Remembrance of Things Paris

by Gourmet Magazine Editors

  You could linger all day on the terrace before Closerie des Lilas over a one-franc-fifty cup of coffee or a three-franc milky elixir called Pernod and see Salle Bullier hugging its memories of the Second Empire directly in the line of march of a heroic statue of Marshal Ney swinging a sword and shouting over his shoulder for shadows to follow as he leads that last great charge that is hopeless and never ended.

  A bunch of violets to throw at his feet or send to the sad-eyed lady at the next table cost a franc.

  A plate of borscht was two-francs-fifty in Dominique’s on rue Bréa, and five hundred at the Schéhérazade, in Montmarte, but under the regime of the temperamental old general who was headwaiter at Dominique’s there was a sporting element to dining there which made it doubly attractive. When you ordered borscht, you never knew what he would bring you.

  On the basis that a gentleman is judged by his French, a tourist’s finances by his nationality, a lady by her face, and a general by who exiled him, the pretentious Russian cabarets on Montmarte employed a sliding price scale entirely at the discretion of the waiter. On taking a seat at a table you were charged forty francs for almonds before ordering anything.

  You could get a room fit to walk out of in striped trousers and carrying a cane for anything from twenty-five francs a day to ten thousand, but I did not pay anything. I enjoyed free rent in the apartment of a seventy-year-old prince who called me fils and regarded me as an inexpensive insurance policy, carried to assume responsibility for Maggy, his twenty-three-year-old mistress, should his estranged wife, a famous Cuban beauty with a sugar fortune, ever swoop down on the place with her lawyer.

  I did not mind that. Being able to support a girl like Maggy was pure flattery, as far as I was concerned. Besides, living with Charles afforded an excellent opportunity of acquiring by osmosis impeccable manners, erudition of sorts, and an endless repertoire of fine stories. In brief, Charles taught me how a gentleman should live. Whether or not either of us would ever be able to afford it was another matter.

  We lived on a short street near the Lutetia Hotel in an apartment that was small but had a certain slovenly elegance about it.

  Tags from the Jockey Club, the Club des Cent, and half a dozen others that he had not frequented since his wife left him and his dues lapsed hung from the binocular case to which he had lent distinction in those days as he raced horses at Longchamp.

  A ponderous oil painting of one of his ancestors stood on the floor because the ceiling was too low to hang it. A gun and a sword leaned against the wall in a corner. Attached to the gun was a whistle. If he touched either, Chaupette, an aged and woebegone cocker spaniel, went crazy. Then a restlessness would come over both of them who would never hunt again.

  After a time my dinner conversation, when I contrived to get invited out, consisted of anecdotes from Maxim’s and Longchamp, and scandals that took place at the turn of the century. The menus I knew by heart and recipes I had memorized would have shamed Lucullus.

  Mornings we had coffee, cheap Champagne from a Nicolas wine store on the corner, and a brown sack full of ladyfingers for breakfast, accompanied by stories that were wonderful, of meals and wines that had cost thousands.

  The prince had a small group of cronies of his own age who for years had moved in similar, respective cycles as regularly as planets in their prescribed courses. Coffee and croissants in the morning, a particular point where their paths touched for apéritifs before shooting off in divers directions toward an ultimate déjeuner. Afternoons and evenings were designed by a gentleman’s deity to be spent over liqueurs and coffee after a certain age. It was a life that was leisurely and dignified and gracious.

  At any hour any one of them knew where to find the others.

  Of the five of us that drifted of an afternoon toward an appointed bistro with its stone-topped tables, four had an average age of seventy-one. The next youngest was your servant, twenty-four, the most attentive listener at the table and probably the one whose opinions were most respectfully deferred to, because at least they were flattering.

  Charles and I generally arrived first, since we were nearest. Besides, we had nothing else to do after Maggy disappeared to go to the hairdresser’s or to some other vague appointment.

