Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 98, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 588 & 589, October 1991

What Ritual Is Being Observed Tonight? by John le Carré

In the 50th Anniversary Issue earlier this year, we reprinted one of two stories by John le Carré that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in the late Sixties. Here is the second of the two by the author o/The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Looking-Glass War, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy, Smiley’s People, The Little Drummer Girl, The Russia House, and most recently The Secret Pilgrim.

Writing of The Little Drummer Girl in New York magazine when it was first published, Reginald Hill said, “It’s been clear for some time that le Carré wants to be taken seriously as a novelist. His claim is undeniable now, but just in case anyone still equates seriousness with dullness, I will add that none of the pleasures you’d expect from a thriller — pace, violent action, shock, suspense — is missing from this...”

I was not, in my youth, fortunate with women. They found me either cold and wary, or overattentive. They cast me, I had the impression, midway between Cardinal Richelieu and an Italian headwaiter. The psychiatrists may have their sport with me, but my predicament was simple: I wanted women and won them seldom.

My needs were never more pressing, or more painfully frustrated, than in the little Provencal town of Etrouille-sur-Mer, in the year 1954. The date is relevant. For the people of Etrouille-sur-Mer, 1954 was an annus mirabilis. In the preceding year their small and normally unrewarding vineyards, which hitherto had produced only a thin and disagreeable rouge known throughout Provence as le pipi d’Etrouille, yielded a truly remarkable growth. The grapes were bursting and erect, and the vines, known everywhere for their frail and inhibited appearance, for once held their rich burden sturdily. Etrouille-sur-Mer, barren for a decade, had borne Bacchus a child of delight.

As for her inhabitants, filled to the brim with the new wine, their own skins swelled and colored as had the skin of their grapes; their eyes sparkled like the light in their vats; and none was more positively affected than my own Marie-Louise, the principal attraction at her parents’ inn, the Auberge du Domaine, where I myself, as a student awaiting admission to Oxford, had accepted service — need I say it? — as a waiter.

I will not say I loved her; I desired her. At night I lay awake, constructing fine phrases, devising opportunities, hotly dreaming of her rich hips and thighs, her plump lips and dancing breasts; I stripped her, kissed, caressed, and amazed her, all in my imagination; but by day I was cumbersome and ineffectual and inwardly agonized. I watched her as I cleared away the empty glasses, I watched her as she lowered her black fringed eyes at the brown peasants from the vineyards, who lusted for her matter-of-factly with clean, outdoor, uninhibited gazes, and I hated her, as the jealous do, for the small favors she occasionally granted me. A kiss, a dance, a squeeze of the hand, even a consoling, playful pat upon the backside. What were these but sweetmeats handed to a child while the adults glutted themselves on stronger fare? Even the carafe of new wine that she occasionally left in my room or the small keepsakes she brought me from town when she rode with the peasants to the market were nothing but salt in the wound.

Now and then, I had no doubt, she had a certain maternal affection for the English boy who skulked so incongruously at the edge of her carefree life. But I did not want a mother — I wanted a mistress — and to my aching, envious heart, these moments of generosity were no more than the salute of a wanton girl to the life she had left behind. I was convinced that in all of Etrouille I was the one man who had not enjoyed her charms. How she tantalized me!

I remember still how at night, when we had swept away the last debris, counted the money, set the chairs upon the tables, and sprinkled wet sawdust on the wooden floor, she would take my hand and lead me upstairs, past her parents’ door and into my room, where she would sit on the bed with a small, wistful sigh, and — still without relinquishing my hand — shake her head so that her hair fluttered like silk curtains over her face.

“Poor boy! You want me so much,” she would say, as if lust were a condition to be pitied in a person so far removed from the easy, primitive way of life. And then she would jump up angrily, toss her head, and rifle through my books and papers.

“It is interesting?” she would ask in English. “It interests you?” I could speak French to anyone but her. “Tell me, please, about the world of the mind.” I forget what answer I gave, but inwardly I knew only one: “Marie-Louise, Marie-Louise, the mind has no meaning if it is not implanted in the flesh!”

