VII
The Renaissance
Just as black night followed the perfumed twilight of the Roman Empire, that “period of insatiable veracity and the peacock’s plume” so light was born after the Middle Ages, long dark and silent, slumbering.
The time now called the Renaissance, loosely located by historians between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, was one of such vital rebirth that its name is inevitable. It sprang like Gargantua from the loins of his mother Gargamelle, lustier and hungrier and fuller of excitement than possible. The accumulation of several hundred years of silent, almost secret thought in the dim cloisters of the Middle Ages burst suddenly into the light, and what men had been pondering on was there, formed, dazzling, ready for life.
All the arts flowered, and the sciences, and gastronomy was not the least of either of them. It more than most had survived the leanness of the past, mainly in order to keep monks fat; although strictures of their religion had imposed a thousand rules of fasting, for the good of their bodies if not their souls they had managed to evade them. Some of the greatest theological minds, it is safe to say, had lent themselves to studying the most artful ways of making red beef look like harmless turbot or salmon on the countless “meager” days, and the ingenious deceptions of the refectories did nothing to dull medieval brains.
By the time the warmth and richness of the Renaissance brightened the moderately holy convent kitchens, cookery was a mature art, ready to make the logical transition from priests’ board to banquet-table. And the reverend fathers, tired of their cramped if well-fed lives, were more than ready to travel, wherever ships were going, to spread the word of God and sample a few exotic delicacies while their seamates looked for western gold or a new passage to India.
There was a great seething and restlessness everywhere. Everything that was good came to Italy and France and Spain, the center of the pot, like morsels in a soup-cauldron.
Potatoes and turkeys and crystallized sugar, as well as bullion, flowed back from the New World. Tea came from China. Explorers brought chocolate home from the fantastic palaces of Mexico. A hundred spices, hoarded like jewels by the returning Crusaders of the Middle Ages, became ordinary articles of trade with the sailors of the Renaissance.
And princesses married and moved to foreign countries, and they took the best and newest treasures with them, as when Catherine de’ Medici went to France, armed with Italian sherbets and seeds of parsley. Either of these innovations has been counted more valuable than any of her diplomatic attributes by numberless gastronomers since she first marched into Paris with her bodyguard of cooks.
Chefs became as well known as the masters they served, so that their names were printed side by side on menus for the great dinners. The masters too grew impassioned about the arts of the kitchen, as a prerequisite to the pleasures of the table, and men like Richelieu and Soubise and Conti, as well as Louis XIV himself, bent knowingly over pots and casseroles in imitation of their cooks, while all the high-born ladies played at being milkmaids and scullions, sometimes most cannily.
Gastronomy became a prize subject for discussion, wittier than weighty, in the most intellectual salons of Europe, and the proper temperature of eggs for a mayonnaise a problem worthy of the period’s greatest minds.
One of the gayest, liveliest records of Renaissance life is the rich collection called The Decameron, by Boccaccio. It is the story of how seven beautiful young ladies and three young men, handsome of course, fled the plague in Florence in 1348, and spent summer days eating and drinking and telling tales. They talked and talked and talked, and most of what they said is amusing in spite of the somewhat grimly moralistic tone that occasionally showed itself, in deference to the disease-ridden city they had escaped from. The fourth story in the book, for instance, is a good example of the robust, sensitive sunniness of the whole:
From The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, 1313–1375
. . . Though ready wit and invention furnish people with words proper to their different occasions, yet sometimes does fortune, an assistant to the timorous, tip the tongue with a sudden, and yet a more pertinent, reply than the most mature deliberation could ever have suggested, as I shall now briefly relate to you.
