by Julia Stuart
She brought the box to the kitchen table, along with a glass of sweet white Château Marie Plaisance Bergerac. Lifting up the cardboard lid, she took out the first mille-feuille that Guillaume Ladoucette had chosen for her which she had naturally kept for herself because of its size. It wasn’t until several chews and swallows later that it struck Émilie Fraisse that Stéphane Jollis’s baking was far from its usual glorious standard. Inspecting it to determine what had gone wrong, she suddenly noticed something wedged inside. Pulling the cake apart, she retrieved a lump sodden with rum-laced crème pâtissière. When, eventually, she managed to unfold it, she found what appeared to be a letter. While the ink had bled and parts, including the signature, had just been swallowed, she could just about make out the words. And as she read, she realized that she had received her very first love letter, which was of such rapturous sentiment her heart soared higher than the buzzards above the scandalous ramparts. But what Émilie Fraisse couldn’t understand was how the baker could have loved her all these years and not given her the slightest inkling.
18
IT WAS WHEN GUILLAUME LADOUCETTE WALKED SLOWLY downstairs in his burgundy silk dressing gown with the same reluctance to face the world that he had felt for the last week and spotted Violette the infernal chicken sitting on the rim of his pot of cassoulet, her tail lifted over its contents in readiness, that he finally snapped. The bird matched his shriek of outrage with a squawk of similar volume and immediately took to the air, flapping round the kitchen in frantic ginger circles that sent the pans clattering into each other on their hooks and the row of Peugeot coffee grinders on the pale stone mantelpiece crashing to the floor.
Ducking down, he ran to open the back door, through which the bird immediately fled for the safety of the garden wall. After locking the door again, the horrified matchmaker rushed to the stove fearing that the family’s perpetual cassoulet, which had outlasted ten prime ministers, had been ruined in the flick of a tail feather. After examining the surface, he took a wooden spoon and slowly poked through the contents, peering underneath the pieces of duck, scrutinizing the pieces of Toulouse sausage, sifting through the haricot beans and lifting out the grey goose bone for closer inspection.
Yet the relief at finding the dish unsullied was not enough to calm Guillaume Ladoucette. Neither was the novelty of warm water in the municipal shower able to improve his mood. After returning home to dress, he headed immediately to the Bar Saint-Jus with as much determination as he could muster in a pair of supermarket leather sandals. Ignoring Sandrine Fournier, the mushroom poisoner, who approached him wanting to know whether he had found her another match, he walked straight up to Fabrice Ribou who was cleaning the coffee machine and announced: ‘Your chicken’s stalking me.’
On seeing his fury, something he had never witnessed before, the bar owner immediately offered him a seat and a drink on the house. He sat and listened as the matchmaker related how for the last six months he had suffered the indignity of peck marks in his butter and apricots, feathers in his pineau, tell-tale four-toed footprints in the talc on the bathroom floor and eggs in the most unacceptable of places. When he told him that the final straw had been the sight of Violette the infernal chicken about to defile his cassoulet, Fabrice Ribou immediately leapt to the bird’s defence, claiming that a creature of her nature couldn’t possibly be responsible for the man’s torment and that it was probably someone else’s. But the matchmaker reminded him that having grown up with chickens he was more than capable of telling them apart. And in any case, Violette’s unfortunate features were unmistakable.
‘She must be very fond of you,’ concluded the bar owner, leaning back in his chair. ‘She never comes anywhere near us.’
‘But I don’t want the affection of a chicken! I assure you her feelings are totally unrequited,’ replied the exasperated matchmaker.
When Fabrice Ribou suggested that he kept his back door shut so she couldn’t wander in, Guillaume Ladoucette leant towards him. Not only did he keep his back door shut at all times, he insisted with quiet rage, but for the last six months he had locked it again every time he had come through it. Neither was she getting in through the windows as he tied them in such a fashion that there was only the narrowest of openings through which a bird of her figure would be unable to squeeze. And when he opened them at night, he kept the shutters closed. How she was getting in was an utter mystery.
