The Last Banquet (32 page)

Emile dies in the summer of 1774, the year Louis XVI is crowned, and I am not invited to his funeral, although I am his oldest friend for all we parted badly. Charlot is invited and refuses. I have no idea if Jerome receives an invitation too. He has stopped writing to me so I must assume rumours of Hélène’s near-disgrace have reached him. Unless he is offended by Laurant’s rejection of a place at court.

Charlot, of course, regards himself as above scandal. He keeps Hélène with him, introducing her to the sons of his friends and followers. By the time Georges finishes burying his father, my daughter is married. Her husband is a diplomat, half French and half Austrian, a baron through his father, due to inherit a chateau and the title of comte when his mother dies, since she is her family’s sole remaining heir. Charlot petitions the king for the boy to be allowed to adopt the title early and this is given. My daughter became a comtesse and pregnant in the same month. She lives in London where her husband represents French interests in this war between our two countries, and writes infrequently. When she does, it is always about her children and in the most literal of terms. Her son has learnt to ride, he has learnt to write, he is learning Latin and English. Her daughter is having dancing lessons. She sends me silhouettes of both, black and anonymous, cut-out profiles of children I’ve never seen and maybe never will, since she moved to London two months before giving birth and has not returned home or visited France since.

1777
Ben Franklin Visits

T
wo years, possibly three after Hélène moves to London, an American diplomat arrives at my chateau and introduces himself as an old friend of Hélène’s husband, the son-in-law I’ve met only once. He describes the count as an intelligent enough boy – and smiles the smile of old men amused by the presumption of those younger. Benjamin Franklin looks less heroic than his engravings, older and more portly, but I recognise him instantly.

We’ve met once already – in Paris, the year before I went to Corsica – at the Hôtel de Saulx, Charlot’s house in the city. Then he wore a powdered wig, curled heavily at the sides, small spectacles, a white linen shirt with frilled cuffs, a stock tied neatly around his neck, and a powder-blue frock coat with heavily turned back cuffs held in place with braid-edged lapels and gilt buttons. He could have been a successful financier or a provincial governor. Instead he was an agent for the American colonies, based in London and briefly visiting Paris. This afternoon he wears a brown coat without braid, the simplest of shirts and a fur hat with a tail falling down the back. I know him for one of new congressional commissioners to the French court.

‘Mr Franklin . . .’

‘Monsieur le marquis.’

We bow to each other and his eyes flick beyond me and I turn to see Tigris padding towards us, her paws huge on the gravel that fills the circle in front of the chateau where the coaches turn. ‘So it’s true,’ he says. ‘You keep wild animals.’

‘She was born in a cage.’

He looks at the chateau, looks back at a coach drawing up behind his then drops his hand to Tigris’s head and tugs her ears. I’m impressed.

‘Weren’t we all?’ he says. ‘Weren’t we all?’

Digging his hand into a crude leather satchel that looks as if stitched by wild Indians, he pulls out a rock-like object. ‘I thought you might like this.’ Mr Franklin has brought me an elephant molar the size of a large grapefruit and heavy as lead.
From the Americas,
he tells me. I look at him and he smiles at my expression and I know he’s been waiting to savour this moment. He tells me the elephant’s tooth is one of several found near his house in Philadelphia. Proof that there were elephants in America before the Flood.

‘Unless something else killed them,’ I say.

He glances around him, but his coachman is looking at one of my maids, and everyone else is looking at the young black woman climbing from the second carriage. She is young and full-figured, dressed in the latest Paris style. ‘What but the Flood? he begins, half distracted by his own companion.

I shrug my shoulders. ‘Who knows what killed the elephants in the Americas? But it’s an interesting question, don’t you agree? Perhaps all animals once existed everywhere. Perhaps Noah’s ark was less successful than God hoped . . .’

He smiles at me. ‘Let me introduce Celeste to you. She knows a lot of Creole recipes. You’ll find her interesting.’

‘Monsieur le marquis.’ The black girl curtsies deeply enough for me to see her cleavage and looks up from under long lashes, but her eyes flicker and I know the presence of Tigris at my side is unnerving her. Ben Franklin mutters something and she nods doubtfully.