Currado Gianfiliazzi, as most of you have both known and seen, was always esteemed a gallant and worthy citizen, delighting much in hounds and hawks, not to mention his other excellences, as no way relating to our present purpose. Having taken a crane one day with his hawk, and finding it to be young and fat, he sent it home to his cook, Chichibio, who was a Venetian, with orders to prepare it for supper. The cook, a poor simple fellow, trussed and spitted it, and when it was nearly roasted, and began to smell pretty well, it chanced that a woman of the neighbourhood, called Brunetta, with whom he was much enamoured, came into the kitchen, and, being taken with the high savour, earnestly begged of him to give her a leg. He replied very merrily, singing all the time, “Madam Brunetta, you shall have no leg from me.” Nettled at this, she retorted, “As I hope to live, if you do not give it me, you need never expect any favour more from me.” The dispute was carried to a great height between them, and to quiet her, at last, he was forced to give her one of the legs. Accordingly the crane was served up at supper, with only one leg, Currado having a friend along with him. Currado wondered at this, and, sending for the cook, demanded what was become of the other leg. He very foolishly replied, and without the least thought, “Cranes have only one leg, sir.”—“What the devil does the man talk of?” cried Currado, in great wrath. “Only one leg! Rascal, dost think I never saw a crane before?” Chichibio still persisted in his denial. “Believe me, sir, it is as I say, and I will prove it to you whenever you please, upon living cranes.”—“Well,” said Currado, who did not choose to have any more words then out of regard to his friend, “as thou undertakest to show me a thing which I never saw or heard of before, I am content to make proof thereof tomorrow morning; but by all the saints, if I find it otherwise, I will make thee remember it the longest day thou hast to live.”
There was an end to the matter for that night, and the next morning Currado, whose passion would scarcely suffer him to get any rest, rose betimes, ordered his horses, and took Chichibio along with him towards a river, where he used early in the morning to see plenty of cranes. “We shall soon see,” said he, “whether you spoke truth or not, last night.” Chichibio, finding his master’s wrath not at all abated, and that he was now to make good his random words, rode on first with all the fear imaginable: gladly would he have made his escape, but he saw no possible means: and he was continually looking about him, expecting everything that appeared to be a crane with two legs. But being come near to the river, he chanced to see before anybody else, a number of cranes, each standing upon one leg, as they are used to do when they are sleeping; whereupon, showing them quickly to his master, he said, “Now, sir, yourself may see that I spoke nothing but truth, when I said that cranes have only one leg: look at those yonder, if you please.” Currado, beholding the cranes, replied, “Yes, sirrah! but stay awhile, and I will show thee that they have two.” Then, riding up to them, he cried out, “Shough! shough!” which made them set down the other foot, and after taking a step or two, they all flew away. Currado then turned to him, and said, “Well, thou lying knave, art thou now convinced that they have two legs?” Chichibio, quite at his wit’s end, and scarcely knowing whether he was on his head or his heels, suddenly made answer, “Yes, sir; but you did not shout out ‘Shough! shough!’ to that crane last night, as you have done to these; if you had, it would have put down the other leg, as these did now.” This pleased Currado so much, that, turning all wrath into mirth and laughter, he said, “Chichibio, thou sayest right, I should have done so indeed.” By this sudden and comical answer, Chichibio escaped a sound drubbing, and made peace with his master.
It took a long time for the subtleties of Renaissance life to affect the stalwart British. It is true, however, that during the fifteenth century there was an increasing love of order in the rules of behavior in upper-class homes, so that cookbooks and pamphlets on good manners were popular among the young ladies of the nobility, and even the gentlemen heeded some of the newly discovered tenets.
Discipline in the management of a great house was strict, so that it is hard not to question how the poorly educated women of that period could cope with the intricacies of domestic protocol, and hard not to admire them for doing it at all, against great odds.
The sumptuary laws became much sterner in proportion to such interior order, too, and there were severe regulations about fasting and ordinary feasting, according to the age and rank of each inhabitant. Entertaining, however, which escaped all bans, was more lavish than ever, perhaps because of the limitations placed on ordinary nourishment, so that such traditional banquet-plates as the Christmas boar’s head assumed an almost legendary importance.
Furnishings were still very simple, even in the greatest castles, but pewter was beginning to take the place of wood for plates and trenchers. The Carver was still chief figure at any large meal, since he must prepare the meats to be eaten with fingers: forks, called fursifers, were not to appear in England from Italy until the end of the seventeenth century.
