Chapter Fourteen A MORSEL FOR A KING

During my years in England and China, a fellow Californian was following a different path.

A lanky screenwriter whom no one could call a classic beauty, she was blessed with humor, a broad smile, and a self-protective sangfroid. When we became friends in Hong Kong, she hadn’t yet written the first of many award-winning movies. She dropped a dead-end affair with a married film director to marry a rising leading-man. To read later that this ‘action’ star was worth over three billion dollars to the film industry made me feel momentarily dizzy as I recalled my girlfriend’s insouciance during their on-set courtship.

The tabloids reported that the husband preferred carpentry and car collecting, home and kids to carousing or clubbing. Theirs was a marriage that defied the Hollywood odds, a ‘happy ever after’ ending.

Until this Christmas. After more than twenty years of well-documented togetherness, Mr Perfect goes off the connubial rails no less publicly. Both parties announce a formal separation. My girlfriend disappears from the pages of the glossy mags to be replaced by a doll-sized, doe-eyed television actress hanging on the Star’s arm up and down red carpets from Hollywood to Deauville.

So much for fairy tales.

‘Leszczynska, that’s her only option,’ V. comments, crumbling a doughnut and reading the paper over my shoulder. The sun is rising a bit earlier now that Christmas has passed, but is still low enough to streak almost horizontally across the kitchen and bounce its reflections off my late mother-in-law’s pewter coffee service.

‘Did you just sneeze into my Bran Flakes?’

He groans. ‘No, I said Leszczynska. Marie Leszczynska, Louis XV’s Polish-born queen. That’s the only role your friend will play from now on. Don’t tell me royalty is dead in the twenty-first century. In my day, kings, not actors, dispensed fortunes like that. This man earns millions of dollars just for appearing on stage—’

‘On film—’

‘Appearing professionally. Let’s pass over the pittance I paid my own actors, even though I always gave them all my ticket earnings. What this man is paid an hour is more than King Louis XV got for a lifetime of going to the toilet in public, even if I calculate the exchange rate conservatively. That makes your friend the Queen, just like Marie Leszczynska. Sweet, religious—’

‘Come to think of it, she’s very keen on the Dalai Lama.’

He nods as he applies a dab of marmalade to his doughnut.

‘Yes, I know the type. Queens typically go all pious as they mature. Tolerant, patient, religious—and dumped. Your friend is the Official Wife and has no choice in the face of the King’s infidelity, but exile or acceptance.’

‘There’s a third option nowadays. She’s hired Tom Cruise’s lawyer.’

‘Very practical, I’m sure. Now, our Polish Marie was a practical girl. Her father was sitting in Lorraine, deposed from his throne. Where could she go? She chose acceptance. Mistresses quaked as she passed. The little Madame d’Étioles did everything she could do to please the Queen, and as Madame de Pompadour, she lasted twenty years in the King’s bed.’

‘I don’t think my Californian friend wants to put up with a Pompadour.’

‘Billions are at stake. Influence, contacts. Will she risk exile? I don’t think so. These newspapers will lie to the vulgar public, but of course, within the walls of royal society, The Courts of New York and Hollywood know all. I predict an accommodation.’

V. fans his napkin like a feathered plume. ‘Society women don’t change. I can hear them gossiping from here. ‘The King’s taste for his Consort has faded, c’est évident. Just look at this photo! She has reached un certain âge,’ they twitter.’

‘Times are different.’ At forty-nine, I’m squirming.

‘After forty, women are old,’ V. says.

‘Are not!’

‘Mais oui! She’s an old woman. But she can still rule Society, like Marie Leszczynska. And should she not be grateful? Louis was faithful to Marie for far longer than anyone expected. They had many children together. But then his duty was done. Nothing endures forever.’

‘What makes you so sure?’ I ask. ‘You never lived in New York.’

‘Oh, Madame, I know the salons of New York without stepping foot on Park Avenue. Gradually, my old friend Madame d’Étioles, now elevated to Madame de Pompadour, worked her magic on the King. Don’t forget, I was invited back into royal society. I was appointed Official Historian. I dined at their table.’

‘That must have been a relief after all those lonely years in Cirey.’

‘Actually, it was stifling.’