  While waiting for the others, Charles told stories ranging from his grandfather’s fight to save the empire that famous Sunday of September fourth, after Sedan, when the Leftists shouted down the assembly, to the most intimate details of the untimely demise of Félix Faure. His story of Boulanger, le brave général, whose love for Madame de Bonnemain was greater than ambition or party or la patrie, may not be the published version but it would make better reading.

  Baron Roodenbeke, a jolly little red-nosed Fleming, had to come all the way from No. 5, rue Chomel for these sessions, so he was sometimes late.

  Commandant de Marolles lived in Versailles, so he came only once a week. His army post had been in Peking at the time of the Boxer uprising, but he was still meticulously addressed by his rank.

  An old gentleman who lived over near Les Invalides and another from a side street near La Madeleine were the other members of our circle.

  Along about three o’clock I imagined them eyeing a clock in the respective retreats they maintained for collecting souvenirs and sleeping, preparatory to sallying forth and converging on the shabby café where they did their living. Here all conversations were prefaced with “Do you remember—?,” and the amenities strictly observed.

  The other old men knew about Maggy, but the only time I ever heard her mentioned was when Baron Fouquier, of the Académie des Oenophiles, joined us one day and observed, “I can’t see why Charles goes on with Maggy; she is stupid and she has no charm.”

  With a deprecatory wave of his hands that expressed complete incomprehension, he added, “A man marries anybody; but a mistress, she has to have something!” It was beyond him.

  Whether the others had a Maggy or not I never knew, but Charles took a great deal of pleasure in divulging nothing to either Maggy or his old cronies about the other. It gave him the satisfaction of feeling that he was leading a double life, in a way, and I suppose they did the same.

  Over a ballon of red wine or a tasse de café, one of them would set a course.

  “Do you remember the hunt, Prince, in the forêt de X, in 1905? You were master of the chasse. Remember?”

  “Oui, oui, oui, oui! La duchesse d’Uzès était là! It was like this—”

  Charles folded his hands over his mouth and, ever so softly at first, started sounding subdued approach to a hunting horn.

  “To-torro, to-torro, to-torro-oo!”

  “Yes, it was like that.” Baron Roodenbeke had a faraway look in his eyes.

  “And now the deer is in the water,” Charles continued, a little louder this time, “to-torro, to-torro, toroooo.”

  Between renditions of the horn, Charles paused to recall the turn they had taken and the landmark marking it. By now, completely carried away in the excitement of the hunt, his sounding could be heard all over the café.

  A few red-faced gentlemen at the bar and a sprinkling of peaceful clients investing tables looked up tolerantly from drinks or a current issue of L’Illustration but saw nothing unusual in four old men rising up and down in their chairs with the movement of men on horses as Charles folded his hand over his mouth and bellowed on an imaginary horn, “To-torro, to-torro, toroooo!”

  They were starry-eyed and oblivious to the rest of the world.

  About the time the last detail of the kill was exhausted, someone would hear a newsman calling “Paris-Soir!” on the street and dispatch me with five sous to buy a copy. The others sipped wine and rested while Baron Roodenbeke read the headlines aloud.

  There was never a reading of that paper that did not lead into another story. The obituary column provided most of them; what England and Germany and the rest of the world were doing did not make sense, so they did not bother to read about it.

  A hush fell on the t
able the day the Baron solemnly announced that Boni de Castellane was dead.

  The loss of any name known to clinking glasses and the cancan at Maxim’s leaves a gap in the lives of old men, but Boni de Castellane’s passing meant more than that.

  He was one of the pivots that memories and stories swung on. He was not as other men; he was a legend and a spirit, a symbol, like Tour Eiffel and swallow boats on the Seine. He was used to reckon dates by. Now only Tour Eiffel remained.

  They had drifted away from him in his later years, like everyone else, but when he died they regretted it.

  The man I have pictured Boni de Castellane as being since that afternoon was a dashing young noble who laughed and drank and dined. He was Paris’s sweetheart, born to be tossed roses by women on balconies, to wear high red heels and die young from too much Olympian affection. Their eyes lit up as they talked about him.