I was even sorry for her then, sorry for the emptiness that awaited her when her ripe body was past its year. And lifting my glass to her departing footsteps, I drank from the carafe she had brought me, drank the rich fruit of last year’s miraculous vintage, drank until I fell asleep, promising myself that one day, when the turbulence of Marie-Louise’s youth had worn itself out and the pipi d’Etrouille was once more equal to its pathetic reputation, I would return, rich and wise and forgiving, to care for the twilight of her life, though she had scorned the dawn of mine.

It had a curious flavor, that great wine, even when it was new; it is with me still as I write. I know nothing of wine in a general way — the cult bores me — but the wine of Etrouille, harvested in 1953 and first enjoyed (prematurely) in 1954, is like the one tune in the memory of a deaf man. At first taste, it promised but withheld itself; it lay trembling upon the tongue, begging the reassurance of a kindly palate; this granted, it gently responded, and suddenly the ecstasy was upon you. A strange but brilliant odor filled the nostrils and infused the palate; the liquid swelled and broke upon the senses; and then, at last, but slowly, the taste faded, leaving behind the perfect languor of a protracted afterglow. I did not by any means wholly enjoy it, for we do not always view kindly that which stirs us from our apathy or lulls us away from our desires, but I could no more forget it than I could my first conquest in the field of love.

They named it la Cuvée Marie-Louise after the girl they had all adored. The outside world saw little of it. Only a few bottles, they say, found their way to the table of the connoisseur. The lion’s share remained in Etrouille and was quickly consumed by greedy natives before it even had time to mature. Go there today and demand la Cuvée ’53 and they will reverently bring you a dusty bottle with a fine label of fake parchment. The year will be right, the indications impeccable, the price exorbitant. There will even be a small ticket attached by lead wire to the neck, and there you may read, in French and American, of the year God sent nectar to the valley. But the wine itself is execrable: it is the old pipi in fancy dress.

I left Etrouille in the following winter, a few thousand francs the richer. I had nowhere in particular to go — my tutors would not accept me yet — but I could not endure the thought of living in Marie-Louise’s presence a second time while the valley woke to the fertilities of spring.

I took one job with the post office in St. Albans, and another with a large store in Watford. Sometimes I wrote to Marie-Louise; sometimes she wrote to me. Once she sent me a rather pathetic parcel. It was my birthday, I suppose, for she was always sentimental about birthdays. There had not been a peasant in Etrouille whose birthday she had not remembered with a free bottle of la Cuvée. She sent me a tin of homemade pastries — they were salted things that she made herself and served free to regular customers — but they had crumbled during the journey and all that was left was a sort of cheesy shrapnel that I fed to the swans at Bushey. A week after Christmas I received a terse note from the customs office, advising me that two bottles of dutiable wine had been sent to me from Etrouille-sur-Mer. But, like the biscuits, they had arrived broken. I wrote and thanked her all the same, but the letter was returned to me by her mother.

Marie-Louise had waited for me for almost a year, her mother wrote, and surely that was long enough for any girl? She had eloped with a schoolmaster of no fortune or prospects, a Lyonnais quite incapable of making her happy. Her father was furious, her mother said, and would have no part of it; the schoolmaster was a prig, he had declared, and, worst of all, a non-drinker, he came from a family of notorious teetotalers. The child, in her father’s frank opinion, had thrown herself away. Her mother, finally, was extremely apologetic, but, she said, I must understand that young girls these days cannot wait forever; Marie-Louise, though she had never broken faith with me, was of an age when she needed a man. She had always dreamed of marrying a schoolmaster, an academic; she was a passionate reader and at school she had taken first place; though she had the instincts of a woman, her first ambition had always been in the spiritual direction.

I could bear no more. I tore the letter in pieces and withdrew, a broken man, to the bachelor seclusion of an Oxford college. I worked like a madman. The more the memory of Marie-Louise oppressed me, the more furiously I fought it away with ruthless intellectual disciplines. Only once did I allow myself the pleasures of the senses, and the result was a disaster.

Under heavy pressure from my colleagues, I agreed to attend some wretched celebratory dinner. Our master of ceremonies, charged with arranging the menu, served a particularly foul rouge, overpriced at twenty-two shillings, too thin to be taken for anything but a rose, and distributed under the title of Merveille d’Etrouille. Even my colleagues found it undrinkable. The master of ceremonies, who was an idiot, refused to apologize. He had consulted authorities, he explained, who spoke of the Etrouille crops with the deepest respect; in 1953 the southern vineyards of Etrouille had produced a wine—

Later, having railed at him, they threw him in the pond, and I, having given them every assistance, returned to my studies.