I refuse to abandon my rosy optimism, even if it rests uneasily on the gossip columns. ‘It says here that my friend and her husband may be getting back together.’

V. sighs, bored with my naiveté.

‘Madame, after working his way through the Nesle sisters and who knows how many other mistresses, King Louis suffered a sudden illness in Metz. He panicked and rediscovered religion. He ran back to his Queen

Marie on bended knee, All of Paris rejoiced, the streets were filled with hysterical crowds who called him ‘Louis the Well-Loved’. It lasted until the beautiful Pompadour crossed his path in the hunting grounds of Versailles.’

‘What was she like, Pompadour? Hot stuff, huh?’

V. rolls his eyes with appreciation, ‘Raised to be a ‘morsel for the King,’ that’s what we called her. White skin, soft cow eyes, wonderful sense of style, beautifully dressed, But what I recall best was her wit, her delightful singing voice, her virtuosity at the keyboard—an excellent musician, a brilliant actress! Trained to seduce the great seducer himself.’

Should I confess to V. my own seduction of my husband? My mother always said, ‘Either an old man’s darling or a young man’s slave,’ At least this was more practical than her other adage, ‘Never drink more than two martinis with a man you’re not engaged to.’ The buddy role with Sean hadn’t suited me. Was I ready for the ‘old man’s darling’ bit? And did the man have to be so very old? I was only thirty-six and deep down inside, I knew that when I reached forty, some would think me old, just as V. said.

I redecorated the dilapidated harbor-view apartment on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. I changed Sean’s museum-white, glass and chrome New York modernity to a pastel melange of Easter almond yellows and pinks set against white wicker furniture, I tossed mohair and lace around the living room, bought silken underwear and new sheets. More hard-nosed than ever in my work, I softened at home, let my practical haircut grow long, sewed an ankle-length red coat, splurged on a pair of absurd party earrings from which dangled tiny filigree bottles that could hold perfume.

Though I desperately needed to replace my rusting Honda Civic, I even plunked down an impetuous $2,000 for an ageing German grand piano, My Versailles was ready.

Miraculously, the man appeared. I knew he was the Louis of my life, with his noble profile and courtly, gracious European manners. He presided over a diplomatic reception as the new International Red Cross delegate to Asia like a visiting prince. We were introduced by a fellow reporter, the correspondent for the German daily, Handelsblatt, who smiled on with the calculations of a Richelieu.

Like Pompadour driving her carriage between the King’s horses and hounds in the hunting ground of Versailles, I bided my time, content to be viewed. I resolved that any new courtship in my life would consist of more than comparing notes on personnel changes in the Chinese politburo over a bottle of cheap wine at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

Unlike Louis XV, Peter had neither Queen nor illegitimate bastards, but at the age of forty-seven, there was the faint whiff

of jaded dissipation creeping up on his chiseled features and generous mouth. After years of overseas missions for the Red Cross—negotiating cease-fires and assisting war victims—his string of girlfriends was mythic back at Geneva headquarters. I heard ‘court’ gossip during lazy junk outings on a hot Sunday afternoon on the China Sea. At dinner parties where diplomats and journalists mixed, there was curious speculation. Would this eligible bachelor seek a consort in Hong Kong?

‘Pompadour and the King finally met in 1745 at the Masked Ball of the Yew Trees,’ V. says, as we climb home from the village. We’re wrapped in coats, shawls and mittens, but V. still insists on his morning constitutional. Madame Weber has been disappointingly short on gossip this morning and V. has resorted to buying the French weeklies for the latest on actresses and the corrupt doings at the Monaco Court and the Quai d’ Orsay.

‘What a night that was! Avenue de Paris was a river of light, illuminating a double line of coaches and carriages coming from the capita!!’

‘Were you invited?’

‘Of course! All of Paris came! The Ball was open to anyone in costume and the concierge rented out swords to those not equipped. What a sight!’

‘And Pompadour?’

‘Ah, don’t rush me! Rumors were flying that Madame d’Étioles, as she was then known, had caught Louis’ eye. That didn’t stop every pretty girl in Paris from coming to the ball to try her luck, but where was the King? Queen Marie had made her appearance, covered in pearls. The Dauphin and his new wife had arrived as the guests of honor, disguised as a gardener and flower girl. But the King, ah, the King, he was very late.’