  He never squandered life in sleeping. At night he danced and drank Champagne. Instinctively you associated him with duels in Parc au Prince, Bois de Boulogne bridle paths, and dinners where men wore their decorations and women their tiaras without fear of inciting a revolution. He represented a way of life where men ate well, drank well, and knew how to live.

  Also his was the gift of going through large sums of money with grace and rapidity. But it was taken for granted that Boni de Castellane deserved the best. That it was a shame to see such a man hampered for want of money was the opinion of everybody, including his tailors. Before long he was in debt for a fortune.

  According to gossip, his creditors formed a corporation and pooled enough to send him to America to look for an heiress, as their only means of retrieving their investment.

  Be that as it may, he arrived in New York in a day when mere millionaires were regarded by the Four Hundred much as middle-class Britishers in Hong Kong look at a Eurasian, and in a whirlwind courtship he won and married Anna Gould.

  The bride’s dowry, stated to run into three millions, was, so her father believed, sewed up to protect the principal; but in the years that followed, the arrival of Boni de Castellane’s yacht in any port in Europe was cause for more excitement among resident nobility than the Polar Star of the Czar of Russia.

  On the edge of Bois de Boulogne he built a home for his wife, a copy of Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon, out of red marble, and he amassed art objects like a looting mogul. His taste was exquisite; landscape gardeners moved trees as though they were chessmen and changed the whole grounds to suit his plans for a party. Carpets of out-of-season flowers to match Anna’s gowns were the order. He was a snob in the grand manner, ce sacré jeune comte de Castellane.

  Naturally, Anna loved it while it lasted, but as Charles philosophically pointed out, Oenone has received a great amount of wholly unmerited sympathy through the centuries, simply because Paris ran off with Helen.

  Had Paris been a penniless young ne’er-do-well without a sou in his pockets, instead of prince of the horse-taming Trojans with a father like Priam and a brother like Hector to whom he could always take a woman home, she would have left him without a tear and Homer would not have given him a paragraph.

  One day Boni de Castellane’s money ran out, and, so the story goes, Gould wrath and indignation rose to high heaven. Parental investigation disclosed, among other things, a tidy sum spent to provide annuities for some half dozen ex-mistresses.

  The Goulds did not understand the code of a gentleman, that was all.

  When he was young and impecunious, and their time might have been more profitably spent elsewhere, these women had been kind to Boni de Castellane. He was only a handsome, futureless young vicomte then.

  About the time he was at his peak they were poor and passé, and he felt responsible for them. Their affection for him had amounted to improvidence in a way. In their declining years he took this into consideration and showed his gratitude.

  Nevertheless, Anna, too young and headstrong to realize that a woman is better off sticking to a likable man she has tried and found wanting than being disappointed in a new one, divorced him and married his cousin, the Duc de Talleyrand.

  Boni moved into a modest house on rue de Berri and, without the large sums necessary to his way of life, gradually dropped out of sight. Soon the art objects and paintings began to go. Of those who had known his brilliant dinners, only a few old servants remained, but these went down with their master, in the grand manner. They wore livery to the last, shiny at facings and elbows but with gold buttons bearing the Castellane arms as proudly as ever.

  He had a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair, but each day, carefully dressed, meticulously groomed, and with waxed mustache, he was wheeled to a window where for years he sat in a chair and looked out on rue de Berri, watching Paris pass.

  Sometimes a heavily veiled woman came to see him, but rarely a man. When the art objects and paintings were gone, dealers started filling his home with new ones, which they brought newly rich clients around to buy. It was worth something to see the inside of that house and be able to point to a vase and say, “It came from the Castellane collection.”

  Boni’s observations on his cousin are said to have been bitter those years; what Anna thought, if anything, about the dark house on rue de Berri is unknown, but I have always had a sneaking suspicion that anything, after life with Boni de Castellane, must have been boring and humdrum. His chef must have thought so, too, for he stayed with his master.

  The New York girl who had risen from vicomtesse to duchess and princess still had her money, her titles, and a pink marble palace in the Bois de Boulogne, which became more conspicuous year by year as monstrosities of an opposite extreme sprang up around it to make it appear like some hangover of a bygone age, as indeed it was. The shuttered house on rue de Berri was only a few minutes away by taxi.