Anthony Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, who lived between 1621 and 1683, wrote a good round description of an English country gentleman. Although Cooper describes him as a throwback to Renaissance times in England, the fact that he could find him still in the flesh in his own day may suggest the slowness with which the British accepted the refinements long since considered essential to noble European living:
From Texts and Pretexts, edited by Aldous Huxley, 1894–1963
Mr. Hastings was an original in our age, or rather the copy of our nobility in ancient days, in hunting and not warlike times. He was low, very strong, and very active, of a reddish flaxen hair, his clothes always green cloth, and never all worth when new five pounds. His house was perfectly of the old fashion, in the midst of a large park well stocked with deer, and near the house rabbits to serve his kitchen, many fish-ponds, and great store of wood and timber; a bowling green in it, long but narrow, full of high ridges, it being never levelled since it was ploughed; they used round sand balls and it had a banqueting-house like a stand, a large one built in a tree. He kept all manner of sport-hounds that ran buck, fox, hare, otter, and badger, and hawks long and short winged; he had a walk in the New Forest and the manor of Christ Church. This last supplied him with red deer, sea and river fish; and indeed all his neighbours’ grounds and royalties were open to him, who bestowed all his time in such sports, but what he borrowed to caress his neighbours’ wives and daughters, there being not a woman in all his walks of the degree of a yeoman’s wife or under, and under the age of forty, but it was extremely her fault if he were not intimately acquainted with her. This made him very popular, always speaking kindly to the husband, brother, or father, who was to boot very welcome to his house whenever he came; there he found beef pudding and small beer in great plenty, a house not so neatly kept as to shame him and his dirty shoes, the great hall strewed with marrow bones, full of hawks’ perches, hounds, spaniels, and terriers, the upper sides of the hall hung with the fox-skins of this and the last year’s skinning, here and there a polecat intermixed, guns and keepers’ and huntsmen’s poles in abundance. The parlour was a large long room as properly furnished; in a great hearth paved with brick lay some terriers and the choicest hounds and spaniels; seldom but two of the great chairs had litters of young cats in them which were not to be disturbed, he having always three or four attending him at dinner, and a little white round stick of fourteen inches long lying by his trencher that he might defend such meat as he had no mind to part with to them. The windows, which were very large, served for places to lay his arrows, crossbows, stonebows, and other such like accoutrements; the corners of the room full of the best chose hunting and hawking poles; an oyster table at the lower end, which was of constant use twice a day all the year round, for he never failed to eat oysters before dinner and supper through all seasons; the neighboring town of Poole supplied him with them. The upper part of this room had two small tables and a desk, on the one side of which was a church Bible, on the other the Book of Martyrs; on the tables were hawks’ hoods, bells, and such like, two or three old green hats with their crowns thrust in so as to hold ten or a dozen eggs, which were of a peasant kind of poultry he took much care of and fed himself; tables, dice, cards and boxes were not wanting. In the hole of the desk were store of tobacco pipes that had been used. On one side of this end of the room was the door of a closet, wherein stood the strong beer and the wine, which never came thence but in single glasses, that being the rule of the house exactly observed, for he never exceeded in drink or permitted it. On the other side was a door into an old chapel, not used for devotion; the pulpit, as the safest place, was never wanting of a cold chine of beef, pasty of venison, gammon of bacon, or great apple pie with thick crust extremely baked. His table cost him not much, though it was very good to eat at, his sports supplying all but beef and mutton, except Friday, when he had the best sea fish he could get, and was the day that his neighbours of best quality most visited him. He never wanted a London pudding, and always sung it in with “my part lies therein-a.” He drank a glass of wine or two at meals, very often syrup of gilliflower in his sack, and had always a tun glass without feet stood by him holding a pint of small beer, which he often stirred with a great sprig of rosemary. He was well-natured, but soon angry, calling his servants bastard and cuckoldy knaves, in one of which he often spoke the truth to his own knowledge, and sometimes in both, though of the same man. He lived to a hundred, never lost his eyesight, but always writ and read without spectacles, and got to horse without help. Until past fourscore he rode to the death of a stag as well as any.
Londoners, always conscious of their stomachs, fared well enough if they had the necessary coins, and there were many little cook shops called “ordinaries” where for three pence and on up to twelve pence clerks and lawyers and merchants could eat a worthy equivalent of the modern cut-of the-joint-and-two-veg. And everywhere were public kitchens where good cooks, some of them refugees from foreign turmoil, turned out handsome pies and roasts and even such Parisian flim flammeries as little cakes coated with gold dust and artfully flavored with spices warranted to increase the already rampant Elizabethan vigor.
(Aphrodisiacs were much used in those days, and books of recipes for them sold everywhere. On the Continent a hundred such obvious ingredients as dried goat-testicles, bat’s blood, and the hearts and tongues of vipers were most popular, but in England the prized remedy for real or imagined sexual fatigue was a simple mixture of sugar and powdered root of sea-holly called, aptly enough, “kissing comfits.”)