‘Take a turn in the garden with me,’ I say.

‘Later,’ says a voice behind me. Manon smiles to soften her words. ‘They’ve been travelling all day. No doubt they want to wash, freshen themselves. You can show Tigris off later.’ She smiles at the girl, and says to her, ‘Once the tiger knows you’re friends with my husband she’ll be friends with you too. Tigris can’t see, but her sense of smell is excellent and somehow she always knows what’s going on. I’m afraid we have quite a lot of animals. You’ll find flamingos and an old hippo in the lake, a giraffe in the lower paddock. Just look for the stripped vegetation. We have a gazelle as well, too old to jump its fences. And parrots in most of the trees. If you’re unlucky my husband will give you parrot stew for supper.’

‘I like parrot stew,’ Celeste says.

Manon’s mouth quirks and she nods. ‘Then you’ll get on famously. Come inside. I’ll have the servants find you a room.’ Celeste glances at Mr Franklin, who nods, and she follows my wife up the stairs and disappears into the cool of the hall, leaving me with my visitor.

‘Your mistress?’ I ask.

‘Not mine,’ he says. Something in the way he says it suggests there’s a story wrapped up inside his denial, and a twinkle in his eye says we might get to it later. But there is, it seems to me, a calculation behind the twinkle. Just as there is a calculation in the way his clothes have changed in the years since we last met. If I had not seen him in his powder-blue frock coat in Charlot’s Parisian drawing room, smiling at the men and softly, carefully, talking his way inside the petticoats of a baroness known for her virtue, I would believe today’s brown coat and simple shirt, fur hat and sturdy shoes indicated a man who came straight from the wild American frontier to plead with France for help fighting his colony’s English masters. Mr Franklin asks what I’m thinking and I tell him.

He smiles, and flutters a liver-spotted hand towards my faded frock coat and old-fashioned wig. ‘We wear what we have to wear to play the parts that we need to play. A man like you understands this.’

I’m flattered at his ‘man like me’, as I’m meant to be, and ask about Celeste, who is at a window with Manon looking down across the gardens. I see the black girl’s gaze sweep across us and then stop on Tigris. She says something to Manon, who laughs.

‘Your wife was not noble,’ Mr Franklin says.

‘You heard?’ This is only half a question.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘How long is it now?’

Since we married? ‘Thirteen years. Long enough to know we’re happy.’

He considers this, and tickles Tigris’s ears while he does, drawing a rumbling purr from deep in her throat. A sound that fills his face with sudden and real happiness. I decide in that second that I like the man for all that I don’t really trust him or know why he has brought his coach south simply to reacquaint himself with me after all these years. My fame, which is slight, is for recipes, strange farming methods and an obsession with food. Court politics have long since ceased to have any interest. Those I leave to Jerome and Charlot. And the kind Emile once practised? They bore me. Emile’s friends don’t want to open the cage and return the animals to the wild, they simply want to change who owns the zoo.

‘No falls from grace?’

‘One each and both regretted.’

‘So it’s possible,’ he says, and it takes me a moment to work out what he means, and another to frame my reply, which is that it is perfectly possible for a man to be content with only one woman if it’s the right woman.

‘And he’s the right man,’ Mr Franklin says.

I’m not sure if he means the right man for the woman or the kind of man who can be content with only one woman at a time. He tells me – and I am uncertain if he’s tying this to my fall from grace or not – that he writes on occasion to Pasquale Paoli, who mentioned that in the last days of the Corsican republic my life was saved by the pleas of a young girl I’d save from death some years earlier.

Swallowing my shock, I tell him that at best I saved Héloïse from a broken leg, and he nods as if I’ve just confirmed something he’s suspected for a long time. ‘Call me Ben,’ he adds, before walking with me to see my gazelle, who looks at us with tired eyes and is so old she has trouble keeping her massive sweep of horns steady.

‘She’ll die soon,’ I say.

‘And then?’

‘I’ll eat her, probably slow roasted given her age. Maybe boiled and then slow roasted if the meat looks really tough when I come to prepare her.’

‘You should talk to Celeste. She has eaten snake and alligator, puma and possum. She tells me she knows recipes that mix snake with chicken.’

