts for some of her neighbours.

Henri Fresnel had given it all up not for an actress – as Alice had always believed – but really for acting. Like one of those strolling players of Molière’s time, who came in the pouring rain to the gates of a dilapidated castle and sought shelter from a ragged squire who would join the errant band next morning, Henri had set off on the road with four companions in misfortune who had failed drama school and despaired of ever getting a part: two twins, Isidore and Lucas, a pair of strong, tall men from the Jura who did swashbucklers and young male leads, a girl hailing from Toulon who played the innocent, and a distinctly butch contralto who was in fact the youngest member of the troupe. Isidore and Lucas drove the two trucks that had been converted into caravans and set up the stage, Henri did the cooking, the accounts, and the directing, fresh-faced Lucette designed, made, and above all darned the costumes, and buxom Charlotte did everything else: washing up, cleaning the caravans, shopping, combing and ironing needed at the last minute, etc. They had two painted canvas sets: one depicted a palace with a perspective effect and did indiscriminately for Racine, Molière, Labiche, Feydeau, Coward, and Courteline; the other, rescued from a church guild, showed a Bethlehem nativity scene: the addition of two plywood trees and a few artificial flowers turned it into the Enchanted Forest where the troupe played its greatest success, The Force of Destiny, a post-romantic drama with no connections whatsoever with Verdi, a play which had made the fortunes of the Boulevard theatres and of six generations of repertory managers: the queen (Lucette) comes across a cruel brigand (Isidore) hanging in the sun from an instrument of torture. She takes pity on him, goes up to him, brings him water, notices he is a handsome and likable young man. She frees him under cover of darkness and tells him to flee disguised as a tramp and to await her arrival in the royal coach in the depths of the woods. But at that point a magnificent Amazon (Charlotte, in a gilt-painted cardboard helmet) leading an army (Lucas and Fresnel) arraigns her:

       –  O Queen of the Night, the man you have freed belongs unto me: Prepare yourself to fight; the war against the armies of light will last in the midst of the trees of the forest till dawn!

(Exeunt omnes. Lights down. Silence. Thunder. Trumpets sound.)

And then the two queens reappear on stage wearing plumed helmets, jewel-incrusted armour, and gauntlets, holding long lances and cardboard shields decorated respectively with a flaming sun and a crescent moon on a starry background, and riding two legendary beasts, one a relative of the dragon (Fresnel), the other cognate to the camel (Isidore and Lucas), with coats cut and sewn by a Hungarian tailor in Avenue du Maine.

With only a handful of other paltry troops – an X-shaped stool for a throne, an old mattress and three cushions, a black-painted score cupboard, door and window openings made of old orange boxes which a piece of patched green baize could turn into that desk with its silver-gilt rims, piled high with books and papers, at which a contemplative cardinal – who is not Richelieu but his ghost Mazarin (Fresnel) – decides to have brought out of the Bastille an aged prisoner who is none other than Rochefort (Isidore) and entrusts this mission to a lieutenant of the Black Musketeers who is none other than D’Artagnan (Lucas) – and with costumes altered a thousand times, repaired and resurrected with bits of wire, Sellotape, and safety pins, with two rusty spotlights they took turns to operate and which failed fifty percent of the time, they produced historical dramas, comedies of manners, the classics, bourgeois tragedies, modern melodramas, vaudevilles, farces, Punch-and-Judy shows, hasty adaptations of sentimental novels like Les Misérables or Pinocchio – in which Fresnel played Jiminy Cricket in an old tuxedo purportedly painted to depict the body of a cicada, and with two clockwork springs sticking out of corks glued to his forehead, representing the antennæ.

They played in schoolyards and playgrounds, in village squares at unlikely locations in the heart of the Cévennes or the hills of Provence, pulling off nightly prodigious feats of imagination and improvisation, swapping six roles and twelve costumes in a single play, before an audience of ten adults drowsing in their Sunday best and fifteen youngsters with galoshes on their feet, berets on their heads, and warm knitted scarves around their necks, who nudged and spluttered when they saw the leading lady’s pink knickers through the rents in her skirt.

