The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium

THE MICHELIN MAN

Many years ago, when I first started to travel in France, a kindly friend pressed a copy of the Guide Michelin into my hands, rather in the spirit that prompts the Gideon Society to fill lonely hotel bedrooms with copies of the Bible. The Guide Michelin (known affectionately as “the Mich ”) is to a traveller and gourmet what the Bible is to a Christian, the Koran to a Mohammedan or the sayings of Buddha to a large section of the world. It is your guide, mentor and friend when travelling in France . It is small, fat and red — like so many cheerful French peasants you see who have become well-padded and polished over the years by good food and wine. Within its scarlet covers are the dossiers of some two thousand hotels, pensions and restaurants, their innermost secrets revealed.

A glance at the Mich and you know every reasonable hostelry within a fifty-mile radius of your position. It tells you whether the hostelry in question allows dogs in your room, whether they are “tout confort ” or dismissed as merely being acceptable; whether they have garages, telephones, private baths and other adjuncts of modem living; whether they are quiet (a red rocking chair as the inspired symbol) or whether they have a “jardin fleuri ”.

But in addition to this almost Scotland Yard dossier on each place the Mich does something more; it tells you about food. France is an eminently sensible country where people take food seriously as an art form, which indeed the cooking and presentation of food is; an art form which has, unfortunately, become almost extinct in Britain. In France the choice of a dish is made with the same care as you would employ in choosing a wife, and in some cases even greater. Therefore the Mich has printed in its margins against the various restaurants certain symbols that guide and succour the person who takes food and its preparation seriously.

The first symbol is a small etching of crossed spoon and fork. One of these denotes a plain but adequate meal, two or three mean comfortable or very comfortable while four crossed spoons and forks mean the presentation is of exquisite excellence. After this the mind becomes bedazzled.

Four crossed spoons and forks accompanied by a star mean you will have an ambrosial meal in ideal circumstances and are on the first rungs of the gastronomic ladder that leads to that Paradise where you discover a place with four crossed spoons and forks and three stars. There are, however, only four of these in France . Getting three stars in the Mich is considerably more difficult than obtaining the Victoria Cross, the Croix de Guerre or the Purple Heart, and to get even one is an achievement that would make any serious chef die happy.

Once you have assessed the culinary worth of a place by the spoons, forks and stars in the margin you may then move on to something else which the Michelin company thoughtfully provides. Under each entry they list the specialities of the restaurant and the wines of which they are particularly proud. This means that — having chosen your place of refuge — you can then spend five minutes or so getting your taste buds overexcited by reading the list of specialities that are provided for your delectation, toying mentally with gratin of fresh-water crayfish tails, or turbot poached in cream, lobster soup, or a Charolais steak accompanied by cиpes, those marvellous wild mushrooms, black as sin, that look as though they should be witches’ umbrellas.

The Guide, therefore, is not merely a guide book, it is a gastronomic experience. Only once did I doubt this incomparable volume. Only once did I think — for a brief moment — that, in its zeal to leave no gastronomic stone unturned, the Mich might have overstepped the canons of good behaviour. This was some years ago when I was paying my annual pilgrimage to a small house I have in the South of France, to which I repair to try to pretend that Alexander Bell has never invented the telephone and to get some writing done.

That year Europe had crept out from under a warm, wet winter into a riotous, multicoloured fragrant spring. France, always one of the most beautiful of countries was, in consequence, like a magnificent piece of embroidery, ashine and aglitter with flowers so that the countryside was as ravishing and as multicoloured as a Fabergé Easter egg. It was the time of the mustard as I headed south and so the car drifted down country lanes that meandered through a landscape as yellow as a nest of canaries, a delicate but bold yellow. So enraptured was I at the flower-bedecked hedges and banks, the vast yellow fields of mustard, the tiled roofs of the cottages looking in the vivid spring sunshine as crisp as gingerbread, that I drove in a sort of daze.

At noon I stopped in a village that encompassed some fifty souls and bought for myself wine, a fresh loaf of brown bread, a fine, brave cheese and some fruit. Then I drove on until I found a gigantic field of mustard curving over the rolling hilts like a yellow carpet. Here I parked the car in the shade of some chestnut trees, took my provender and made my way into the delicate sea of yellow and green. I lay down among the fragile mustard plants and ate and drank, lapped in this sea of gold. Then, making up my mind that I must drive on, I fell deeply and peacefully asleep.