  As the old prince and the baron discussed the relative latitudes of both residences in terms of happiness, they gravely agreed on one thing: We would have to go to the funeral. Everyone remembered then.

  So, in due course of time, along with many others, we traversed a narrow street and passed through the shopping district that has crowded in on the old church of Saint-Philippe-de-Roule.

  Its somber pillars were covered with black drapes on which the Castellane arms were embroidered in gold thread, and aside from the depressed feeling a church always gives me, I felt a wistful regret for having been born too late. The old man beside me was mourning his youth; Boni de Castellane was only a rather imposing knickknack in it, a symbol of impeccable taste and wines and dinners.

  He pointed out people as they entered. Paris and the great names of France came to the funeral. It sounded like a roll from the pages of Almanach de Gotha. Marshal Lyautey was present, and Paderewski.

  Charles’s underlip protruded like a pouting boy’s as he recalled memories through which the man in the coffin surrounded by ugly wreaths had walked: the dinner where Duc de la Rochefoucauld met Mattie Harris, Countess de Montesquieu’s parties, and riding to hounds at Gros Bois.

  Baron Fouquier took his place at the left of us, and Charles was jarred from his reverie. In a whisper more carrying than a shout he complained to me, “Regardez. He has the rosette of the Legion of Honor, and I haven’t even the ribbon. I don’t know how he trafficked it. When we were young, he arranged the rendezvous with actresses for all of us, tous les ducs et tous les princes. Castellane and Rochefoucauld and all of us. He took our cards to their dressing rooms—and now, he has the Légion d’honneur and I have nothing.”

  His lower lip protruded still farther and his words trailed off. As he finished speaking, a little old lady walked down the aisle and quietly seated herself toward the front, near the family.

  Her face was white with powder and she wore a high lace collar. Her knitted gloves were darned at the fingertips, and you pictured her stepping out of an electric car steered by a handle. Charles knew nothing about her and neither did anyone else, apparently. When the rest filed out to go to the cemetery, the frail old
woman stayed behind in the church. I suppose she had no way of going, and no one offered to take her.

  Boni de Castellane’s funeral provided conversation for days in our bistro as the old men talked about Marshal Lyautey and the Duc de Broglie and la Marquise de Clement Tonnerre and everyone else.

  The Duchess of Talleyrand, née Anna Gould of New York, did not come. She had a cold, so she stayed home in a pink Petit Trianon where the garden was never changed on a whim anymore.

  Major Pollock, of La Fayette Escadrille, made a blasé observation to a group of Americans that Boni de Castellane’s death marked the passing of an era that in its decadence had the sweet, heavy odor of tuberoses. This was carried back to the café as my contribution, a sort of report on foreign reaction to the obsequies.

  The only part of the whole proceeding to have any effect whatever on Maggy, who was a hopeless romantic and an avid reader of cheap novels, was the story of the unknown little lady with hatpins in her hat and gloves with the fingertips darned. It appealed to her, the idea of a frail old woman in clothes dug out of a lavender-scented trunk, coming to put the period to the last line of her own story of Boni de Castellane.

  Maggy was sure it must have been one of the actresses he pensioned off. Charles seemed to feel that his old friend had let him down by establishing a precedent he could never live up to, which made it rather bad taste to pursue the subject with Maggy.

  For my part, never having had an affair with an actress, nor any prospects of putting one out to grass, if I did, I preferred to think of her as some ordinary bourgeoise housewife who had the beauty of youth once and nothing else; and for a brief space of time, probably only a night, as his romances were reputed to have been reckoned, Boni de Castellane at least pretended to love her. Maybe he did at the time. And forever after, that memory was her high spot.

  I liked to imagine her raising children for some minor official of the Crédit Lyonnais, while reading of Boni de Castellane’s marriage and cruises and parties; following, in some dowdy, middle-class parlor, the down-graph of his divorce and stroke and death notice.