Pamphlets dealing with all aspects of mass gastronomy were sold in the streets of London as fast as they could be printed: a good indication of the hungry interest people felt in their own hunger! One such, by “John Taylor, London, Printed by Anne Griffin, 1637” is typical of most of them. The title page, elaborately balanced in a dozen different types, says:
Drinke and welcome: or the Famous Historie of the most part of Drinks, in use now in the Kingdomes of Great Brittaine and Ireland; with an especial declaration of the potency, vertue, and operation of our English Ale With a description of all sorts of Waters, from the Ocean sea, to the Teares of a Woman.
I cannot resist adding parts of one discussion from it, on Pomperkin: it was “the sixt sorte of Brittish drinkes . . . made of Apples . . . bruised and beaten to mash, with water put to them, which is a drinke of so weake a condition that it is no where acceptable but amongst the Rustickes and Plebeyans, being a heartlesse liquor much of the nature of Swillons in Scotland, or small Beere in England, such as is said to be made of the washings of the Brewers legges and aprons. . . .”
Another pamphlet I like very much, “By J. Marriott, of Grays-Inn, Gent.,” was printed in London in 1652, and is a fair indication of the occasional bothers suffered by Elizabethan trenchermen.
On the first page is an engraving of an enormously fat “gent.,” with a balloon floating from his blubbery lips saying
Behold the Wonder of this Age.
If thou observ’st these Rules, and Tak’st my Physick,
’Twill keep thee from the Pox, Plague, Cough, or Tysick,
Consumptions, Dropsies; nay, the truth to tell ye,
From all griefes either i’ th’ head, back, or belly.
The title page goes on:
The English Mountebank: Or, a Physical Dispensatory, Wherein is prescribed, Many Strange and excellent Receits of Mr. MARRIOTT, the great Eater of Grays-Inn: With the manner how he makes his Cordial Broaths, Pills, Purgations, Julips, and Vomits, to keep his Body in temper, and free from SURFEITS. With Sundry directions,
While city mice lived thusly, beset by “grumbling in the Guts, or a wambling Stomack” as well as the pleasures antecedent to them, country mice in their cottages fared more simply on such suppers as milk and hot crabapples, which must have tasted fine indeed on a night when little birds brooded in the snow:
From Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare, 1564–1616
When icicles hang by the wall,
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When blood is nipp’d, and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
“Tu-who!
Tu-whit, tu-who!” a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
When all aloud the wind doth blow,
And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,
And birds sit brooding in the snow,
And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;
When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,
Then nightly sings the staring owl:
“Tu-who!
Tu-whit, tu-who!” a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.
In the palaces, though, things grew stuffier with every reign. Henry VIII, finally, indulged his passion for masquerades and postprandial frolicking to such a degree that by Elizabeth’s time his comparatively childish pageants of costumed and disguised courtiers had become a deadly routine of elaborate classical allusions and pedantic affectations.
In any country-house thrown open to the Queen on her frequent jaunts through England the servants were of necessity re-christened before her arrival, so that a messenger boy could answer to the name of Mercury, and the maids set to carrying pitchers-and-bowls would be called all the words applied to water nymphs by the ancients. The royal cooks learned to make confections inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and thought nothing of decorating their banquet-cakes with sugared bas-reliefs of the Fall of Troy.
All this silliness was a part of the solemn and wasteful pomp expected by the Queen, but it is comforting to know that occasionally there were breaks for completely rowdy bear-baiting and “dawncing,” which she enjoyed with the best of her subjects.
It is better, I think, to go down to the cottages, where “There’s pippins and cheeses to come,” or back to the ordinaries and the taverns of London.
(Ah, Ben!
Say how, or when
Shall we thy guests
Meet at those Lyric Feasts,
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun?
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad;
And yet each Verse of thine
Out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine!)4
The best companion anyone could find for pub-crawling, at least as it was done in the seventeenth century, would to my mind be Samuel Pepys. He it was who on April 17, in 1661, went with three friends to The Dolphin, where they “did eat a barrel of oysters and two lobsters, which I did give them, and were very merry” . . . and probably did drink much more than Pepys had sworn to, after his last troubled head.
At the end of that year, on December 30, he gave a party at the Mitre, “whither I had invited all my old acquaintance of the Exchequer to a good chine of beef, which with three barrels of oysters and three pullets, and plenty of wine and mirth, was our dinner, and there was about twelve of us. I made them a foolish promise to give them one this day twelve-month, and so forever while I live; but I do not intend it.” (A fine New Year’s resolution, indeed!)
