‘Yes, sir.’ The old woman had taught me the rest of my letters.
‘What’s fifty minus twenty?’
‘Thirty, sir.’
The old man looked thoughtful, then decided. ‘You can be in my class. I’m putting you in Emile’s care. His punishment for what happened.’
‘Sir . . .’ Emile protested.
‘You expect me to believe he punched you first?’
‘What you believe and what can be proved are different.’
Dr Morel sighed. ‘Leave the law at home, Duras. Leave it to men like your father.’ Taking the other boy’s face in his hands he turned it sharply until they met each other’s eyes. ‘Now, the truth. Did you hit him?’ The boy’s face narrow and watchful, his curls dark and his nails clean. I was surprised by that. I hadn’t met anybody whose nails were clean. He seemed to be considering what it would cost him to admit this.
‘Yes, sir,’ he said.
So I first met Emile Duras, son of a lawyer and here because his father paid for him to come here to be educated. He went home at the weekends, which made him an outsider. His father was a rich lawyer and as St Luce was for the sons of destitute nobles, of whom there were enough to fill five classes of forty boys each, that also made him an outsider. But the biggest thing that set him apart, the thing that sent him out to punch me when other boys told him that was what he must do, was his name. Had he been de Duras, should such a family exist, his life would have been easier. The lack of the
particule,
the
de
in his name, set him apart from the others and from me, although I was too young to realise it.
My first day was simple. I trailed behind Emile and sat quietly at the desk I was given and answered the three questions the old headmaster asked me. Luckily I knew the answers to those, because there were others to which I did not. When Emile dipped his head for silent reading I did the same, looking over to see which page he read and fumbling to find my place. I read the page three times – and, though it made little sense, when asked to read a line I did in as clear a voice as I could manage. ‘The glory of great men should always be measured by the means they have used to acquire it . . .’
Emile’s sentence came from further down the list of quotations because he sat two desks away. In the weeks to come we managed to sit side by side, when it became obvious our brief fight had made us friends. Emile’s sentence read, ‘Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us consider how happy those are who already possess it.’
Later I learnt the name Rochefoucauld, later still who he was and why his maxims were famous. His name reminded me of the cheese I’d eaten with le Régent and Emile brought me a sliver from home, wrapped in paper. It tasted as I remembered, of mould and horses’ hooves clipping on brick and dung beetles and sun.
I learnt a lot from Emile in my first two weeks at St Luce, which boys and which masters to avoid and which could be trusted, and at the end of that I discovered what two weeks’ grace meant and that Emile had truly become my friend. A boy – older and bigger, because all the boys were older and bigger, since I was the youngest and smallest in the school – walked up to me and tried to take my work book, having had his own stolen, the loss of which was punishable by beating. And instead of letting it happen, Emile stepped up beside me and together we saw off the would-be thief.
It was a friendship that was to last for years and only be broken by something bigger than friendship and fiercer than shared bonds. That was so far into the future we could barely imagine it from a world of small boys where days stretched for ever and our memories hungrily swallowed every detail of the world around us.
‘You can be good at sport, you can be good at learning, you can be good with your fists . . .’ Emile grinned ruefully and touched the yellowing fringes of the black eye I’d given him a few weeks earlier. Out of friendship I touched my lip, although the scab was mostly off and the swelling long gone. The written rules were on a board in the main hall. They were few and easy to understand. The unwritten rules more numerous and more complex. In the school as in the later world I was to find. But like the rules of the later world they could be simplified and reduced to those that really mattered. That was what Emile was doing, while standing with his legs apart and his hands behind his back as his father might do in court. ‘You should punch, but you should also read to yourself.’
I looked at him.
‘The masters will leave you alone.’
He seemed to be saying that Dr Pascal and the other masters should see me read books and the boys above should see me punch people. I checked, and that was exactly what he meant. I was six and he was nearly eight, older and worldly wise. I did my best to obey his suggestion. The result was the masters liked me, and my friends grew in number. Those I hit wanted to be friends so I didn’t hit them again, and their friends wanted to be my friends so I didn’t hit them to start with. Inside a year I stopped having to hit people and stopped worrying about being their friends. They were still friendly to me but got little in return. Emile was the exception.
