Moreau, 4
THE OLD-STYLE KITCHEN originally equipped with the ultramodern devices that Madame Moreau’s cook soon had replaced was intended to contrast, in Henry Fleury’s plan, with the great formal dining room, done in uncompromisingly avant-garde style, designed as a rigorously geometrical, impeccably formal model of icy sophistication where grand dinner parties would take on the aura of unique ceremonies.
To begin with, the dining room had been a heavy, cluttered, over-furnished place with a woodblock floor laid in a complicated pattern, a tall blue ceramic stove, walls with superabundant cornices and mouldings, skirting boards made to look like veined marble, a nine-branched counterpoise ceiling light equipped with 81 pendants, a rectangular oak table accompanied by twelve embroidered velvet chairs and at either end two light mahogany armchairs with X-shaped open-work backs, a bottom half of a Breton-style dresser which had always held a Second Empire liqueur-stand made of papier-mâché next to a smoker’s set (with a cigarette box portraying Cézanne’s Card Players, a petrol lighter looking quite like an oil lamp, and a few ashtrays depicting a club, a diamond, a heart, and a spade, respectively) and a silver fruit bowl full of oranges, over all of which hung a tapestry representing an imaginary landscape; between the windows, over a coco weddelliana (an indoor palm with decorative foliage), was a large, dark canvas, showing a man in judge’s robes sitting on a high throne whose gilding dominated the whole painting.
Henry Fleury shared the widely held view that the tasting of food is conditioned not only by the specific colours of the foods tasted but also by the surroundings. Lengthy research and several experiments convinced him that the colour white, by virtue of its neutrality, “blankness”, and luminosity, was the one which would best bring out the flavour of ingredients.
That was the basis on which he reorganised Madame Moreau’s dining room from top to bottom: he eliminated the furniture, dismantled the chandelier, stripped off the skirting boards, and hid the mouldings and plaster roses behind a false ceiling made of sparkling white laminated panels, fitted in places with pristine spotlights, positioned so that their beams converged on the centre of the room. The walls were painted in brilliant white gloss, and a similarly white plastic covering was put on the crusty old parquet floor. All the doors were bricked up except the one giving onto the entrance hall – originally a double door with glass panes, replaced by two sliding panels controlled by a hidden photoelectric cell. As for the windows, they were concealed behind tall plywood panels sheathed in white synthetic leather.
Apart from table and chairs, no furniture and no accessories were allowed in the room, not even a switch or an electric cable. All crockery and tableware was to be kept in cupboards installed outside the room, in the entrance hall, where a serving table was also set for plate-warmers and carving boards.
In the centre of this spotless, shadowless, and perfectly smooth white space, Fleury placed his table: a monumental marble slab, absolutely white, cut to an octagon, with bevelled edges, standing on a cylindrical pedestal one yard in diameter. Eight moulded plastic chairs, also white, completed the furniture.
The white line stopped there. The china, designed by the Italian stylist Titorelli, was done in pastel shades – ivory, pale yellow, sea green, blushing pink, pale mauve, salmon, light grey, turquoise, etc. – which were selected according to the characteristics of the dishes to be served, themselves selected according to a basic colour which the table linen and waiters’ attire would also match.
For the decade during which her health allowed her to carry on entertaining, Madame Moreau held a dinner party roughly once a month. The first one was a yellow dinner: Burgundy cheesecake, quenelles of pike in Dutch style, quails stewed in saffron, sweetcorn salad, lemon and guava sorbets, accompanied by sherry, Château-Chalon, Château-Carbonneux, and cold Sauternes punch. The last one she gave, in 1970, was a black meal served on plates of polished slate; it included caviar, obviously, and also squid Tarragon style, saddle of baby Cumberland boar, truffle salad, and blueberry cheesecake; it was more difficult to select the wines for this final repast: the caviar was served with vodka in basalt goblets, and the squid with a retsina wine which was a very dark red indeed, but for the saddle of boar the butler got away with two bottles of Château-Ducru-Beaucaillou 1955 decanted for the occasion into adequately black Bohemian crystal.
Madame Moreau herself hardly touched the dishes she had served to her guests. She was subject to an ever stricter diet which in the end allowed her only raw fish roes, chicken breasts, cooked Edam, and dried figs. Usually she had her meal before her guests, alone or in the company of Madame Trévins. That did not prevent her conducting her parties with the same energy that she showed in her daytime work, of which these dinners were in any case no more than a necessary extension: she planned the parties with minute care, drawing up her guest-list as one would draw up a battle plan; she invariably brought together seven people, amongst whom there would be: one individual with a more or less official function (ministerial private secretary, consultant to the public accounts committee, associate member of the Conseil d’Etat, official liquidator, etc.); an artist or writer; one or two members of her own team, but never Madame Trévins, who hated this kind of festivity and preferred to stay in her room, rereading her book on such evenings; and the French or foreign businessman she was dealing with at the time and in whose honour the dinner was being held. Two or three well-chosen wives made up the complement around the dinner table.
One of the most memorable of these dinners was given for someone who had been in this building many times on other accounts: Hermann Fugger, the German businessman who was a friend of the Altamonts and Hutting, and some of whose camping equipment Madame Moreau was to market in France: that evening, knowing of Fugger’s repressed passion for cooking, she put on a pink meal – ham au Vertus in aspic, koulibiaca of salmon in aurora sauce, wild duck with vineyard peach, pink champagne, etc. – and she brought to her table, along with one of her closest colleagues, who ran the “hypermarket” division of her business, a good-food columnist, a flour-miller turned oven-ready food-pack manufacturer, and a Moselle wine-grower, the latter two guests flanked by wives as crazy about good food as their husbands. Leaving Flourens’s piglet and the other pre-dinner talking points out of it for once, these guests concentrated all conversation on the joys of food, old recipes, bygone chefs, white-butter-sauce like mother used to make it, and suchlike taste bud topics.
Henry Fleury’s dining room was of course only ever used for prestige dinners of this kind. The rest of the time, including when she was still in good health and enjoyed a sturdy appetite, Madame Moreau ate with Madame Trévins in one or the other’s bedroom. It was their only moment of relaxation each day; they would chat interminably about Saint-Mouezy, bringing back memories they never tired of hearing.
In her mind’s eye she could see the arrival of the old moonshiner, who came from Buzançais, with his red copper still drawn by a little black mare answering to the name of Belle; and the toothpuller with his red bonnet and his multicoloured leaflets; and the bagpipe-player who accompanied him, blowing his pipes as hard and as out of tune as he could so as to cover the cries of the unfortunate patients. She would relive the fear that had haunted her of not being allowed dessert and being put on bread and water for three days when the schoolma’am gave her a bad mark; she would retrieve the fright she had had on finding a big black spider underneath a pot her mother had asked her to scour; and her intense wonderment on seeing an aeroplane for the first time in her life, one morning in 1915, a biplane which emerged from the fog and landed in a field; out of it climbed a leather-jacketed young man as handsome as a Greek god, with big, pale eyes and long, slim hands in his thick sheepskin gloves. He was a Welsh airman who had got lost in the fog trying to get to the castle at Corbenic. In the plane there were several maps which he studied fruitlessly. She couldn’t help him, any more than could the villagers to whom she led him.
Or from even further back, from as far back as she could remember, there rose the fascination she had felt as a little girl every time she saw her grandfather shaving: he would sit down, usually around seven in the morning, after a frugal breakfast, and with a serious air make up his lather with a very soft brush in a bowl of very hot water, a lather so thick and white and firm that even after more than seventy-five years it still made her mouth water.