‘Then the door to the King’s antechamber flies open, the guests press forward and—a parade of trees walks into the room! You see, determined to be anonymous, Louis disguised himself as one of eight yew trees, just like the ones lit up by bonfires and torches along the walkway to Versailles. One of the trees promptly carried off Mademoiselle Portail to a dark corner of the castle.’

‘To play a new version of ‘ I love yew’?’ I can’t resist.

‘Oui,’ V. chuckles, ‘but having made her contribution to ardor in the arbor, the poor Portail made her disheveled way back to the ballroom only to find the real King was deep in conversation with the girl he would soon rename, ‘Madame de Pompadour’!’

All very amusing, but I feel I’m becoming more a Marie than a Pompadour these days, is my marriage slipping into Royal Torpor? We would all prefer to be Pompadour. After the usual morning hours spent at my laptop, I hunt down V.

I find him in the guest bathroom, powdering his wig for the day. His vest is embroidered with gold threads and his white stockings fresh and smooth, but he’s sending wig powder in little clouds all over the clean sink.

‘What were her tricks? How did she keep Louis interested?’

‘Pompadour?’

‘Yeah, I need some love tips. Everything is so, well—’

‘Sombre.’ Voltaire grimaces.

‘You feel it too, huh? I’m worn down car-pooling to catechism classes, music classes, dance classes, getting the kids to do their homework. Jesus, just translating their assignments takes hours. When I’m not trying to write, I’m taking Eva-Marie to the orthopedist, Theo to the pediatrician, or Alexander to the optometrist.’

I think fleetingly of long weekends spent uninterrupted in bed with Peter, voluptuous, carefree Sundays doing nothing but making—’

‘Amusements. Entertainments.’

‘Sorry?’

V. sounds impatient. ‘Pompadour, of course. She understood the King’s profound melancholia.’ He wipes his engraved ivory comb on a clean bath towel.

‘Louis was a dissipated man, fawned over, indulged from birth. Pompadour’s trick was to constantly surprise him, amuse him, spirit him off to hideaways, groves, châteaux. Produce plays, operas, picnics, n’importe quoi. Remove him from his court, hide him from his diplomatic visitors, do anything to fend off boredom.’

I hesitate. ‘This approach sounds . . . expensive.’

V. waves this aside. ‘She charged it to the state—thirty-six million francs in twenty years.’

‘My credit card limit is a bit lower.’

He shrugs, sending a flurry of fresh powder up my nose. ‘Your friend bought her movie star a vintage car, un Austin Healey. An old car can’t be that expensive.’

‘Fat lot of good that did her. I must do something. After so many years, I must resuscitate my inner Pompadour.’

V. looks up, his eyes bright. ‘An entertainment? A party? Real people at last?’

‘You should talk! Yes, real people. A New Year’s Eve party. As long as I have to live here I might as well meet some people. It’ll be a sort of housewarming for Peter to get some of his friends to drag their unwilling carcasses up from Geneva. Will you help?’

V. skips with excitement. ‘Yes, yes, but only four days to go. I have no time to erect a theater,’ he mutters. ‘There is so little time to rehearse the parts. Your Alexander will make a marvelous Brutus.’

I clear my throat. ‘Hold on. Moral support will do. No revealing yourself to my kids. And no yew tree costumes.’

‘The food must be really good,’ he mutters to himself ‘Nothing would be more tiresome than eating and drinking had God not made them a pleasure as well as a necessity. The pleasure comes from God.’

‘As long as the menu comes from you.’

By noon, V. has scribbled down food suggestions—in his best English for my benefit.

‘‘This is one meal?’ I protest. ‘Remember who’s doing all the cooking. What’s this? Truffled turkey?’

‘La d’Inde, you know? The large bird from the West Indies? We must find some Jesuits who breed them—one of the few things they produce in which I have faith. The rest, I’ve kept very modest. No foie gras, given your budget. Order the best café moka from the islands—Genevan coffee is terrible—and chocolate with double vanilla for sweetening. Make sure the olive oil smells of olives. Do you trust your suppliers?’