Rain interrupted their plays, the trucks wouldn’t start, a bottle of cooking oil got spilled a few minutes before Monsieur Jourdain was due to go on in the only remotely presentable seventeenth-century costume they possessed – a sky-blue velvet jacket with a flower-embroidered doublet and lace cuffs – and obscene abscesses sprouted on the heroines’ bosoms, but they did not lose heart for three years. Then, in the space of a few days, everything fell apart: Lucas and Isidore ran off in the middle of the night with one of the trucks and the week’s takings, which, for once, had not been disastrous; two days later Lucette got herself abducted by a scurrilous surveyor who had been chasing her to no avail for the previous three months. Charlotte and Fresnel stuck together for another fortnight, attempting to perform their repertoire of plays two-handed and yielding to the fallacious illusion that they would be able to rebuild their troupe once they reached a large town. They ended up at Lyons and separated by mutual agreement. Charlotte went back to her Swiss banking family, for whom acting was a sin; Fresnel joined a troupe of tumblers leaving for Spain: a snake-man permanently dressed in a thin scaly leotard who contorted his way under a burning panel twelve inches off the ground, and a couple of female dwarves (one of whom was actually a man) who did a Siamese-twin act with banjo, castanets, and ditties. As for Fresnel, he became Mister Mephisto the Magician, the soothsayer and healer acclaimed by all the crowned heads of Europe. Wearing a red tuxedo with a pink in his buttonhole, with a top hat on his head and a diamond-topped walking stick in his hand, he would put on a slight Russian accent and take a full set of Tarot cards out of a tall, narrow, lidless, old-leather box, and lay out eight of them on a table in a rectangle; using an ivory spatula, he would sprinkle them with a blue powder which was nothing more than ground galena but which he called Galen’s Dust and to which he granted certain organotherapeutic properties effecting cures for all past, present, and future afflictions, but especially recommended for the extraction of teeth, migraines and cephalalgias, menstrual pain, arthritis, arthrosis, neuralgia, cramps, convulsions, colic and kidney stones, and such other ills as he might select as appropriate to the place, the time of year, and the specific audience addressed.

They took over two years to cross Spain, went over to Morocco, then down to Mauritania and as far as Senegal. Around nineteen thirty-seven they took a boat to Brazil, reached Venezuela, then Nicaragua, then Honduras, and that was how in the end Henri Fresnel found himself in New York, NY, United States of America, on his own, one morning in nineteen forty, with seventeen cents in his pocket, sitting on a bench opposite St Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, in front of a stone plaque, placed diagonally by the wooden porch, attesting that this church, dating from 1799, was one of the 28 buildings in America built before 1800. He went to ask for help from the priest of the parish who – maybe touched by Fresnel’s accent – agreed to listen to him. The cleric nodded his head in sadness as he learnt that Fresnel had been a charlatan, an illusionist, and an actor, but as soon as he discovered that the man had run a restaurant in Paris and had had a clientele including Mistinguett, Maurice Chevalier, Serge Lifar, Tom Lane the jockey, Nungesser, and Picasso, he broke into a broad smile and as he reached for the telephone assured the Frenchman that his troubles were over.

It was thus that after eleven years of wandering Henri Fresnel became cook to an eccentric and super-rich American woman, Grace Twinker. Grace Twinker, then aged seventy, was none other than the famous Twinkie, the very same who started at sixteen in a burlesque show dressed as the recently inaugurated Statue of Liberty and who became at the turn of the century one of the most legendary queens of Broadway, before marrying five billionaires in succession who all had the good sense to die shortly after their weddings and leave Twinkie all their money.

Twinkie was extravagantly generous and supported choreographers and dancers, writers, librettists, set designers, etc., whom she had hired to write a musical based on her own fabulous biography: her triumph as Lady Godiva in the streets of New York, her marriage to Prince Guéménolé, her stormy affair with Mayor Groncz, her arrival in a Duesenberg at East Knoyle airfield for the meeting at which the Argentinian flyer, Carlos Kravchik, who was madly in love with her, jumped from his biplane after a suite of eleven dead-leaf dives and the most impressive zoom climb ever seen, her purchase of the monastery of the Brothers of Mercy at Granbin, near Pont-Audemer, which she had transported stone by stone to Connecticut and presented to Highpool University, which used it for its library, her giant crystal bath shaped like a champagne glass, which she filled with said (Californian) beverage, her eight Siamese cats with navy-blue eyes watched over day and night by two vets and four nurses, her lavish and extravagant contributions (which the beneficiaries, it was frequently reported, would have rather not had) to Harding’s and Coolidge’s and Hoover’s campaigns, the famous telegram – Shut up, you singing buoy! – she sent to Caruso a few minutes before his first appearance at the Metropolitan Opera, all these episodes were supposed to appear in an “All-American” show beside which the wildest Follies of the period would pale into provincial insignificance.

