Secret Ingredients (80 page)

André Lagrange, had he been asked, would have agreed with Mme Amélie. Once a voluptuary, Delacour had become an ascetic; once an advocate of tolerance, Delacour had developed a severity toward his fellow men.

Seated at the Café Anglais, Lagrange listened to a peroration concerning the inadequate enforcement of the eighteen articles governing the cultivation of tobacco. Then there was a silence, a sip of water was taken, and Delacour continued, “Every man should have three lives. This is my third.”

Bachelorhood, marriage, widowerhood, Lagrange supposed. Or perhaps gambling, gourmandism, the tontine. But Lagrange had been contemplative for long enough to recognize that men were often provoked to universal statements by some everyday event whose significance was being exaggerated. “And her name?” he asked.

“It is strange,” Delacour said, “how, as life proceeds, the dominant sentiments may change. When I was young, I respected the priest, I honored my family, I was full of ambition. As for the passions of the heart, I discovered, when I met the woman who was to become my wife, that a long prologue of love led finally, with the sanction and approval of society, to those carnal delights that we hold so dear. Now that I have grown older, I am less persuaded that the priest can show us the best way to God, my family often exasperates me, and I have no ambition left.”

“That is because you have acquired a certain wealth and a certain philosophy.”

“No, it is more that I judge the individual rather than the social rank he fills. The curé is a pleasant companion but a theological fool; my son is honest but tedious. Observe that I do not claim virtue for this change in my understanding. It is merely something that has happened to me.”

“And carnal delight?”

Delacour sighed and shook his head. “When I was a young man, in my Army years, before meeting my late wife, I naturally accommodated myself with the sort of women who made themselves available. Nothing in those experiences of my youth told me of the possibility that carnal delight might lead to feelings of love. I imagined—no, I was sure—that it was always the other way round.”

“And her name?”

“The swarming of bees,” Delacour replied. “As you know, the law is clear. So long as the owner follows his bees as they swarm, he has the right to reclaim and take possession of them again. But if he has failed to follow them then the proprietor of the ground on which they alight has legal title to them. Or take the case of rabbits. Those rabbits that pass from one warren to another become the property of the man on whose land the second warren is situated, unless this proprietor has enticed them thither by means of fraud or artifice. As with pigeons and doves. If they fly to common land, they belong to whosoever may kill them. If they fly to another dovecote, they belong to the owner of that dovecote, provided, again, that he has not enticed them thither by fraud or artifice.”

“You have quite lost me.” Lagrange looked on benignly, familiar with such perambulations from his friend.

“I mean that we make such certainties as we can. But who can foresee when the bees might swarm? Who can foresee whither the dove might fly, or when the rabbit might tire of its warren?”

“And her name?”

“Jeanne. She is a maid at the baths.”

“Jeanne who is a maid at the baths?” Everyone knew Lagrange for a mild man. Now he stood up quickly, kicking his chair backward. The noise reminded Delacour of his Army days, of sudden challenges and broken furniture.

“You know her?”

“Jeanne who is a maid at the baths? Yes. And you must renounce her.”

Delacour did not understand. That is to say, he understood the words but not their motive or purpose. “Who can foresee whither the dove might fly?” he repeated, pleased with this formulation.

Lagrange was leaning over him, knuckles on the table, almost trembling, it seemed. Delacour had never seen his friend so serious or so angry. “In the name of our friendship you must renounce her,” he said.

“You have not been listening.” Delacour leaned back in his chair, away from his friend’s face. “At the start it was simply a matter of hygiene. I insisted on the girl’s docility. I wanted no caresses in return—I discouraged them. I paid her little attention. And yet, in spite of all this, I have come to love her. Who can foresee—”

“I have been listening, and in the name of our friendship I insist.”

Delacour considered the request. No, it was a demand, not a request. He was suddenly back at the card table, faced with an opponent who for no evident reason had raised his bid tenfold. At such moments, assessing the inexpressive fan in his opponent’s hands, Delacour had always relied on instinct, not calculation.

“No,” he replied quietly, as if laying down a small trump.

Lagrange left.

Delacour sipped his glass of water and calmly reviewed the possibilities. He reduced them to two: disapproval or jealousy. He ruled out disapproval: Lagrange had always been an observer of human behavior, not a moralist who condemned its vagaries. So it must be jealousy. Of the girl herself, or of what she represented: health, longevity, victory? Truly, the subscription was driving men to strange behavior. It had made Lagrange overexcited, and he had gone off like a swarm of bees. Well, Delacour would not follow him. Let him land wherever he chose.

Delacour continued with his daily routine. He did not mention Lagrange’s defection to anyone, and he constantly expected him to reappear at the café. He missed their discussions, or at least Lagrange’s attentive presence; but gradually he resigned himself to the loss. He began to visit Jeanne more frequently. She did not question this, and listened as he talked of legal matters she rarely understood. Having previously been warned against impertinent expressions of affection, she remained quiet and tractable, but did not fail to notice that his caresses had become gentler. One day, she informed him that she was with child.