‘These days we have supermarkets.’

‘Do you think that’s wise? There’s still time to order the best from Paris or Lyon. I thought up the cranberries myself as a little touche Americaine. Come to think of it, my American play Alzire would be perfect. It was a big success in l736—all about the cruelty and fanaticism, Spanish barbarity and intolerance in the Americas, and you’re an American, so we could—’

‘Conquistadors for New Year’s Eve?’

‘A shortened version of La Princesse de Navarre, perhaps? Just a little fantasy I threw together for the Court. My friend Richelieu got the job of King’s Chamberlain and commissioned it for the wedding of the Dauphin to the Infanta of Spain. It was a big success.’

At my skeptic glance from under lowered lids, he insists, ‘Énorme! It won me that title of Royal Historian and two thousand livres a year in salary.’ He gives my unmade-up face some razor-sharp scrutiny. ‘You’re too old to play the princess,’ he says, ‘We’ll do it with marionettes!’

‘NO puppets!’

‘The Genevans still prohibit all theatre? Tsk, tsk, pathetic, aren’t they? I said they were a cold and complicated people, but I would have thought things had loosened up a little by now. Bon, then it’s just the music and magic tricks. Eva-Marie must learn not to show the front of her cards by Saturday night. And no matter how well Alexander plays his jazz, he must learn to take a bow properly. You must make him execute it like this.’

V. bends his head to buckled knee breeches while his hand makes a supersonic arc through the air.

The very next day, he explodes.

‘You’ve taught your children nothing, Madame, rien! I can’t work with talent like this! Especially when they can neither see nor hear me. Better to use marionettes as we did in Cirey.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be fine on the night. A bad dress rehearsal, they say, means a great show.’

V. casts me a warning scowl. ‘Remember, nothing is punished so viciously as the desire to please—if that desire has failed.’

I haven’t seen V. this animated in days. He insists that we need ten at the table, minimum. He’s crawling up the cookbook shelf like a frustrated gekko in velveteen breeches.

‘Where’s your Massialot? You know, Cuisinier royal et bourgeois?’

‘Probably out of print,’ I suggest.

‘Humph! It was good enough for the cooks at Court.

What’s this, the Joie of Cooking? Well, that’ll have to do. Damn, if only Bonnesauce were here!’

‘You had a cook named Good Sauce?’

‘For 180 livres a year. Worth every coin.’

I know he’s thinking less of my cuisine than his audience for this little entertainment he’s cooking up. That sturdy canvas work apron he’s donned is all for show; it’s me pulling out the pots and pans. Even as Peter is finding last-minute guests, I’m having second thoughts just looking at Voltaire’s menu.

I invite one fellow UC Santa Cruz buddy, a rather mercurial television producer of ‘Believe It or Not’ segments, to drive down from Paris. He will help me face our Swiss guests with their elegant culinary expectations for Le Réveillon, as the French term New Year’s Eve. If the middle-class Pompadour faced down the taunts and whispers of Versailles as she braved their rude verses and mockery, I can do this, I will do this for my Louis, but I need at least one trusty friend at court.

I re-examine V.’s menu. He’s a Versailles vet.

 

Red and black caviar on star-shaped puff pastry
Oysters on ice
Sherried parsnip soup with hazelnut and basil garnish
Lac Léman trout
Partridge pie
Truffled turkey
Épinards in sauce Béchamel
Gruyère, rampon, bean gratin a l’Italienne
Salade mélangé, assorted cheeses and biscuits
Compote of Seville orange in honeyed white wine dressing
Caramelized flans with candied zest and Grand Marnier praliné
Cranberry nut tarte with sauce caramel and vanille glacé

 

‘But the pièce de résistance! Aha!’ he crows with excitement. ‘We will serve them an exotic treat at the end of the meal. Something they will never, ever, ever forget!’

‘What? What? What?’

‘BANANAS! In winter! You will be the talk of all Geneva!’

Poor V. means well, but disaster looms. Since I’ve arrived in St-Cergue, I’ve avoided contact with Geneva, the strange Calvinist, exclusive manners of Genevans, and their insular social judgments. It’s going to take more than out-of-season fruit to make the evening a success.

‘How the hell am I going to serve all this, much less cook it?’