I suppose, in fact, that I owe my success in the examination to my poor Marie-Louise. The thought of her in the arms of her mean and cheerless academic drove me again and again to my desk. It was no longer the Cuvée Marie-Louise that lulled me into giddy sleep, but the ashen dullness of Kantian dialectic, the observation of minds in flight from the flesh. Yet at heart I was not deceived by these stern philosophies. I had no taste for the disembodied mind; the abstractions of German philosophic verbalism were, for me, like musical scores that would never be played. Thus, though I took high honors and was offered a fellowship, I entered the gates of the academic life as a prisoner. At least Marie-Louise, I thought, had she but, known, would have been proud of me. I was not proud of myself.

The academic reputation of the provincial French university at Felon, near Avignon, was in those days, heaven knows, not exactly high. But academics, like the rest of the world, find their stars in strange places, and it was at Felon that they discovered Du Chēne. All of a sudden, in the tiny world to which I now belonged, Du Chēne had become the arbiter of intellectual fashion.

It is not much, I know, but the fact remains: from Uppsala to Berkeley, there was not a Germanist who ventured into print on the subject of the Nineteenth Century thinkers without reckoning with the judgment of Du Chēne. At the smallest leap into unfounded speculation, his pen struck like a whip, for he was not merely our star, he was our abbot and the scourge of all untidy thinking. It was with uncommon pride, therefore, that I accepted his invitation to address the faculty of Felon. Not only had Du Chēne been gracious enough on a number of occasions to give favorable notice to my work, but the University of Felon was famous for its hospitality.

Du Chēne and I shared, I liked to think, a mutual regard. He had written warmly of my reappraisal of Schiller’s interpretation of the naive; I had been much excited by his observations on the inductive nature of Kant’s logic. But his invitation, extended in the name of his colleagues, overwhelmed me with its generosity. “Your diligence,” I read, “your perseverance in the noble search for spiritual and intellectual enlightenment—” It was a citation. I replied the same morning. I would be proud, I said, to address the faculty, and delighted to attend a dinner afterward in my honor. The same afternoon I made a special journey to Low’s in Hatton Garden. I bought an Eighteenth Century bonbon dish for the professor’s wife; the professor should know that I did not take his invitation lightly.

To my delight, Du Chēne was to meet me at the station. I know precisely how I expected him to look: massive and oaklike, an aristocrat as vigorous and austere as his writings. I imagined a generous man, but one who was stern, who strode firmly, but not (since he admired me) uncharitably, across the earth. I dressed him in a suit of dark grey, clean but rubbed shiny at the elbows by the rich teak of an ancient rolltop desk, and I fancied a large and cumbersome motorcar parked in a privileged place, with a loyal driver waiting at the wheel.

When the freckled clerk in the English blazer approached me at the station, a grubby Bon Marché shopping bag dangling from his left hand, I assumed that Du Chēne had been detained for reasons of state and had sent his acolyte instead.

“Du Chēne,” he said, hissing, while his upper lip rose in a sneer. I did not realize at first that he was introducing himself; I thought he was making an apology on behalf of his absent master and that Du Chēne was the subject of an unfinished sentence. But he had taken my hand in his by then and was feeling the flesh as though he disapproved of it. We had a couple of hours to kill, he explained, before my lecture. Had I eaten on the train or would I care for a sandwich?

It occurred to me, as I listened to his unbroken monologue in the dingy bar where we drank our coffee, that Du Chēne’s ideas were not ideas at all but attitudes of scorn conveyed by a sharp but barren mind. Where previously I had thought of him as breaking new ground, I now understood he had been merely retracing old paths and beating down the bushes to either side. I tried to remember what he had praised in my own work, and I realized for the first time that he had only sided with me where I had questioned the work of others; and I wondered how on earth I had been taken in by him, and how his colleagues — who were now to form the nucleus of my audience — could tolerate the dictatorship of such a shallow, bitter, and ungenerous intellect. I was soon to know the answer.

Du Chēne himself had decided to introduce me.