I awoke when the sun was getting low, slanting on to my bed of mustard, turning the pale yellow to old gold, and I realized I had driven without direction, slept far too long and now had not the faintest idea where I was. It was reaching that hour of the afternoon when all intelligent travellers on the French roads pull in to the side and start consulting their Michelins. But it was useless my doing this for I did not know where I was.

I got into the car and drove slowly along the road until, by good chance, I came upon a wagon piled high with fragrant cow manure being driven by a little man who looked like an animated walnut. With great good humour he reined in his two mammoth horses and showed me on the map exactly where I was, pointing out the very spot with a calloused forefinger brown with earth and sun. I thanked him and he clopped and jingled and creaked on his way, while I got out my Mich and started looking up every town and village in a thirty-mile radius. It was a fruitless task. Each one I looked up was treated frostily by the Mich and there was nothing of any gastronomic quality at all. I had apparently struck one of those curious blank spots in France where there was nothing — so to speak — Michelinable.

Then I spotted a village on the map some twenty kilometres away, but so tiny and remote I felt sure it would have nothing. I looked it up anyway since I was attracted by its name, Bois de Rossignol, the Nightingale Wood. To my astonishment the Mich informed me (almost quivering with delight) that the village boasted one tavern, “Le Petit Chanson” (which in view of the Nightingales struck me as being pleasantly apposite). Wonder of wonders, it not only had six rooms but baths, telephones, a garage, a red rocking chair for serenity and a “jardin fleuri ”. In addition it had three crossed spoons and forks and a star. It closed for the winter but had reopened on this very day.

I read the description again, hardly believing my eyes, but there it was in black and white. Underneath the description of the amenities was the list of specialities. This riveted my attention for they would have done credit to a large hotel on the Côte d’Azur . The proprietor obviously made up his own names for his specialities, which argued a fine, free spirit. There were tails of fresh-water crayfish “in clouds of eggs”. There was beef in red wine, “For the Hunger of Theodore Pullini”. There was a “Tart of Wild Strawberries for the Delectation of Sophie Clemanceau”. I was enchanted and immediately made up my mind that I must, at all costs, stay at “Le Petit Chanson”. Slamming the Mich shut I started the car and drove with all speed to Bois de Rossignol, hoping to get there before all the other salivating gourmets on the roads should arrive before me and occupy all six rooms in the hotel.

The village, when I found it, was delightful. It consisted of some two dozen or so houses grouped amicably round a small, sunlit square, lined with huge plane trees that guarded a small and very beautiful fountain. One end of the square was dominated by a tiny and perfect little fifteenth-century church which raised an admonishing, slender spire to the gingerbread roofed houses around it. Every available space on window ledges on pavements and on the tops of walls was covered by regiments of flower pots, window boxes, tin cans and, in some cases wheel-barrows and old prams, all aglow and overflowing with spring flowers. I pulled up by a bench on which sat five old men, wizened, toothless, wrinkled as lizards, soaking up the evening sun, and asked them the way to “Le Petit Chanson”. Eagerly a chorus of quavering voices and a forest of gnarled hazel sticks pointed me through the village and out the other side. A few hundred yards along the road I came to a side-turning at which was a sign informing me that “Le Petit Chanson” lay to my left. The road was narrow and ran beside a baby river, green and silver in the sun, bounded on one side by woodland, and on the other by vineyards, the vines like black, many-branched arthritic candelabras each with a wig of new green leaves on top.

“Le Petit Chanson”, when I came to it, was no disappointment. The road curved between two huge oak trees and there, in a garden like a patchwork quilt of flowers lay the hotel, a long low building with a red-tiled roof blotched here and there with emerald cushions of moss. The walls and part of the roof were almost invisible under one of the most flamboyant and magnificent wisterias I had ever seen. Over the years it had lovingly embraced the building, throwing coil after coil of itself round the walls and roof until the occupants had been hard pressed to keep it from barring the doors and windows. At ground level the trunk had a girth that any self-respecting python would have been proud of, and the whole complicated web of trunk and branch that had the house in its grip was as blue as a kingfisher’s wing with a riot of flowers.

In a small gravel square among the flower beds in front of the hotel neat white tables and chairs were laid out in the shade of six or seven Judas trees in full bloom. Their pinky-red blooms were starting to fall; the ground was red with them and the white table tops were bespattered as by gouts of dragon’s blood. Beyond the garden stretched woodland and great skyward sloping fields of mustard.