Fabrice Ribou sighed and brushed an invisible crumb off the table. While he couldn’t lock up the bird as, he reasoned, she too deserved her freedom, and nor was he responsible for whom she fell in love with, he would be willing to come round at some stage to shore up Guillaume Ladoucette’s defences. But the matchmaker, who rarely put his foot down, insisted that he came that instant.
Leaving the bar in the hands of his wife, Fabrice Ribou accompanied Guillaume Ladoucette home. After checking the locks on the front and back doors, he then asked the matchmaker to show him how he tied the windows and agreed that a chicken of Violette’s girth couldn’t possibly squeeze through the gap. They then went down to the cellar with its shelves of preserves and ancient farming utensils laced with cobwebs. While the bar owner looked around, Guillaume Ladoucette sat on the bottom step watching the man in silent fury. Not only was he incapable of admitting to having had his hair cut in the most preposterous of fashions by a rival barber, he thought, but such was his disregard for others he let his hooligan of a chicken roam around the village willy-nilly. Fabrice Ribou then announced that with no openings to the outside, it was impossible that the bird was getting in from the cellar. Taking a quick look at the astrological maps and planetary charts covering the walls, he then asked Guillaume Ladoucette what he should be doing about his melons. While the matchmaker thought the man didn’t deserve his expertise, he nevertheless replied that it was a most auspicious time to be planting them out, adding that he should make sure that he nipped off the stems that grew above the first two leaves only when the moon was passing in front of Leo.
As they trooped up to the attic, Guillaume Ladoucette pointed out the path the eggs took when rolling across the landing at night when he was trying to sleep. He then opened the airing cupboard in the bathroom and showed him a fresh black-and-white dropping on a pile of otherwise clean cotton underpants. As they turned the corner on the stairs, he picked up a ginger feather from the floor and held it silently underneath the bar owner’s nose. Once in the attic, Fabrice Ribou inspected the three tiny arch-shaped holes under the eaves which used to serve as entrances for pigeons at the time when they were kept for food. But the bar owner found that, like all the others in the village, the holes had been blocked off with a pane of glass decades ago.
‘That only leaves the chimneys,’ he concluded. The two men then headed back down to the kitchen. After Guillaume Ladoucette had picked up the coffee grinders from the floor, two of which had cracked, they peered up inside the blackened opening above the fireplace. After inspecting the one in the sitting room, Fabrice Ribou then announced that he would go and pick up some wire meshing and cover the tops of the stacks so that not even le père Noël with his wily ways could get down them.
Showing him out, the matchmaker thanked the bar owner for his help, unaware that it was rooted solely in his fear that Guillaume Ladoucette would put Violette in a pot before he did. The matchmaker had intended to spend the rest of the weekend behind closed doors, but Stéphane Jollis was insistent that he helped him at the Fête de la Saint-Jean celebrations that evening. Guillaume Ladoucette had tried to get out of it as the last thing he wanted to do was attend a social function frequented by the entire village as well as the inhabitants of the surrounding hamlets. But the baker was adamant, reminding him that he still owed him a favour.
To take his mind off the misery that lay ahead of him, Guillaume Ladoucette went outside to lose himself in the cultivation of vegetables. He thwacked his way across the grass to his shed, which he ran with the same rigour as a captain did his bridge, and pulled open the
table drawer. Inside, amongst a pile of seed packets arranged in alphabetical order, he found those for his winter radish, which would eventually be thinned out when the moon was in Virgo. As he started to prepare the earth next to a row of round courgettes, he heard the clattering of Fabrice Ribou’s ladder. And for the first time upon spotting Violette the infernal chicken warming her fluffy undercarriage on the garden wall, Guillaume Ladoucette smiled.