The amount of food prepared for a little dinner by Mrs. Pepys is staggering to anyone accustomed as we are now to offering our guests two or at most four simple courses: for fourteen people, as an example, she got ready “a dish of marrow bones; a leg of mutton; a loin of veal; a dish of fowl, three pullets, and two dozen larks all in a dish; a great tart, a neat’s tongue, a dish of anchovies; a dish of prawns and cheese”!
Another time, in 1663, Pepys writes: “My poor wife rose by five in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls and many other things for dinner, with which I was highly pleased; and the chine of beef was done also before six o’clock, and my own jack, of which I was doubtful, do carry it very well. Things being put in order, and the cook come, I went to the office. . . .”
At noon he returned home to meet his six guests: “I had for them, after oysters, as first course a hash of rabbits, a lamb, and a rare chine of beef. Next a great dish of roasted fowl, cost me about 30s., and a tart; and then fruit and cheese. My dinner was noble and enough. I had my house mighty clean and neat; my room below with a good fire in it; my dining room above, and my chamber being made a withdrawing chamber; and my wife’s a good fire also. I find my new table very proper, and will hold nine or ten people well, but eight with great room.”
The guests left at ten that night, “very merry at, before, and after dinner,” having played cards and then been sustained by a late supper of cold meat and a good sack posset . . . “both them and myself highly pleased with our management of this day; I believe (it) will cost me near five pounds.”
Not all of Pepys’s meals were as fine as this. He hated untidiness, and food that was not decently fresh (“a damned venison pasty that stunk like the devil . . . Lord! so sorry a dinner, venison baked in pans . . . a damned bad dinner which did not please us at all”), but he recognized like a true gourmet the blessings of simplicity, as when, on March 25, 1669, on board The Charles off Chatham, “the Boatswain of the ship did bring us out of the kettle, a piece of hot salt beef and some brown bread and brandy; and there we did make a little meal, but so good as I would never desire to eat better meat while I live, only I would have cleaner plates.”
One of Mr. Pepys’s friends, and a charming one, was John Evelyn, who wrote about a slightly different type of banqueting, and with less intimacy but no less grace than his colleague.
He was one of the real “gentlemen” of his period, the kind that flowers rarely but deathlessly in the hothouse of British diplomacy, and he lived easily with kings and priests and common men. His learning was quiet but impressive, and he owned the voracious curiosity of a true scientist, which could make some fantastic experiment at the Royal Society more interesting to him than an ambassadorial feast, as he described in his Diary on April 12, in 1682:
From the Diary of John Evelyn, 1620–1706
I went this afternoon with several of the Royal Society to a supper which was all dressed, both fish and flesh, in Monsieur Papin’s digestors, by which the hardest bones of beef itself, and mutton, were made as soft as cheese, without water or other liquor, and with less than eight ounces of coals, producing an incredible quantity of gravy; and for close of all, a jelly made of the bones of beef, the best for clearness and good relish, and the most delicious that I had ever seen, or tasted. We eat pike and other fish bones, and all without impediment; but nothing exceeded the pigeons, which tasted just as if baked in a pie, all these being stewed in their own juice, without any addition of water save what swam about the digestor, as in balneo; the natural juice of all these provisions acting on the grosser substances, reduced the hardest bones to tenderness; but it is best descanted, with more particulars for extracting tinctures, preserving and stewing fruit, and saving fuel, in Dr. Papin’s book published and dedicated to our Society, of which he is a member. He is since gone to Venice with the late Resident here (and also a member of our Society), who carried this excellent mechanic, philosopher, and physician, to set up a philosophical meeting in that city. This philosophical supper caused much mirth amongst us, and exceedingly pleased all the company. I sent a glass of the jelly to my wife, to the reproach of all that the ladies ever made of their best hartshorn.