I parked the car and, carrying my overnight bag, walked into the hotel. The small hall smelt of food and wine and floor polish, and everything was clean and shining. I was first greeted by an enormous hairy dog that, had you met him in the woods, you would have been pardoned for thinking a bear. He was, however, most amiable. I soon found that he had several delicious, ticklish spots behind his ears and had him groaning with pleasure as I massaged them. Presently a young waiter made his appearance and I asked him if they had a room for the night.

“Certainement, monsieur, ” he said with grave politeness and taking my case from me he led me down a passageway to a charming bedroom whose window was rimmed with blue wisteria framing the distant fields of mustard.

After I had bathed and changed I made my way downstairs and out into the garden, floodlit now with the rays of the setting sun. I sat down at a table and started to think hopefully that a Pernod might be a not entirely unacceptable idea when the young waiter appeared.

“Excuse me, monsieur,” he said, “but monsieur le Patron asks whether you will drink a bottle of wine with him, for you are the first customer we have had this year and it is his custom to celebrate like this.”

I was enchanted by such a civilized idea.

“Of course I will be delighted to accept,” I said, “but I do hope that the Patron will come out and join me?”

“Oui, monsieur, ” said the waiter, “I will tell him.”

I was anxious to meet the Patron for I felt sure that he was the one responsible for the quaint names of his various specialities, and I wanted to find out why they had been thus christened. Presently he appeared. His appearance was in keeping with the name of the hotel and the whole ambience of the place. He was a giant man, some six foot three in height, with shoulders as wide and solid as a café table. His massive face with an eagle nose and brilliant black eyes, framed in a shock of white hair, belonged to an Old Testament prophet. He wore an apron which was spotless and a chef’s hat perched jauntily on the back of his head and in his huge hands, the joints cobbled by arthritis, he carried a tray on which was a bottle of wine and two very beautifully-shaped glasses. He was, I judged, in his middle eighties, but gave the impression of being indestructible. You felt he would live to be well over a hundred. He beamed at me as he approached as though I was a dear friend of long standing; his eyes flashed with humour; his delighted smile was wide and his face fretted with a thousand lines that the laughter of his life had etched there,

“Monsieur,” he boomed as he set the tray carefully on the table, “welcome to my hotel. You are our first guest of the season and so are especially welcome.”

He wrung my hand with courteous enthusiasm and then sat down opposite me. The force of his personality was like a blast furnace. He exuded kindness and good will and humour in equal quantities and so was irresistible.

“I do hope that you will like this wine,” he continued, pouring it out carefully into the glasses. “It is a Beaujolais from my own little vineyard. I have enough grapes to make some twenty bottles a year, for my own consumption, you understand, and so I only open it on special occasions such as this.”

“I am honoured,” I said, raising my glass. The wine slid into my mouth like velvet and the fragrance illuminated my taste buds.

The old man rolled it round his mouth and swallowed thoughtfully. “It is a truthful wine,” he said.

“Very truthful,” I agreed.

“You are en vacances here?” he enquired.

“Yes,” I said. “I have a little house down in Provence and I try to go there every summer.”

“Ah! Provence ! . . . the country of herbs,” he said, “what a lovely area of France !”

“The whole of France is beautiful. I think it is one of the loveliest countries in the world.”

He beamed at me and nodded. We drank for a while in respectful silence that one gives to a special wine, and then the old man refilled our glasses.

“And now you wish for the menu?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” I said. “I was reading about some of your specialities in the Michelin. You must be an excellent chef to have obtained your star.”

He closed his eyes and an expression of anguish passed for a moment across his fine face.

“Ah, the star, the star,” he groaned. “You have no idea, monsieur, what I had to suffer to get that star. Wait, I will get you the menu and after you have chosen I will tell you about the star. It is, I assure you, a romance such as Dumas might have invented and yet it is all true. A moment while I get the menu.”

He went off into the hotel and returned presently with the menu and the wine list and placed them in front of me.

“If I may venture to make a suggestion,” he said as he recharged our glasses, “the ‘Pigeons for the Sake of Marie Theresa’ is something I am really proud of and I have some fine, plump, fresh squabs. As you are our first customer of the season I will, naturally, broach another bottle of my Beaujolais to accompany the pigeons.”