‘And I’ve mixed snake with cat. It’s an old Chinese recipe,’ I tell him, seeing his expression, and we walk on, taking a long turn around the paddock with the giraffe and then back along the edge of the lake where the pygmy hippo floats as quietly as a log, his nostrils only just above the water and his eyes watching us pass. I’m proud of the hippo. It was almost dead when it arrived, and though I was tempted to let it die, my job as Lord Master of the Menagerie was to keep it alive for as long as nature would let it live. So maybe I was proud of myself for not giving in to temptation. Although it’s easier not to give into temptation when one’s kitchen has a ready supply to hand of the exotic and near-dead.

Unbuttoning the flap on his breeches, Ben Franklin pisses against a tree without feeling the need to retire into the undergrowth or turn away. I’m not sure if it’s affectation or he really doesn’t consider it a matter of shame. The man interests me. He’s probably used to that. As we walk back to the chateau he tells me more about Celeste. She can quote Voltaire, and talks of the tedium of Versailles with all the boredom of a French marquise. So far as Ben can tell there is no difference between her and any other woman he has befriended, apart from the colour of her skin and the darkness of her eyes. He’s begun to wonder if our natures are a product of how we’re treated rather than to whom we’re born . . .

He tells me openly that his father was a soap-maker and the son of a blacksmith, his grandmother on his mother’s side an indentured servant little better than a slave. That he grew up poor and knows the value of thrift, and that the years he wore silks did nothing to change his early life. Nor would he want it changed since the values and virtues it instilled outweigh any hardship. He looks at me to see how I take this. So I tell him my parents starved to death when I was small and I grew up in a school for the poor; that my title and the castle behind us I owe to having killed a wolf and travelled downriver under an upturned boat. Had those boyish adventures not happened I would, at best, probably now be dead on some forgotten battlefield. Had le Régent not found me I would never have gone to St Luce. For reasons that escape me, rescuing a trapped cat and her kittens from a thorn bush at the expense of my own skin appeals to the vicome and helps convince the colonel that I’m right for what vicome d’Anvers has in mind. Our lives are built almost entirely on a foundation of events colliding.

Ben smiles, and announces that that bon mot alone makes his trip worthwhile. He hopes we will have many more conversations in the week he would like to be allowed to stay, but adds that we should probably make our way back to the chateau to see how the marquise and Celeste are doing. He says one other thing, as we return, that gives me the frisson that comes from meeting for the first time an idea one has not had the intelligence to think for oneself. He touches briefly on the political uses of taste; not just in fashion or furniture but in wine and food. About how taste defines and separates the sexes and the classes and the cultures and the races. I had been lucky to fall so in love with Roquefort, and to do so immediately. The development of taste is like learning to read – and we live in a world where we deny most of those around us access to its alphabet.

A footman opens the door as we approach, and I usher Ben into my house and realise Manon has left the door to the small drawing room open so she can hear us return. She smiles at him, shoots me a glance that says
Where have you been?
, and tells him she’ll show him to his chamber herself. It is late, he’s travelled long distances and I have still to discover why he is in my house. I am delighted, however, to play host to a man widely described as ‘the First American’
.
The Americas claim to have no aristocrats. But this man is, despite his birth, among nature’s natural nobility.

The next morning Celeste knocks at my study door and announces that Mr Franklin has said I might want to hear about the food of her childhood and asks if she can come in. She sits on the very edge of a chair and looks surprisingly nervous for someone willing to describe themselves as bored with life at Versailles. Maybe it’s Tigris, curled around the corner of my desk in her usual position, her head heavy on her great front paws, who makes her nervous. She receives my suggestion that we swap chairs with gratitude, and she takes my seat and I take hers, leaning against the unfamiliar side of the desk as I begin to make my notes. Her French is heavily accented and mixed with African words. She’s not black, she tells me, she’s mulatto
.
Her mother was black, her father is an Arcadian octaroon – one part Iroquois – who moved south with the other French-speakers when the Treaty of Paris gave the Atlantic coast of Canada to the English-speakers.

‘You know more about your family than I know about mine.’