There are two methods, in my experience, of introducing an outside speaker. I think of them as the English and the German styles. The English method requires a pipe, for the speech must be largely inaudible, and the introducer sits not on the podium but in the first or second row of the audience. When the hall is about three quarters full, and long before the majority has sat down, he rises, but does not hold himself erect, and, with his back to the speaker and his hand to his pipe, growls out a couple of flat sentences that are at once drowned by the clatter of feet and the grinding of chairs. If the speaker strains his ears, he may just catch his own name mispronounced, and that is all, but his best course is to ignore the whole procedure, for by that means he starts even with his audience.

The second, or German, method has been practiced in the field of literature by Bernard Shaw. Having no confidence in what is to follow, the introducer takes it upon himself to offset the deficiencies in advance. He offers conclusions to what has not yet been said, questions nonexistent hypotheses, and even — I have known it done — takes personal exception to certain dark inferences that could mar the speaker’s objectivity. It was this method, predictably, that Du Chēne had selected.

We would all be familiar, he said, with the rich contribution that our guest had made to his chosen field of study. Du Chēne himself had had occasion to be grateful for several stimulating suggestions. He referred in particular to my paper on the Schillerian distinction between the naive and the sentimental. Personally — the upper lip trembled — Du Chēne was inclined to question whether Schiller was a philosopher at all. He had noticed, in his recent readings, that the literati tended to speak of Schiller as a philosopher, while the philosophers spoke of him as a poet.

It was while he was making this tired joke that I woke to the reaction of the audience. It was one of unmixed loathing. They followed him as racegoers might follow an unpopular winner, longing for him to fall, yet knowing there was little hope. Some had lowered their heads and were staring miserably at their hands; some had turned their eyes glumly to the high, dusty windows, but God was hidden behind a black and stormy sky that day, and they had no comfort there. A few — they were the younger men whose nerve perhaps was stronger and whose aspirations had not yet died — these few stared at him with passion burning in their Gallic gaze, each one a Cassius to this precocious, usurping Caesar, and I knew they hated me also as his protege.

Du Chēne must have been nearly finished, for he was talking now of my own person. We all looked forward, he said, to the privilege of a closer acquaintance at the faculty dinner tonight; it was not often that they had the pleasure of receiving a gentleman of Oxford in their midst. Speaking for himself, Du Chēne said, he had a warm affection for Oxford: he had spent a term at St. Peter’s Hall while still a student. In vino veritas, he had learned, was the Oxford motto; it was a nice thought for those of us who enjoyed the pleasures of the table — the upper lip made it clear that he was not among them — that today an Oxford man was supplying the truth, and that Felon was supplying the wine.

I spoke appallingly. I skipped, at random, long pages of eulogy of Du Chēne, and the whole fabric of my thesis collapsed. I extemporized and could not find the words; I made awful jokes and no one laughed; I apologized and no one pitied me. I spoke of the great French institutions of learning, of hands clasped across the Channel, but all I felt was the smoldering hostility of an alienated audience. And all the while, through the mist, Du Chēne’s gleaming eyes shone on me like prison lights from which there was no refuge.

I think that, in a way, they actually quite liked me. They had expected a destructive robot of Du Chēne’s own school. Instead, they had watched me fail, and fail royally. The apprentice had disgraced his master; the day was not wholly the enemy’s. When it was over, they shook my hand quite kindly.

An older man — I had seen him earlier appealing to God — actually patted my arm. He had gained much from my lecture, he said; it had been a very human lecture. Humanity, these days — here a small glance in the direction of Du Chēne — was often in rather short supply at Felon, particularly among the young. But tonight, he added with a parting smile, tonight they would do justice to my humanity. “We bring our wives,” he explained, quoting John Gay to me: “‘There is nothing unbends the mind like them.’” He was an Anglicist, I learned later, with a gift for apt quotation.

They had taken a private dining room at the inn where I was staying. The French windows gave onto a courtyard planted with trees. The branches had been trained over a pergola and the lamps shone downward through the leaves. I was reminded, a little sadly, of Etrouille.

Alone in the dining room, I waited for my hosts to arrive. Du Chēne had gone home to collect his wife, and I knew at once that I would be facing him down the length of the table, for while every other place was set with a cluster of wineglasses Du Chēne’s was provided only with a clouded, drab-looking tumbler that I am sure the maitre d’hotel had chosen personally as an emblem of his contempt.