Up on the scandalous ramparts, Émilie Fraisse picked her way past the buckets of dried cement and stacks of old tiles abandoned by the previous owner when his delusion that he could make a difference had passed. Finding a spot in the shade, she sat down with her back against the stone wall. In her hand was the partly eaten letter, which, after having wiped off the crème pâtissière, she had left out in the sun to dry. As she read it yet again, it spoke of such rapturous affection that her heart blossomed. It was only upon remembering that it wasn’t from the man she had always loved that the petals dropped. As she sat looking at the discarded walnut shells left by squirrels, she wondered whether she could ever feel the same ardour for the baker as he did for her. But while his letter was such bewitching poetry, and she had the utmost admiration for his work as an artisan, she knew that his were not the arms in which she longed to shelter.
More aware than most that letters had to be answered, Émilie Fraisse decided to go and speak to Stéphane Jollis. After pulling out her ridiculous seventeenth-century shoes from underneath her four-poster Renaissance bed, she clopped her way down the spiral stone staircase with its lamentable repairs, opened the vast door and crunched her way across the drawbridge. But when she arrived at the bakery, in an antique tea-rose dress which appeared to have been shorn off at the knees, she found a queue reaching all the way to the spot where the village cross had been before the diocese deemed Amour-sur-Belle unworthy of it. When Émilie Fraisse asked a woman in the queue why so many people were waiting, she replied that a love note had been found in one of the baker’s little cakes, and while the sender’s identity ws uncertain, they were all hoping to find one of their own. The shocked châtelaine, who had told only two people of her discovery, both of whom had sworn to keep the matter to themselves, decided to return later.
It wasn’t Lisette Robert who had let slip about the curious correspondence in Émilie Fraisse’s mille-feuille. When the châtelaine knocked at her door asking for help in deciphering the words blurred by rum-laced crème pâtissière, the midwife had taken one look at the letter and instantly recognized the hand of Guillaume Ladoucette. However, her cursed inability to gossip had prevented her from pointing out the sender’s true identity. And when Émilie Fraisse eventually left, the midwife never spoke of it again and simply stored the intriguing episode in her cabinet of curiosities.
The person responsible for the enormous queue at the bakery was in fact Sandrine Fournier the mushroom poisoner. When news spread that Émilie Fraisse had made off with all the bakery’s little cakes, the assistant ambulant fishmonger had knocked at the château door in the hope of wresting a coffee éclair from her. When Émilie Fraisse explained that they had all gone, such was the woman’s disappointment that she immediately invited her in for an apéritif to console her. It was when Sandrine Fournier got up from the seat which slid open to hide the salt from the tax collector in order to admire the view from the window that she noticed the letter on the table. Despite the châtelaine’s bountiful imagination, she was unable to come up with an explanation for the soggy missive other than the truth, that she had found it in her mille-feuille. The assistant ambulant fishmonger told Madame Serre of the discovery while wrapping up her trout, and advised her to inspect her rum babas carefully as she didn’t want the old woman to choke to death before she had paid her monthly bill. Madame Serre, who had failed to catch the name of the recipient, changed it each time she repeated the tale, confident that eventually she would land on the correct one.
As Émilie Fraisse was making her way back up the rue du Château that did lead to the castle, Yves Lévèque pulled over to thank her again for the almond tartlets. However, it wasn’t courtesy that had made him stop, but a desire to put off as long as possible his rendezvous with Denise Vigier. He had just got as far as asking Émilie Fraisse about the provenance of the llama skeleton in the hall when he was obliged to move as Marcel Coussy had come up behind him with two bales of hay impaled on the front of his tractor. Driving out of the village, the dentist turned right at the field with the ginger Limousin cows that winked and headed for Sorges. As he entered the flat green valley with its tumbledown château on the hill, he tried to remember how on earth the matchmaker had talked him into meeting the repugnant grocer again. And, as he approached the village, he decided that it was time to give up his quest for love as it was proving even more painful than his confounded constipation.