We played together and he got permission from his father to bring me home for a weekend. I arrived in near rags and left wearing Emile’s old clothes. More to the point, I left fed and with my pockets filled with slivers of five different cheeses. Emile’s mother thought my passion for Roquefort funny and asked who’d given it to me.
‘Monsieur le Régent.’
She looked at her husband, who looked at Emile, who shrugged slightly to say he didn’t know if it was true but it was possible. And so I came to tell them about the day the duc d’Orleans rode into my father’s courtyard and left a row of kicking villagers strung from the trees behind him. I left out eating beetles.
Emile told me later what she said. Sometimes life is kinder than one thinks. Sometimes it is even kind to those in desperate need of kindness. I adored her and she became the mother mine had never bothered to be. This amused Emile as his possessiveness of me extended to expecting his mother to like me also. An only child, in his home he was as spoilt and cosseted as a dauphin. Even the prickly Maître Duras approved of my friendship with his son.
A small man with expensively tailored clothes and a jewelled ring on one finger, his coat was buttoned tight to the neck and his nails always clean. Occasionally I would find him staring from me to his son as if considering the difference. Emile was cleaner and still taller, although I was catching up. My appetite was bigger and I ate everything put in front of me, which endeared me to Madame Duras, a large woman fond of her gold bracelets, her supper parties and her garden. Maître Duras acted for the school, and for baron de Bellvit, which was how Emile came to be at the school and why the school agreed when Maître Duras suggested I might come to his for a few days over the holiday since I had nowhere else to go.
I was noble and instinctively polite and treated his son as an equal because no one had suggested I shouldn’t. Later, other boys became my friends. Some of them in the first few terms suggested Emile was too common to be friends with people like us. And I looked at them and I looked at myself and I looked at Emile and wondered what the difference was. We wore the same uniform and went to the same school, we ate the same food and attended the same classes. The only difference was that Emile looked a little cleaner and had clothes that were a little neater and slept at home rather than in the dorms. To me that made him luckier than us not worse. All of us knew we were different to the peasantry.
That sullen indistinguishable mass who stared at us with flat eyes from the fields on the two occasions a year we were allowed to leave the school grounds: once to visit the fair at Mabonne and again to be fed by the baron de Bellvit, our local landowner and titular master, under its founding articles, of our school. The peasants dressed in rags and dirt and lived in hovels – it was hard beneath the mud and sweat and stink to tell the men from the women. And though we might see a wide-eyed boy only a little younger than we were, or a girl pretty enough to make us notice her, we knew what they would become. It had always been this way and we believed it always would. More to the point, they believed it and so it was.
1728
Hanging the Dog
To cook mice
Drown first. Clubbing produces sharp fragments of bone. Gut, skin and clean in water. Wrap three or four together in wet clay and bake in a bonfire. Alternatively, halve along length, fry with sliced onions and season with salt, pepper and thyme. This also works for sparrows. Tastes like chicken.
To cook sparrow
Gut, pluck, remove legs and clean carcase in water. Alternate layers of salt and cleaned sparrow in a jar. When needed, wash away salt and fry with a little olive oil. In a separate pan fry onions until clear and add diced tomatoes. Put sparrows on top of sauce and garnish dish with basil.
Tastes like chicken.
To cook cat
Gut animal, skin, remove head and tail, cut off paws and lower limb at joint, wash body cavity thoroughly. Carcase looks just like rabbit and can be roasted in similar way. Spit, brush with oil, season with tarragon. Cook until juices run clear when meat pierced with a knife.
Tastes like chicken.
To cook dog
Gut, skin and joint. The thighs are too fatty to make good eating, the flanks can be trimmed for steak, the rest can be stewed or fried at a pinch. Boiling the meat before roasting or frying removes fat and helps lessen the distinctive flavour. Sauce heavily or season with chillies.