I remained there sadly, listening for the first car to arrive. A waiter had entered, quite a young man, a student perhaps, filling in time before beginning his studies. He smiled at me pleasantly and offered me an aperitif. I was enjoying my stay? I was enjoying it very much, I replied, and I might have added, if I had not heard a car drawing up in the courtyard, that I envied his estate and wished to heaven I had never renounced it in favor of the hollow triumphs of an academic discipline.

I composed myself suitably, waiting for the door to open. It is a silly game one plays at such moments of nervousness. Should one be turned expectantly to the doorway or allow oneself to be discovered unawares? Hands clasped before one, or behind? It was the Du Chēnes. I actually caught a few words as he settled with the taxi driver. A month ago, he was saying, the fare had been four francs sixty — now it was four francs eighty. The driver answered wearily: they were held up at the lights; the meter was controlled by a combination of time and distance; he could not be responsible for the meter. I heard the rustle of crinoline and a light, feminine step, and I saw in my mind’s eye the pinched, sallow wife he would have, the mother-of-pearl handbag and the poor raincoat covering the black crepe, and I was in the act of thanking God that I had not parted with the silver bonbon basket when Marie-Louise walked in on the arm of Du Chēne, her black hair brushed over her lovely shoulders and her eyes turned down so that I knew that she expected me.

Du Chēne introduced us. I touched her hand, reaching toward her tentatively, like a blind man. She gripped me as if I would save her from drowning.

“Pierre has spoken constantly of you, Monsieur,” she murmured. “I do not understand all, but I admire you immensely.”

“Our work goes far over her head,” Du Chēne remarked indifferently. “But for some reason she has always been interested in your writing. Your style is very simple.”

Du Chēne turned his back on Marie-Louise in order to present to me another guest, who mercifully had just entered. Soon they were arriving in numbers, their faces bright with gastronomic anticipation. Rich smells reached them from the hallway; they greeted me with pleasure, recognizing, I am sure, the light of humanity and the dash of color that now redeemed my features. Somewhere I heard music playing, though Marie-Louise has since assured me there was none. But a man who is on the edge of paradise hears his own sounds, and no one, not even Marie-Louise, has the right to dispute them.

There were eighteen of us at table. Marie-Louise sat on my left. She sat very demurely, talking most of the time to the elderly Anglicist, unbending his mind and almost unhinging mine, for her foot was resting against my ankle and our hands had intertwined beneath the immaculate tablecloth. She was more beautiful than ever — and more assured. I read her afresh, and I read her accurately, with an eye sharpened by love and a mind improved by years of agonized reflection. She was lost, but not forfeit, disappointed but not despairing. She had made a mistake and had seen where it could lead, and she proposed to rectify it at the earliest opportunity. Her very body was a body in waiting. I was certain she had quickly determined not to waste it on Du Chēne. She had had a lover — several — and some no doubt (it was in the air) were at this very table, but the lovers were to cover the mistake she had made six years ago, and now she faced a clear sea and meant to sail her own course. There was no flirtation between us; the pact was concluded with that first handshake. Our relationship was resumed where it had left off, but it was informed with the wisdom of the intervening years. We were lovers before the act, and the act — as our secret caresses now declared — would be taken care of at the earliest possible opportunity.

There are cliches about both the art of love and the art of cooking that I have never subscribed to. The French delight in them less than we suppose, but they are victims of their reputation. Still, there are probably those who could recite to this day the list of superb dishes that were put before us. And Marie-Louise, in any event, is in a special position to do so, since it was she, the hostess, who had ordered them.

We ate and talked and drank, each with greater liberality as the evening proceeded. I have never been so entertaining. I made jokes, and the jokes were funny. I regaled them with small gossip from my arid Common Room, and they laughed out loud, rejoicing in my frankness. I even chose a moment to criticize my own lecture of that afternoon. I had thought about it too much, I said, I had been overawed by the honor of the occasion — but they would hear no wrong of me, shouted me down, lifting their glasses to me and assuring me that every word I spoke had been a jewel of wisdom. Opposite me, at the far end of the table, already out of focus, Du Chēne sipped darkly at his tumbler, forgotten or ignored.

