The small town of Valençay, on the edge of the Loire Valley, is rather well known in France despite its diminutive size (historically, around three thousand inhabitants). This is partly due to the delicious wines and cheese that bear its name; in fact, Valençay is the only locale in France to have won an AOC for both its wine and its cheese. Few things are more sublime in the French summertime than sharing a bottle of crisp Valençay sauvignon blanc alongside the distinctive Valençay goat cheese, which is shaped like a cropped pyramid and coated with a salty charcoal ash.
There is a well-known legend explaining how Valençay cheese came to have this unusual flat-topped pyramid shape, and it has to do with the other notable feature of Valençay: its enormous and elegant Renaissance château, which draws thousands of visitors each year. Among the most popular attractions at the château are the extensive kitchens, in which the finest chefs of France once performed exquisite gastronomic feats. Today, the château bears homage to their talents by presenting monthly gourmet dinners, drawing upon the delectable bounty of the Loire Valley.
Valençay’s striking shape has spawned a revealing legend about the remarkable duo of Napoleon and Talleyrand. © Pipa100 (Dreamstime Photos).
The Château de Valençay was built in the sixteenth century, but its most famous occupant did not take up ownership until 1803. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, known familiarly to history as Talleyrand, bought the château and its lands with a little financial help from Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he was then serving as foreign minister. It was purportedly thanks to his purchase of the château that the local goat cheese acquired its famous shape—an incident that reveals a good deal not only about Napoleon’s fiery temper but about the skilled diplomat who orchestrated French and European affairs so cunningly during one of the most tempestuous periods of the modern era.
Talleyrand’s diplomatic skills are evident in his record of support for, consecutively, the monarchy, the revolution, the Directory that replaced the faltering revolutionary government in 1795, and the coup d’état that eventually brought Napoleon to power. He had a superb knack for supporting a political order until the moment it became untenable, and then finding a suitable position in the new regime. (He once justified his opportunism with the cynical quip, “Treason is a matter of dates.”) Born into an aristocratic yet poor family, he had amassed a large fortune through shrewd business deals, and this facilitated a life of luxury that, while indulgent, was also strategic. While serving as a French ambassador and then foreign minister, Talleyrand deployed the best of French culture and French gastronomy to win over rivals, flatter potential allies, and craft artful compromises that seemingly benefited all parties. He was an unparalleled practitioner of what today we call “soft power,” explicitly taking advantage of the reputation of French cuisine—regarded as the most refined in Europe since at least the mid-seventeenth century—to pursue core national interests.1 He is famous for saying to the king, upon departing for negotiations at the Congress of Vienna that would reshape European politics: “Sire, I have more need of saucepans than instructions.”
Talleyrand had a long and complicated relationship with Napoleon, who rose to power in the 1790s as the revolutionary project began to unravel. Napoleon had also been born into a noble but relatively poor family, in Corsica, in 1769. Like many impoverished young French noblemen, he embarked on a military career, and he began to find fame in the early years of the revolution. In 1793, he reclaimed the key port city of Toulon from a counterrevolutionary force of royalists backed by the British navy; two years later, he put down an attempted royalist uprising in Paris. He was given command of the French army in Italy and won a series of improbable victories there, displaying the innovative and dauntless war-making style that would eventually help him conquer much of Europe. This made him a popular hero, and also essential to the revolutionary government, as the plunder he amassed in Italy was desperately needed to stave off national bankruptcy.
The revolutionary regime was in desperate straits, beset by financial calamity, wars with European rivals, and internal rebellion. In 1795, the National Convention was superseded by the Directory, a panel of five men appointed by two elected assemblies. But the Directory fared little better and was constantly assailed by both royalist and radical factions. Concerned over Napoleon’s growing popularity, the Directors persuaded him to embark on a new challenge: the conquest of Ottoman Egypt. France was at war with Britain, but its navy was too weak to confront the British directly. The French invasion of Egypt was intended to indirectly harm Britain by disrupting its quickest trade route to India, which was then falling under British control. It might even give France a platform for challenging British imperial dominance in South Asia.
Napoleon, already envisioning himself as a new Alexander the Great, sailed east in 1798 with more than thirty thousand men. At first, he enjoyed a string of successes. He evaded the British navy in the Mediterranean and captured Malta and then the Egyptian port of Alexandria. After marching two weeks through the desert, he defeated the fearsome Mamluk army in the shadow of Cairo’s pyramids, the modern weapons and tactics of the French army overwhelming the fiercest soldiers of the Ottoman world. Napoleon dreamed of conquering a vast eastern empire, later writing that he saw himself “marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my needs.”2 But these visions of grandeur were crushed by Admiral Horatio Nelson of Britain, who finally caught up to the French fleet off the coast of Egypt and sunk nearly every ship. Napoleon was trapped, with no way to return home or resupply himself. He still clung to hopes of conquest, mounting a doomed expedition into Syria, but his army was plagued by disease and poor morale.