After parking outside the church with its carved skull and trumpeting angels above the door, Yves Lévèque was disappointed to see a sign indicating the way to the Truffle Museum as it meant he would be unable to go home claiming that it was impossible to find. As he passed the charming stone houses with their closed blue shutters, the stone in his heart plummeted even further when he saw the grocer already standing in the shade of a plane tree outside the museum mopping herself with a handkerchief. Kissing her on each cheek from as far a distance as possible, he then complimented her on her atrocious dress, which was so devoid of allure he was in no doubt that it had come from the stall in the market.
Once inside, the pair stood together briefly at the kiosk until Denise Vigier could no longer resist the lure of the gift shop and darted off. When the woman behind the counter handed him two tickets, Yves Lévèque knew he was cornered and reluctantly his long, pale instruments of torture found their way into his pocket. Wanting to get the ordeal over as quickly as possible, he entered the exhibition devoted to the prized Périgord truffle, known as the black diamond, and walked up to the first panel. As he was reading that truffles had no roots, shoots, leaves or true fruits, which had often baffled scientists as to whether they belonged to the animal or vegetable kingdom, Denise Vigier came in holding a tiny paper bag containing a truffle-shaped nail brush and began to study a panel out of sequence. As she stood learning about how the celebrated fungus could be found in the circular bare patch of earth that surrounded certain trees, pitched forward by her colossal chest as if battling against driving rain, the dentist wondered again what in heaven’s name the matchmaker had been thinking of.
When the grocer disappeared to look at the exhibits round the corner, Yves Lévèque hung back and approached a cabinet of what appeared to be scorched brains in specimen jars. But as he peered at the 570-gram truffe du Périgord found in Sorges on 19 December 1995 by Monsieur Jean-Noël Combeau, all he could think about was the monstrous price Denise Vigier charged for her mushrooms compared to those in the supermarket.
As soon as he saw her returning, the dentist swiftly walked off to read about the train that ran twice a week on market days between Excideuil and Périgueux, which truffle-hunters boarded with full baskets, the aroma of which was so strong that the railway authorities were obliged to reserve them a compartment so the smell would not compete with the ladies’ scent. But his mind was transported to the grocer’s treacherous grandmother who had been found guilty of horizontal collaboration at a tribunal in 1944 and, after a swastika had been drawn on her forehead, given a ‘Number 44’ haircut in front of a spitting crowd in Périgueux.
Denise Vigier was well aware of what was still said about her grandmother behind her back. The grocer had never asked her the truth of it, or indeed the truth of anything, for her grandmother had died a year after the war giving birth to her only daughter. The doctors all agreed that her death was a result of the terrible assaults she had endured, which were of such severity they judged it best not to tell her husband. It was never known who had denounced her, as there had been so many contenders. Everyone in Amour-sur-Belle knew that the Nazi had come to her house for t
he hunting gun the first night, as he had fired it into the air as a warning. Everyone knew that he had come for the pig on the second night as they had been woken by its squeals. But no one knew that when he came for Denise Vigier’s grandmother the subsequent nights he had held a knife to the teenager’s throat to silence her whimpers. Nor did anyone ever know about the scissors she had plunged between his shoulder blades one night when he was on top of her, where they remained to this day, below nine feet of earth in the garden behind the family shop.
Yves Lévèque was just about to suggest to the grocer that it was time to leave when suddenly one of the panels caught his eye. He retraced his steps and started to read about how Venus, when mourning the death of Adonis, was consoled by Amour telling her that a new fruit had been created in her garden that would cause eagerness in couples, and that it would be attributed with Adonis’ virility. Amour then buried Adonis’ body in a field where it germinated and converted into black truffles. Once harvested, he served them for supper at Venus’ house when Mars was invited. While Venus refused to eat them, Mars finished the lot. The blonde Venus was never so beautiful the following morning and Mars beamed with utter satisfaction.