“You are very kind,” I said. “The pigeons sound admirable. Tell me, I notice that you give curious names to all your specialities. I presume they have some special significance?”

“Why yes, monsieur,” he said gravely. “When one invents a new dish I think it is only befitting that its name should commemorate some event. For example, take the pigeons. I invented this dish when my wife was pregnant with our first child. You know the strange humours women get at such times, eh — ? Well, my wife developed a passion for tarragon and pigeons. Enfin ! It was incumbent upon me to invent a dish that would not only feed her and our unborn child, but would appeal to the finicky appetite of a pregnant woman of great beauty and sensibility. So, I invented this pigeon dish for the sake of Marie Theresa, which is my wife’s name.”

“What a fascinating idea,” I said. “I must start doing that myself, for I am something of a cook and I always think that so many lovely dishes have the dullest names.”

“It is true. I see no reason why imagination should not go into the creation of a dish and also into the naming of it.”

I perused the menu for a few moments.

“I think,” I said at last, “that with your ‘Pigeons for the Sake of Marie Theresa’ as a main dish, I would like to start with the ‘Pâté Commemorating the passing of Albert Henri Périgord’ and then finish with some cheese and perhaps ‘Tart of Wild Strawberries for the Delectation of Sophie Clemanceau’.”

“An admirable choice, monsieur,” he said, getting to his feet. “Now, please help yourself to more wine. I will just tell my wife of your wishes and then I will return and tell you the story of how we got our star.”

He went off into the hotel and presently reappeared with a dish of olives and some small but delicious cheese puffs.

“Yes, monsieur,” he said thoughtfully, easing himself into the chair and taking a sip of wine, slouching easily in the attitude of the professional raconteur. “The fact that we have a star is, to my mind, a small miracle as I am sure you will agree when I tell you the full story. This all happened, of course, before the fourteen-eighteen war, for as you will have discerned, although I aim a fine upstanding man, I am no longer in the first flush of youth.

“In those days I was something of an artist, albeit an unsuccessful one. I still dabble a bit and do the odd oil or watercolour, but I found my true artistic métier was in the kitchen. However, in those days, as I say, I tried to earn a few francs by doing the odd portrait and pictures of people’s homes. In this way I earned a rather uneven living, but I enjoyed myself tramping through France and if no one bought my pictures I did whatever job was offered. I have mended roads, picked grapes and cherries and even been, for a short time, a snail farmer.

“Well, one spring in just such a season as this, my wanderings led me to this village. As you may imagine the countryside was looking magnificent and I was captivated by the colours and the scenery. I decided that if I could stay in this vicinity for a while I would be able to paint some really remarkable pictures. But, as was often the case with me, I had no money, so I had to set about looking for a job. As you may well believe in a village of this size jobs were as rare as a goose with five livers.”

He sighed and sipped his wine musingly. “Well,” he continued eventually, “there was a man in the village who had taken a fancy to me and he spoke to the proprietor of this hotel, saying what a fine fellow I was and asking him if he would consider giving me a job in the kitchens as a skivvy. The owner’s name was Jean Jacques Morceau, a strange, earnest man, short and fat and much given to hysteria over small events so that you sometimes thought him more like an old maid than a man. Nevertheless, monsieur, Morceau cooked like an angel. I do assure you that some of his inventions tasted as though they had been transported straight down from Paradise by kind permission of Le bon Dieu.

“His pastry was as light as cobwebs; his sauces burnt their way delicately into the very fabric of your mouth so that you thought you had been eating all the most fragrant flowers of the world. His omelette of crayfish tails and finely chopped fennel and walnuts was such a wonderful creation that I have seen men with tears of emotion running down their cheeks as they ate one. He had a white wine sauce in which he would simmer oysters and asparagus tips so that the result was so ambrosial that, if you were a person of fine sensibility and a delicate constitution, you could well faint with pleasure at the first mouthful. He had a way of stuffing wild duck with rice, pine nuts and white truffles soaked in brandy that created a flavour in your mouth as though a whole orchestra was playing: your palate rang with the music of the food. In short, monsieur, Jean Jacques Morceau was a gastronomic genius, a Leonardo da Vinci of the table, a Rembrandt of the taste buds, a veritable Shakespeare of the cuisine.”

The old man paused, took a sip of wine, popped an olive into his mouth and delicately spat the pip into an adjacent flower-bed.