This contemporary cartoon depicts Admiral Nelson’s victory in the Battle of the Nile. Each crocodile represents a French ship that was captured, blown up, or managed to escape. From the French Revolution Digital Archive, a collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Drawing by James Gillray (1798). Extirpation of the Plagues of Egypt; Destruction of Revolutionary Crocodiles; or, The British Hero Cleansing Ye Mouth of Ye Nile.
In the end, Napoleon abandoned his soldiers in Egypt and returned to France, then threatened by war with Britain, Russia, and Austria (his Egyptian army eventually surrendered to the British in 1801). He and his political allies fomented a coup, replacing the ill-fated Directory with a Consulate of three leaders. Napoleon was first consul and, for all intents and purposes, now dictator of France. Talleyrand supported his coup and became foreign minister.
Napoleon acquired the nickname “the Corsican Ogre,” thanks to his monstrous talents for conquest and bloodshed in the ensuing years. He revolutionized European warfare, which throughout the preceding century had been conducted in a very limited way, with correspondingly indecisive results. Tactics and weaponry in the 1700s required well-trained soldiers, and so European armies tended to be rather small and expensive to maintain, and were thrown into battle only when absolutely necessary. They relied on massive supply lines, which restricted their mobility. Generals tried to outwit their adversaries rather than annihilate them on the battlefield, and statesmen focused on achieving victory at the diplomatic table. Some saw these limitations on war as an indication of heightened civilization.
The French Revolution changed everything for the French army. With the nation under attack from within and without, a small army of professional soldiers was inadequate. The state had endowed French citizens with new political rights and now demanded from them new obligations: the French people themselves should defend their nation and the revolution, either by fighting or by contributing economically to the war effort. In 1793, the levée en masse was decreed by the revolutionary regime, a forced military conscription of hundreds of thousands of young men. Their lack of training meant that conventional tactics had to be abandoned, and there was not enough food to supply them, so they had to forage off the land. But this actually made the army more mobile and allowed innovative French officers to experiment with new tactics and improved artillery. When Napoleon came to power, he was able to wield an enormous and highly mobile army against European forces still wedded to the old way of things, and this disparity largely accounts for the sensational victories of the first half of his reign. A new era of offensive warfare—of “total war”—had been introduced to Europe.3
But “Ogre” was an apt nickname for Napoleon’s eating habits as well: he was prone to scarfing his meals down in minutes, paying little attention to what he was eating. When he was on campaign, he would not waste time sitting down to eat, instead eating on horseback. Among the most numerous victims of his reign were chickens, a particular favorite; his cooks grilled a new chicken every half hour, day and night, so there was always a fresh meal available at whatever time he might decide to eat. Perhaps unsurprisingly, one of the most famous recipes linked to his name is poulet Marengo, made using the ingredients his chef could forage after Napoleon’s victory over the Austrians in 1800 at Marengo, Italy. According to legend, the original dish featured crayfish, eggs, and brandy in addition to the usual chicken, but today poulet Marengo is generally just chicken sautéed with tomatoes, garlic, parsley, and white wine. (The delicious napoleon pastry has nothing to do with the diminutive Corsican; its name is actually an unfortunate mutilation of napolitain, reflecting the pastry’s origins in Naples.)
Talleyrand, of course, more than made up for his patron’s failings in the gastronomic realm. His table was known to be one of the best in Europe, and he employed great chefs like the legendary Antonin Carême. Talleyrand did not eat very much himself, but he could talk about food and wine for hours, as if it were the most important subject in the world. Having charmed his guests with his genial manner and a sumptuous meal, Talleyrand could then discuss affairs of state in a most agreeable atmosphere of conviviality.
After purchasing the château in Valençay, Talleyrand naturally began serving its delicious goat cheese at his dinner parties and banquets. According to legend, at that time the cheese was shaped like a proper pyramid, triangular with a pointed top. One day, someone unwisely served the cheese to Napoleon himself, who flew into a rage upon seeing this reminder of his failed Egyptian campaign. Leaping to his feet, he drew his sword and sliced off the top of the unfortunate cheese. And so, to avoid further offending the mighty ruler of France, Valençay was made with a flattened top from that day forward.
An alternative legend explains that Talleyrand himself ordered the cheese to be flattened, before Napoleon could ever see it, anticipating how provocative its shape would be to his short-tempered ruler. And really, considering how skillfully Talleyrand survived one of the most murderous eras for politically engaged Frenchmen, this story seems far more likely.
Talleyrand is generally seen as trying, and usually failing, to moderate Napoleon’s tendency toward excess. This became even more difficult after 1804, when Napoleon crowned himself emperor of France, effectively abolishing the First Republic and ending the revolutionary era. Napoleon continued remaking French society: he issued nearly eighty thousand decrees during his reign, reforming nearly every aspect of state administration and daily life. The Napoleonic Code, the civil code enacted in 1804, was widely imitated and still serves as the core legal code in France today. Napoleon rebuilt a strong, centralized French state, and then tried to export the revolution across Europe via his massive armies. He was more or less constantly at war until his final defeat and exile in 1815. As we shall see, this era of unparalleled destruction also yielded a revolutionary change in the human diet—and offered Talleyrand one final chance to save the French nation at the banquet table.