John Evelyn’s palate was as fastidious and exploratory as his mind, so that he quite naturally gave serious consideration to tasting a new fruit; it occupied a relative importance in his life-plan with a diplomatic visit to the king, a new greenhouse for his rare saplings, or the publication of his book The Perfection of Painting. In 1668 he noted in his journal:
From the Diary of John Evelyn, l620–1706
I saw the magnificent entry of the French Ambassador Colbert, received in the Banqueting House. I had never seen a richer coach than that which he came in to Whitehall. Standing by his Majesty at dinner in the presence, there was of that rare fruit called the King-pine, growing in Barbadoes and the West Indies; the first of them I had ever seen. His Majesty having cut it up, was pleased to give me a piece off his own plate to taste of; but, in my opinion, it falls short of those ravishing varieties of deliciousness described in Captain Ligon’s History, and others; but possibly it might be, or certainly was, much impaired in coming so far; it has yet a grateful acidity, but tastes more like the quince and melon than of any other fruit he mentions.
So much of Evelyn’s time was taken up in his rich political career with what was, perhaps rightly, considered the highest society of his day (he knew Charles II and James II well, and their ministers, and was visited by every eminent foreigner in England during his long life) that it seems fitting to quote what he said about one of the countless “great entertainments” he attended. It is hard to see how he managed to do and be so much, but he was typical of the whole Renaissance, vital and eager and full of a kind of spiritual elation at being free from the dark chains of ignorance of the Middle Ages.
On December 18, then, in 1685:
From the Diary of John Evelyn, 1620–1706
I dined at the great entertainment his Majesty gave the Venetian Ambassadors, Signors Zenno and Justiniani, accompanied with ten more noble Venetians of their most illustrious families, Cornaro, Maccenigo, &c., who came to congratulate their Majesties coming to the Crown. The dinner was most magnificent and plentiful, at four tables, with music, kettle-drums, and trumpets, which sounded upon a whistle at every health. The banquet [dessert] was twelve vast chargers piled up so high that those who sat one against another could hardly see each other. Of these sweetmeats, which doubtless were some days piling up in that exquisite manner, the Ambassadors touched not, but leaving them to the spectators who came out of curiosity to see the dinner, were exceedingly pleased to see in what a moment of time all that curious work was demolished, the comfitures voided, and the tables cleared. Thus his Majesty entertained them three days, which (for the table only) cost him £600, as the Clerk of the Green Cloth (Sir William Boreman) assured me. Dinner ended, I saw their procession, or cavalcade, to Whitehall, innumerable coaches attending. The two Ambassadors had four coaches of their own, and fifty footmen (as I remember), besides other equipage as splendid as the occasion would permit, the Court being still in mourning. Thence, I went to the audience which they had in the Queen’s presence-chamber, the Banqueting House being full of goods and furniture till the galleries on the garden-side, council-chamber, and new chapel, now in building, were finished. They went to their audience in those plain black gowns and caps which they constantly wear in the city of Venice. I was invited to have accompanied the two Ambassadors in their coach to supper that night, returning now to their own lodgings, as no longer at the King’s expense; but, being weary, I excused myself.
At about the same time (and what difference can a few years make now to all those well-fed ghosts, or even to us?), there took place in a village in Norfolk a merry festival, one long planned for and nobly prepared, which I must quote here for two reasons: its apt juxtaposition to the Venetian trappings in London and all such elegance, and its poignant last line.
A Bill of Ffare at the Christning of Mr. Constable’s Child, Rector of Cockley Cley in Norfolk, Jan. 2, 1682, Anonymous
The child, a girle; godfather, Mr. Green, a clergyman; godmothers, Mis Beddingfield of Sherson, and a sister-in-law of Mr. Constable’s.
The guests, Mr. Green, Mr. Bagg and his daughter, and the godmothers.
The parishrs entertained at another house with rost and boil’d bief, geese, and turkeys. Soon after the child dy’d, and the funerall expences came to 6d.
The death of Mr. Constable’s suckling makes me think, but with increased somberness, of another death, this time before the feast began instead of soon after. It was poor Vatel, chef to the Prince de Condé, who on April 11, 1671, stabbed himself until he died.
The popular and very sketchy rumor that he died from shame because his turbot did not arrive in time for the King’s banquet is only partly true: he was a victim, if ever there was one, of the senseless extravagance and ostentation that has always seemed an inevitable part of a royal visit, in any land or epoch.
This time it was a long-heralded descent upon Chantilly of the King of France and his retinue of hunters and their ladies. Condé had but lately re-occupied the run-down old country estate, rented to careless tenants, and it fell upon his cherished steward Vatel to put the whole place in order in an almost impossibly short time. He had carpenters and drapers and repair-men from all that part of France, and meanwhile was training an enormous staff of bumpkins to do the countless menial tasks of keeping such an establishment operating, while he rehearsed the Prince’s regular servants in their unaccustomed duties.