Tastes like sour mutton.
The sad truth is that, apart from dog, one animal tastes much like another, and those that don’t taste like chicken mostly taste like beef, with the rest tasting like mutton. The secret of variety for meat is in the spicing. Vegetables, fruits, herbs have far wider variations in taste than the creatures that pick, browse or gnaw upon them. Even the way we describe the taste of meats other than the obvious ones is wrong. We say cat tastes like chicken when, had we been weaned on kitten stew, we’d say chicken tastes like cat.
‘To cook mice’ was my first recipe, written in careful lettering in a small notebook stolen from a master. I was ten and lied about the taste. It tasted more like chicken than beef because my palate was too inexperienced to make a better comparison. A cat and a dog changed my life. The cat came first, although the cat in this bit of the story is not that cat, simply a wild cat found trapped in a bush. But before this cat came a whipping. The old headmaster died the winter I was nine. The school was hushed into silence and slow movement. We knew in our common rooms and dorms that something was wrong because that afternoon’s lessons were cancelled and the doctor was seen entering the gates in his cart and was hurried up the main stairs by the old headmaster’s son himself.
The whole school attended his funeral.
The year I was ten no one died – and the year I turned eleven Dr Faure arrived. He taught Latin and theology and disliked me from the start. He disliked my face, my friendship with Emile, which he found suspicious, and he disliked that I was due to stay with Emile during the coming holiday when the terms of my attendance said I should remain at St Luce. He whipped me in his first week at school for being disgusting.
That is, he whipped me for eating a raw snail. Snails were common in the stews we were given and the masters ate snails boiled in butter and seasoned with garlic. This was different apparently. Because I took the snail from a pile of night soil collected from the school’s latrines and I ate the snail raw. He announced he would transfer that rawness from the snail to my buttocks. After Friday prayers and the blessing, I was called forward, climbed the steps to the dais, and told to drop my breeches and grip the far edge of a small table – position that left me stretched across the table with my behind exposed.
He used a switch of willow twigs, soaked overnight in a tub of brine that was carried in between two boys. The salt water makes the twigs subtle and acts as an astringent to stop the stripes going bad. The first blow made me jump so fiercely my knuckles cracked where I gripped the table. I was eleven. Everyone I knew in the world was watching in silence as I fought the pain that scalded up my body. Emile had told me to scream. He said people like Dr Faure liked you to scream. There would be fewer strokes and it would be over quicker if I screamed. Only my throat was too tight and the scream would not reach past my teeth.
The second blow was fiercer, the third so fierce that the wall of the assembly hall swam in and out of darkness. A whimper left my lips and I heard Dr Faure mutter in satisfaction. I kept silent for the fourth blow, helped by the darkness that washed over me the second it landed. The fifth had my mouth open in a silent scream and I would have howled my lungs out with the sixth had I not looked up and seen a girl staring at me through a crack in an almost closed door. Her dark hair was greasy, her eyes wide and shocked, her mouth slightly open. She was my age, perhaps a year older.
A girl, in a school of a hundred and fifty boys.
The sixth blow shocked me into a low moan and the headmaster stepped forward before Dr Faure could decide to launch another. When I looked up the girl was gone and the side door to the assembly room shut again. I was helped to my feet by the headmaster and put into the care of two of my classmates, who were told to take me to my classroom and report to his wife if I showed any sign of fever. Dr Faure glowered at the fuss and scowled at me so fiercely I grinned, which only made him angrier.
They clapped me into the classroom, the other boys. I was a hero, the boy who took six strokes of the birch and barely murmured. I had to drop my trews and stand there while classmate after classmate came to stare at the bleeding. It was the best, several agreed, beating the existing record for damage, which had been inflicted by ten strokes of the cane laid on with full force by the headmaster the summer before. The previous record holder spent a full minute with his face a hand’s breadth from my rear while the class waited in silence for his verdict. Magnanimously, he agreed this was better.