Who spoke first of producing a special wine? Marie-Louise assures me to this day that it was the old Anglicist on her left, but if that is so, then Marie-Louise implanted the notion in his mind. The movement began with a conference from which I was excluded. A muddle of excited murmurs at the center of the table, a short dispute followed by universal agreement, and the waiter, the young waiter whom I had spoken to earlier, was summoned and addressed in terms near to reverence.

The bottles should be decanted, they said; they should be uncorked now and allowed to breathe; no, they should be uncorked later. It was Marie-Louise who quelled the dispute. This wine, she said simply, should be drunk directly from the bottle and uncorked only at the last minute. The waiter returned with a colleague. The bottles they carried were wrapped in linen napkins. Silence descended on the company. Only Du Chēne, sensing an irregularity, his rimless spectacles glittering unpleasantly in the candlelight, chose to speak:

“What ritual, may I ask, is being observed tonight?”

Not a head turned. It was the Anglicist who finally replied:

“We are making a bridge,” he explained. (I think he was holding Marie-Louise’s other hand, for I felt a surge of warmth for him that was like an electric reaction.) “A bridge between the naive and the sentimental. Between the intellect and the body.”

“More like a river,” Du Chēne retorted sullenly, regarding the little row of white-clad bottles that stood like virgins before their First Communion, but the day was undoubtedly the old professor’s and had been from the beginning.

“And since your guest,” the professor continued, “our guest, has taught us that life is not only to be contemplated but enjoyed, we propose to ask him” — here he glanced at Marie-Louise as if she were at least party to the notion — “to ask our guest to sample a wine we have chosen in his honor, and to give us the advantage of his valued academic judgment.”

I protested, but only feebly. I was no connoisseur, I said, but again they shouted me down. All my reserve had left me. I am no musician, but if they had put a grand piano before me that night I could have played them a Beethoven sonata with the confidence of a master.

The young waiter’s hand trembled a little as he poured. He had put before me a new glass of the classic balloon shape and the whole table watched in silent rapture as the red wine spread like a stain over the broad base.

The glass had not reached my lips before I heard the raucous chatter of the peasants in the bistro below my bedroom. I smelled the wet, sweet scent of the vine leaves on the southern slope of the valley and heard the cracked, irreverent chime of the little chapel, summoning the heathen Gauls to worship some other God but Bacchus; I saw Marie-Louise lean back a little in her chair, as she had lain so vainly on my little bed. At last I drank. The liquid swelled on my tongue, its aroma infused my nostrils, turned my head.

For a moment I feared I had lost altogether the power of speech, for not even the great Cuvée could wash away the lump in my throat or keep back the tears that crowded my heated eyes. My first words, I think, were inaudible to all but those closest to me:

“It is the finest of all French wines. I thought it was lost to us forever. A wine as rare and as rich as happiness itself, of multiple and mysterious tastes, a wine of the mind and of the body. It was found once only.” My voice gathered strength. “For those of us at this table, it will not be found again in our lifetime — a gift of God to a barren valley.” I named it, but not at once, for I had Du Chēne in mind. Even in that moment of ecstasy, with Marie-Louise’s hand resting coolly on my thigh, cunning was my ally. The year was ’fifty-three, I said, the wine was first enjoyed (prematurely) in ’fifty-four. The valley was remote and even despised by those who thought they had experienced the best that Provence could yield.

They were applauding, but I barely heard them. Someone was clapping me on the back, someone else was embracing me, but I saw only Marie-Louise, and the sweet tears running down her cheeks.

Du Chēne had made it a rule to retire at eleven. He liked to rise early, he explained in a metallic voice, in order to arrange his correspondence. I thanked him for his generosity. No, I said, I would make my own way to the station — he had done enough for me already. The Anglicist promised to bring Marie-Louise home; she was, after all, the hostess and obliged to remain — and when Du Chēne had left, she gave him a little kiss that he seemed to understand.

We took the midnight train to Etrouille, changing at Avignon. I have altered the name, for we do not care for visitors in the valley. There are a few dozen bottles left in the cellar of the Auberge du Domaine, and we like to use them sparingly. The bonbon dish sits resplendent on our dining table. Marie-Louise fills it from time to time with savory pastries of her own manufacture. The quality of the Cuvée Marie-Louise has, if anything, improved. Not even its most ardent admirers had dared to expect such a maturity in the flavor. The afterglow is particularly rewarding.