The entire plan for all the meals for every soul in Chantilly, from the King to the lowest scullion, was also a part of Vatel’s Herculean job.
He had always been insomniac, and perhaps this was accentuated by his first love, which pounced upon him after almost forty celibate and serious years, for a lady-in-waiting in the château. Whatever the causes, the harried man went sleepless for twelve nights, so that by the time the King’s party arrived his head was turning, and he begged Gourville, the Prince’s friend and assistant, to help him.
Gourville reassured him as best he could, but it was evident that this peak of Vatel’s whole studious and ambitious life was ill-fated: his eyes were like red coals, and he trembled in a fever that did not cease.
The first fabulously elaborate luncheon for the royal party went off smoothly, to all except poor Vatel, who saw that one or two tables lacked enough roasted meat. The Prince de Condé himself reassured his good friend, but Vatel would not be consoled even by the obvious reminder that twice as many guests had come as had been invited or prepared for.
That night he prowled the halls . . .
But Madame de Sévigné, in a letter to her confidante Madame de Grignan, tells it best. All I must add is that the poor distracted cook’s body was hustled out of the château at dawn, still warm, and propped up to look as if he were merely drunk, and was buried in a suicide’s grave most secretly, so that the gay hunting-party would not be too much disturbed at the thought of missing one of his famous sauces or ingenious confections of cream and spun sugar.
From the Letters of Madame de Sévigné, 1626–1696
Paris, Sunday, April 26th, 1671
I have just learned from Moreuil of what passed at Chantilly with regard to poor Vatel. I wrote to you last Friday, that he had stabbed himself; these are the particulars of the affair. The King arrived there on Thursday night; the walk, and the collation, which was served in a place set apart for the purpose, and strewed with jonquils, were just as they should be. Supper was served, but there was no roast meat at one or two of the tables, on account of Vatel’s having been obliged to provide several dinners more than were expected. This affected his spirits, and he was heard to say several times, “I have lost my fame! I cannot bear this disgrace!” “My head is quite bewildered,” he said to Gourville. “I have not had a wink of sleep these twelve nights, I wish you would assist me in giving orders.” Gourville did all he could to comfort and assist him; but the failure of the roast meat (which, however, did not happen at the King’s table, but at some of the other twenty-five) was always uppermost with him. Gourville mentioned it to the Prince, who went directly to Vatel’s apartment, and said to him, “Everything is extremely well conducted, Vatel; nothing could be more admirable than His Majesty’s supper.” “Your highness’s goodness,” replied he, “overwhelms me; I am sensible that there was a deficiency of roast meat at two tables.” “Not at all,” said the Prince. “Do not perplex yourself, and all will go well.” Midnight came: the fireworks did not succeed, they were covered with a thick cloud; they cost sixteen thousand francs. At four o’clock in the morning, Vatel went round, and found everybody asleep; he met one of the under-purveyors, who had just come in with only two loads of fish. “What!” said he. “Is this all?” “Yes, Sir,” said the man, not knowing that Vatel had dispatched other people to all the seaports round. Vatel waited for some time, the other purveyors did not arrive; his head grew distracted; he thought that there was no more fish to be had; he flew to Gourville. “Sir,” said he, “I cannot outlive this disgrace.” Gourville laughed at him; Vatel, however, went to his apartment, and setting the hilt of his sword against the door, after two ineffectual attempts, succeeded in the third, in forcing the sword through his heart. At that instant the carriers arrived with the fish; Vatel was inquired after to distribute it; they ran to his apartment, knocked at the door, but received no answer; upon which they broke it open, and found him weltering in his blood. A messenger was immediately dispatched to acquaint the Prince with what had happened, who was like a man in despair. The Duke wept, for his journey to Burgundy depended upon Vatel. The Prince related the whole affair to His Majesty, with an expression of great concern: it was considered as the consequence of too nice a sense of honor; some blamed, others praised him for his sense of courage. The King said he had put off this excursion for more than five years, because he was aware that it would be attended with infinite trouble, and told the Prince that he ought to have had but two tables, and not have been at the expense of so many, and declared that he would never suffer him to do so again; but all this was too late for poor Vatel. However, Gourville endeavored to supply the loss of Vatel; which he did in great measure.