“Twenty-five francs,” he replied automatically. She protested that she was not asking for money. He apologized—his mind had been elsewhere—and asked if she was confident that the child was his. On hearing her assurance—or, more exactly, the tone of her assurance, which had none of the vehemence of mendacity—he offered to have the baby placed with a wet nurse and to provide an allowance for it. He kept to himself the surprising love he had come to feel for Jeanne. To his mind, it was not really her affair; it concerned him, not her, and he also felt that, were he to express what he felt, it might depart, or become complicated in a way that he did not desire. He let her understand that she could rely upon him; that was enough. Otherwise, he enjoyed his love as a private matter. It had been a mistake to tell Lagrange; doubtless it would be a mistake to tell anyone else.

A few months later, Lagrange became the thirty-sixth member of the tontine to die. Since Delacour had told no one of their quarrel, he felt obliged to attend the funeral. As the coffin was being lowered, he remarked to Mme Amélie, “He did not take sufficient care of himself.”

When Delacour looked up, he saw Jeanne, standing at the back of a group of mourners on the other side of the grave, her dress now full in front of her.

The law relating to wet nurses was, in his view, ineffective. The declaration of January 19, 1715, was plain enough. Wet nurses were forbidden to suckle two infants at the same time, on pain of correctional punishment for the woman and a fine of fifty francs for her husband; they were obliged to declare their own pregnancies as soon as the second month was reached; they were also forbidden to send infants back to the parental home, even in cases of nonpayment, but were obliged, instead, to continue their service and be reimbursed by the police tribunal. Yet everyone knew that such women could not always be trusted. They made arrangements for additional infants; they lied about the advancement of their pregnancies; and, if there was a dispute over payment between parents and wet nurse, it was not unknown for the child not to survive the following week. Perhaps he should permit Jeanne to feed the child herself after all, since that was what she wanted.

At their next encounter, Delacour expressed surprise at her presence at the graveside. Lagrange had never, as far as he knew, exercised the right to use the municipal baths.

“He was my father,” she replied.

Of Paternity and Filiation, he thought. Decree of March 23, 1803, promulgated April 2nd. Chapters 1, 2, and 3.

“How?” was all he could say.

“How?” she repeated.

“Yes, how?”

“In the usual manner, I am sure,” the girl said.

“Yes.”

“He used to visit my mother as…”

“As I visit you.”

“Yes. He was much taken with me. He wished to acknowledge me, to make me…”

“Legitimate?”

“Yes. My mother did not want this. There was a dispute. She feared he would try to steal me. She guarded me. Sometimes he would spy on us. When she was dying, my mother made me promise never to receive him or to have contact with him. I promised. I did not think that…that the funeral amounted to contact.”

Jean-Étienne Delacour sat on the girl’s narrow bed. Something was slipping in his mind. The world was making less sense than it should. This child, provided it survived the hazards of accouchement, would be Lagrange’s grandchild. What he chose not to tell me, what Jeanne’s mother kept from him, what I, in my turn, have not told Jeanne. We make the laws but the bees swarm anyway, the rabbit seeks a different warren, the pigeon flies to another’s dovecote.

“When I was a gambler,” he said finally, “people disapproved. They thought it was a vice. I never thought so. To me it seemed the application of logical scrutiny to human behavior. When I was a gourmand, people judged it an indulgence. I never thought so. To me it seemed a rational approach to human pleasure.”

He looked at her. She seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. Well, that was his own fault. “Jeanne,” he said, taking her hand. “You need have no fear for your child. No fear of the kind your mother had. It is not necessary.”

“Yes, sir.”

At supper, he listened to his grown-up son’s prattle and declined to correct numerous idiocies. He chewed on a sliver of tree bark, but without appetite. Later, his cup of milk tasted as if it had come from a copper pan, his stewed lettuce stank of the dunghill, his rennet apple had the texture of a horsehair pillow.

In the morning, when they found him, his linen nightcap was grasped in a rigid hand, though whether he had been about to put it on, or whether for some reason he had just chosen to remove it, no one could tell.

2002

“Dinner is scrambled.”

Copyright © 2007 by The New Yorker Magazine

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All pieces in this collection were originally published in
The New Yorker.
The publication dates are given at the end of each piece.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, for permission to reprint an excerpt from
Underworld
by Don DeLillo, copyright © 1997 by Don DeLillo. First published as “Sputnick” in
The New Yorker,
September 8, 1997. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Secret ingredients: the New Yorker book of food and drink / edited by David Remnick.
p.                            cm.
1. Gastronomy—Literary collections. 2. Food—Literary collections. 3. Food habits—Literary collections. I. Remnick, David. II. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925)
PN6071.G3N49 2007
809'.933559—dc22                            2007014490

www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-823-2

v3.0