“He also had a daughter, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life, monsieur, and really this was the cause of all the trouble, for, having laid eyes on her, I had eyes for no other women. She was incomparable. I, who had taken my pleasures with women in a light-hearted way (and I will not conceal from you that I liked the opposite sex and indeed had considerable success with them); I, who had sworn that I would never marry; I, the gay here-today-gone-tomorrow lover; I fell so deeply in love that I behaved like a calf that has lost its mother, running about like a headless chicken, carrying on like a dog betrayed by aniseed. There was nothing, not even murder, that I would not have done to marry that girl.”

He gave a great, heartfelt sigh, raised his eyes to heaven at his ancient folly, and took another drink. “I worked here for a year and with each of the 365 days I grew more deeply in love. What was even more extraordinary, the girl grew to love me. However, she was an only child, you understand, and so stood to inherit this hotel. Her father viewed all suitors with grave suspicion, since he felt they might well want to marry the hotel rather than the girl, in spite of her undoubted beauty. Therefore it was not surprising that we both knew that any attempt on my part to ask for her hand in marriage would be immediately misconstrued.

“We discussed it at great length, the girl and I, and we knew that to be successful we should have to move with great caution. It was then that I had my brilliant idea; at least, I thought it was brilliant at the time, but it turned out to be much more complicated than I had imagined.”

He lit a cigarette as yellow as mustard and poured out some more wine. “At that time, monsieur, the Michelin tyre company had just started issuing its now world-famous Guide and awarding stars for distinguished tables. As you know the Michelin man comes in secret to your hotel or restaurant and samples your cuisine. Only when this has been done are you aware that you have been tested, so, you understand, it is necessary for you to keep up the same standard at all times, for you are never sure when a Michelin man is lurking among your customers.

“Now Jean Jacques Morceau knew that he cooked like an angel but he also felt that his hotel was a little bit too distant from the great highways to attract the attention of a Michelin man. To know that he should be awarded a star and yet to be convinced that he would never obtain one, drove the poor man nearly crazy. He could talk of nothing else. It became a grand obsession that ruled his whole life. At the mere mention of the Michelin Guide he would fly into an hysterical rage and start throwing things. It is true, monsieur, with my own eyes I saw him throw a Bombe Surprise and a Turkey en Cocotte at the kitchen wall. It was terrible for him to have an all-consuming passion like that, but it served my purpose admirably. You see I told him that I had heard from my uncle (in the strictest confidence, of course) that he had just been appointed as a Michelin man.”

“And had your uncle been appointed?” I asked.

The old man laid a forefinger alongside his nose and closed one eye.

“Of course not,” he said, “in fact I had no uncle.”

“Then what was the point?” I asked, puzzled.

“Wait, monsieur, and I will unfold my whole plan to you. Naturally, when I told Morceau this he got wild with excitement, as I knew he would, and did his best to persuade me to get my uncle to come and stay. At first I said that it would be unethical and I could not possibly expect my uncle to do anything like that. This went on for a week or so, with Morceau doing his best to get me to change my mind. Then, when I had driven him to a near frenzy, I weakened. I said that, even if I did get my uncle down, I could not promise that he would award the hotel a star. Morceau said he quite understood this but that all he wanted was the chance to show his prowess in the kitchen. I expressed doubt about the whole project and kept him on tenterhooks for another few days. Then I said that I was in love with his daughter and she with me and if I agreed to get my uncle down he would have to agree to our getting betrothed. As you may imagine, this threw him into an hysterical fury. A newly made Tarte aux Pommes missed me by a hair’s breadth, and I did not dare venture into the kitchen for the rest of that day. However, as I had hoped, his obsession with the star was too strong and the following day and with the utmost reluctance he agreed to us getting engaged. The day after I put the engagement ring on her finger I went up to Paris to see my uncle.”

“But you said you hadn’t an uncle,” I protested.

“No, monsieur, I had no real uncle, but I had a substitute one, an old friend of mine called Albert Henri Périgord. He was the black sheep of a well-to-do family and he lived in a garret on the left bank of the Seine, painting a little, swindling a little and generally living on his wits. He had special qualities which I needed: he was of a very aristocratic and haughty mien, he knew a lot about food and wine which he had learnt from his father who was something of a gourmet, and lastly, he was enormously fat — in a way that you would expect a Michelin man to be — and could eat and drink more than any other human being I had met in my life. He engulfed food, monsieur, as a whale engulfs little shrimps, or so I am told.