Grace Slaughter – the surname of her fifth husband, a manufacturer of pharmaceutical toners and “prophylactic” products, recently deceased due to a ruptured peritoneum – was sharply chauvinistic and would allow no more than two exceptions to her all-American views, exceptions with which her first spouse, Astolphe de Guéménolé-Longtgermain, no doubt had something to do: cooking had to be done by French nationals of male gender, laundry and ironing by British subjects of female gender (and absolutely not by Chinese). That allowed Henri Fresnel to be hired without having to hide his original citizenship, which is what had to be done by the director (Hungarian), the set designer (Russian), the choreographer (Lithuanian), the dancers (Italian, Greek, Egyptian), the scriptwriter (English), the librettist (Austrian), and the composer, a Finn of Bulgarian descent with a large dash of Romanian.

The attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into the war at the end of 1941 put an end to these grandiose plans, which in any case did not satisfy Twinkie as she thought that every version inadequately emphasised the galvanising part she had played in the life of the nation. Though in total disagreement with the Roosevelt administration, Twinkie decided to devote herself to the war effort by sending all American soldiers serving in the Battle for the Pacific packets of samples of consumer products made by firms she controlled directly or indirectly. The packets were wrapped in a nylon sleeve depicting the American flag; they contained a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, three soluble effervescent tablets recommended for neuralgia, stomach pains, and heartburn, a piece of soap, three doses of shampoo, a bottle of pop, a ball-point pen, four packs of chewing gum, a set of razor blades, a plastic card case designed to hold a photograph – as an example, Twinkie had had her own put in, showing her at the launch of MTB Remember the Alamo – a small medallion cut to the shape of the soldier’s home state (foreign-born military received a medallion cut to the shape of the USA), and a pair of socks. The executive committee of the “Godmothers of America at War” which the Pentagon had made responsible for checking the contents of these gift packs, had had samples of “prophylactic” products withdrawn and strongly disapproved of any being sent to individuals.

Grace Twinker died in nineteen fifty-one, from complications arising from a little-known disease of the pancreas. She left all her servants more than comfortable incomes. Henry Fresnel – he had adopted the English spelling of his first name – used his money to open a restaurant which he dubbed Le Capitaine Fracasse in memory of his years as a travelling player, published a book boastfully titled Mastering the French Art of Cookery, and founded a school of cooking which rapidly flourished. That didn’t stop him from satisfying his deepest passion. Thanks to all the show-business personalities who had tasted his cooking at Twinkie’s and who soon found their way to his restaurant, he became a producer, technical adviser, and the main actor in a TV series called I Am the Cookie (Higher Ham Zee Cool Key, in Fresnel’s inimitable Marseilles accent, which had stood up successfully to so many years of exile). The broadcasts, which ended each time with Fresnel presenting one of his own original recipes, were so popular that analogous acting parts as a likable Frenchman were offered to him on several occasions, and thus did he finally fulfil his vocation.

He retired from business in 1970 at the age of seventy-six and decided to go back to see Paris, which he had left more than forty years before.

He was undoubtedly surprised to discover that his wife was still living in the little room in Rue Simon-Crubellier. He went to see her, told her all he had lived through, the nights in barns, the rutted roads, the messes of rain-sodden potatoes in pork fat, the slit-eyed Touaregs seeing right through every one of his sleights of hand, the heat and the hunger in Mexico, the wonderland soirées of the aged American lady for whom he made set pieces out of which, at the right moment, troupes of girls with ostrich plumes would prance.

She listened to him silently. When he had finished, after he had nervously offered to give her some of the money he had amassed in the course of his peregrinations, she said only that none of all that, his story or his money, was of any interest to her, and she showed him the door without even asking for his address in Miami.

There is every reason to believe that she had only stayed on in this room to await her husband’s return, however brief and disappointing the meeting might be, for within a few months she sold up and went to live with her son, a serving officer stationed at Nouméa. A year later, Mademoiselle Crespi received a letter from her; it described her life out there, in the Antipodes, a sad existence where she was used for household chores and for looking after her daughter-in-law’s children, sleeping in a room with no running water, reduced to washing in the kitchen.

Today the room is occupied by a man of about thirty: he is on his bed, stark naked, prone, amidst five inflatable dolls, lying full length on top of one of them and cuddling two others in his arms, apparently experiencing an unparalleled orgasm on these precarious simulacra.

The rest of the room is more bare: blank walls, a sea-green lino on the floor, strewn with odd pieces of clothing. A chair, a table with an oilcloth covering, the signs of a meal – a can, shrimps in a saucer – and an evening newspaper lying open at a monster crossword puzzle.