No answer from my co-host. V. is busy preparing the ‘grounds.’ He’s inspired Eva-Marie to gild empty peanut butter jars for hanging on the branches of all the pine trees near the garage, and place votive candles inside. A trail of more little candles will sit on mounds the boys have fashioned by overturning my salad bowl filled with snow along the walkway in front of the house.

I gaze out of the kitchen window as he points proudly to the mounds.

 

‘A corridor of fairy lights to mark the entrance of the Court,’ he explains. ‘Once Pompadour, dressed as Night, led us through the dark forest to a clearing where she had a troupe of players waiting to play for the King. The guests, even Louis himself, picnicked on logs and stones. It was a great success. What do you think? Mon Dieu, it’d better not rain.’

I glance down during this distraction at a caramel sauce that has suddenly granulated into something like maple sugar. My furious expression is all the answer V. needs. He backs off before I can caramelize his wig.

‘Bien. Une idee, simplement.’

I can’t keep track of V. after that, although I hear laughter and wild violin bowing coming from the playroom. The cooking proceeds, less by inspiration than by putting one pan in front of another, hour after hour. I’ll break it to V. later that I’m skipping the truffled turkey, but at least I found pigeons at the supermarket to fill in for partridges. The trout will give Peter a last-minute errand to keep him out of my hair. I’m investing a paint-by-numbers faith in cookbooks, clearing out the freezer of prepared sauces and gratins that seem to multiply upwards like stones of the Egyptian pyramids. You don’t know how the Egyptians got to the pinnacle, but they did.

Ed, my familiar face at ‘court,’ arrives from Paris with his own wild card in tow—an opera singer, a cuddly Russian beauty half his age with the improbable name of Khatuna. They have known each other all of three weeks, he explains with the delight of a boy who has found a new toy. She speaks Georgian, Russian and Italian and clearly adores my old friend, hugging and snuggling and cooing to him, ‘Ours, ours.’ Bear, bear.

Peter gives me an amused glance. ‘I have a feeling I know where she does her best singing,’ he whispers.

‘Do you think she’s one of those illegal passport hunters? Where will we put her at the table?’ I ask Peter on the night.

‘Compared to everyone else, she’s another generation. Which one of your guests can babysit in Italian?’

‘Maybe Jean. He’s got a summer house in Tuscany.’

I try to imagine the aristocratic Jean spending his New Year’s Eve next to the lusty Russian. Ed good-naturedly volunteers to prepare the pile of seventy-five oysters. An hour later my oven mitts are stinking, frayed memories of their inner selves, but sixty-nine glistening oysters are on ice-filled, foil-wrapped cookie trays laid outside in the snow under the rising moon. Six bad oysters have been tossed aside in the bushes. I think of the smell luring wild cats that haunt our back cliffs, but what can we do?

‘There wasn’t any room in the fudge,’ Ed explains, and heads upstairs to change.

‘MADAME!’ Voltaire shrieks, rushing in from the dining room. ‘Who laid the table? Where is the gold and silver plate?’

‘I don’t own any gold or silver plate. That’s my best china.’

Voltaire throws up his hands. ‘Mon Dieu!’

The rest of the guests arrive in a sudden downfall, like an avalanche of snow poured from the inside of a tourist van. That’s how I’ll survive this evening. I’ll be a tourist attraction, I think, with my faulty French, Americanized food, and missing footmen. Flowers and bottles fly around the kitchen. Everybody is kissing everybody. My kids sweep off Charlotte, Jean and Christine’s tiny daughter, to the playroom. We settle Estelle, the new baby of Peter’s former Hong Kong assistant, Catherine, upstairs in my office in a carrycot, right next to V.’s invisible oxygen experiment.

The Court of Geneva has descended on our little Versailles. The women from Geneva are dressed like Calvinist priests in sober black pant-suits devoid of adornment, their men in sober dark suits hardly festive gear.

Nobody notices Voltaire, standing at the door bowing to each guest, a preposterously happy grin on his face. He is dressed entirely in crimson velvet.

It hasn’t occurred to me, preoccupied with my own new isolation, that poor V. has spent far longer than me waiting for the good times to roll.

Something over two hundred and fifty years.