“I went to Paris, called at the garret of Albert Henri and found him, as usual, without a sou to his name and (since he always was) ravenously hungry. I took him out to dinner and unfolded my plan to him. I said that I wanted him to come down here for a week, posing as my uncle, and then to take his leave and return to Paris . There he would write a polite note to Morceau saying that he would do what he could about a star but could promise nothing, as the final decision was not his: he could merely recommend.

“Needless to say Albert Henri was enchanted by the idea of a trip to the country and a week of eating as much as he could want, prepared by a culinary genius such as Morceau. I sent a telegram to Morceau telling him my uncle was coming down for a week and then Albert Henri and I went down to the Flea Market and got him some respectable second-hand clothes, for he had to look like a man of substance. Mind you, it was not easy, monsieur, for Albert Henri must have weighed every gramme of a hundred kilos. But at length we managed to fit him out with something and this, combined with his aristocratic bearing, made him look every millimetre the Michelin man he was supposed to be.

“We finally arrived down here to find my future father-in-law in a state of hysterical delight. He treated Albert Henri as if he were Royalty. I had warned Morceau, of course, that he was at no time to mention to my uncle that he knew he was a Michelin man, and I had warned Albert Henri not to divulge this information to Morceau.

“To see them together, monsieur, was a delight: the more Morceau fawned on Albert Henri the more haughty and regal did Albert Henri become, and the more regal he became the more Morceau fawned on him. My future father-in-law had gone to unprecedented lengths to ensure success. The kitchen had been scrubbed until every copper pot and pan shone like a harvest moon. The larder was stuffed to capacity with every sort of fruit and vegetable, every form of meat and game. More, in case he might suddenly find that he did not have the necessary ingredients to satisfy the ‘Michelin man’s’ every whim, my future father-in-law had taken the unprecedented and expensive step of having a car and a chauffeur at the ready so that they could dash, post-haste, into the nearest big town to procure whatever it was that this exalted guest might demand.”

The old man paused and chuckled reminiscently as he sipped his wine. “Never have I seen such cooking, monsieur, and never have I seen such eating. Morceau’s genius was in full flower, and the dishes that flowed from the kitchen were more complicated, more beautifully balanced, more delicious in aroma, texture, than anything that he had ever produced before. Of course, this made Albert Henri’s genius for over-eating come to fruition. They vied with each other, monsieur, like two armies fighting for supremacy. As the dishes became more and more ambrosial Albert Henri would order more and more dishes for each meal, until he was having six and seven courses, not counting the sweet and cheese, of course.

“If the eating was a Herculean task, washed down by rivers of wine, the preparing of the food was also a mammoth undertaking. Never have I worked so hard, in spite of the fact that we had engaged three temporary skivvies to do the vegetables and so forth. Morceau was like a man demented: he flung himself around the kitchen like a Dervish, screaming instructions, chopping, stirring, tasting and occasionally running, panting, into the dining-room to watch Albert Henri stuffing food into himself in such prodigious quantities that one could hardly believe one’s eyes. A word of praise from Albert Henri and Morceau would go purple with pleasure and gallop back to the kitchen to fling himself with renewed enthusiasm into the task of creating another dish more splendid than the last.

“I assure you, monsieur, that when he cooked his version of Liиvre Royale — and it took two days in the making — the aroma was such that they could smell it down in the village and all the villagers, to a man, trooped out here just to stand in the garden so that they could have the privilege of simply smelling the dish. It was when all this activity was at its height, when Albert Henri’s appetite appeared to get more gargantuan with each meal that he (Just having consumed some comfit of goose of incredible richness and fragrance) rose to his feet to toast the blushing Morceau. . . . and dropped dead.”

The old man sat back and watched my expression with satisfaction.

“Great heavens!” I exclaimed. “What did you do?”

The Patron looked grave and stroked his chin.

“I will not conceal from you the gravity of the situation, monsieur,” he said. “Look at all the ramifications. If a doctor was called in it would lead to the eventual discovery that Albert Henri was not a Michelin man, and this might lead to Morceau putting an end to my engagement with his daughter, for in those days children obeyed their parents, especially the girls. This I could not allow. Fortunately at the moment when Albert Henri crashed to the floor there was only my future father-in-law and myself in the room. I had to think fast. Needless to say, Morceau had gone into a sort of hysterical decline when he discovered that Albert Henri was dead and so were his chances of getting a star. To get him in the right mood I pointed out the full horror of the situation: he had, with his culinary art, actually killed a Michelin man. If he had any hopes of ever getting a mention in the Michelin Guide, let alone getting a star, this dreadful fact must be kept from the Michelin company at all costs.

“Even in the condition he was in, weeping hysterically, he saw the wisdom of my words. What, he implored me, were we to do? Mon Dieu, I could not tell him that I had about as much idea of what to do as he had. I had to take the initiative or else the whole situation would disintegrate.

“Firstly, I said, he must dry his eyes, gain some control over himself and then go into the kitchen and send his daughter to her room, saying that she had been over-working (which was perfectly true). He must dismiss the kitchen boys, say that Monsieur Albert Henri Périgord had a headache and was retiring to bed. On no account was anyone to be allowed into the dining-room.

“Having tidied him up a bit — for in his frenzy of grief he had torn off his chef’s hat and trampled it underfoot and hurled a bottle of excellent Medoc at the wall, a lot of which had splashed over him — I sent him into the kitchen. Then I dragged the body of Albert Henri out of the dining-room through the hallway and down into the cellar which, being cool, we used for keeping our wines and game and poultry. I went back upstairs to find that Morceau had done everything that I had suggested, so that we had a moment’s respite.

“Morceau was beginning to show signs of considerable strain and I knew that he would break under it if I did not keep him occupied. I opened a bottle of champagne and made him drink. In his highly excited state the wine had a befuddling effect which calmed him down considerably. We sat there like two criminals, monsieur, discussing the best way of getting rid of a corpse weighing over a hundred kilos. It was a macabre discussion I can assure you.

“Morceau was all for waiting until it was dark and then taking the body out in the pony and trap and leaving it in some remote forest glade a number of kilometres from the village. I objected to this on the score that, if the body was discovered, people in the village knew of Albert Henri’s presence in the hotel and would ask why his body should be found so far away. This would immediately throw suspicion on Morceau. Did he, I asked, want to be known throughout the length and breadth of France as the chef who had killed a Michelin man with his cooking? He burst into tears again and said he would commit suicide if this was said of him.

“I said that we must be intelligent and think of a way of disposing of the corpse without implicating ourselves. I told him that my ‘uncle’ was unmarried and had only a small circle of acquaintances, so that his disappearance would not occasion any undue alarm. This was indeed true, for Albert Henri had a very small circle of acquaintances simply because he was so untrustworthy. I knew that anyone in Paris would treat his disappearance as a cause for rejoicing rather than the reverse. I could hardly tell Morceau that, so to keep him calm, I assured him that, given the hours of darkness, I would think of a solution to our problem. But I do assure you, monsieur, I was at my wits’ end what to do.”

At this moment the waiter approached the table and told me that my food was ready.

“Good, good,” said the old man, “don’t delay. Come, monsieur, let me conduct you to the dining-room.”

He rose and led me into the hotel and thence into a small but beautifully appointed dining-room and there pulled a chair for me to sit down. The waiter came forward bearing a dish of toast and a large dish of pâté. A sudden realization came to me.

“Tell me,” I said to the Patron, “this pâté commemorating the Passing of Albert Henri Perigord . . . is this named after your friend?”

“Of course, monsieur,” said the Patron. “It was the least I could do.”

I cut a slice of the pâté from the dish, applied it to a fragment of toast and put it in my mouth. It was delicious beyond belief.

“Magnificent, Patron,” I said, “a wonderful pâté. Your friend would have been proud to have had it called after him.”

“Thank you, monsieur,” he said bowing.

“But, tell me,” I went on, “you haven’t finished your story. You can’t leave me in mid-air like that . . . what did you do with the body?”

The old man looked at me and hesitated for a moment, as if making up his mind whether to vouchsafe this secret or not. At last he sighed.

“Monsieur,” he said, “we did the only thing we could do . . . indeed the only thing that I am sure Albert Henri would have wanted us to do.”

“What was that?” I asked, perhaps obtusely.

We turned my friend into a pâté, monsieur. It is perhaps somewhat ironical that it was for this very pâté that we were awarded our star by the Michelin, but we were most grateful for it, nevertheless. Bon appetit, monsieur. ” Chuckling, he turned and made his way out to the kitchen.