by Peter Mayle
The last stage before lighting up is optional. Should you remove the band—that miniature work of art just below the head—or should you leave it on? When it was first invented (credit is often given to Gustave Bock, a Dutchman), the band had a practical purpose, which was to prevent the outer wrapper from coming adrift as the cigar heated up. Nowadays, with more reliable gumming methods, the risk of losing the wrapper is very slight, so it comes down to a question of aesthetics. Do you prefer your cigars to be decorated or totally nude? Either is fine, and only pendants make a fuss about it.
So you’ve rolled and you’ve squeezed and you’ve sniffed and you’ve cut, and now you are ready to light up. Once again, a certain finesse is required, and certain laws of nature should be observed. The most important rule is never to use a petrol lighter unless you like the taste of petrol fumes. Similarly, don’t be tempted to lean across the dinner table and gaze into the décolletage of your beloved as you light up from a candle. Wax and tobacco don’t mix. Use a match. When you have the cigar in your mouth, bring the flame close to the end (about one third of an inch away) and rotate it so that you make an even burn that starts at the rim and spreads to the centre.
You can now settle back and take the first luxurious puff. There is a richness of texture to cigar smoke that makes inhaling quite unnecessary: it is enough just to hold the smoke in the mouth for a few seconds before blowing it gently toward the heavens. And as you watch it hanging in the air, thick and blue-grey and aromatic, you can easily imagine that what you are smoking was hand-rolled on a Cuban maiden’s long brown thigh. (I doubt that this delightful practice still exists in the cigar factories, but a man can dream.)
“The cigar smoker,” wrote Marc Alyn, “is a calm man, slow and sure of his wind.” You will never see an experienced cigar man taking quick, agitated puffs. He is concentrating—albeit in a relaxed and sometimes even trance-like fashion—on the pleasure of the moment. This mood of leisurely well-being that is induced by a good cigar is perhaps its greatest attraction. It even has social benefits, because this mild euphoria makes heated argument almost impossible. Nobody but a clod would waste a £25 Havana by waggling it around for emphasis or stubbing it out in anger.
Despite a good cigar’s tranquillising effect, it doesn’t kill conversation. Quite the contrary, since it encourages contented and appreciative listeners. (Why do you think cigars are handed out at the end of formal dinners? Obviously, to render the audience benign, no matter how long and terrible the speeches are.) Stories told over a cigar are funnier, observations are more profound, pauses are comfortable, the cognac is smoother, and life is generally rosier. An hour with a good cigar and a couple of friends is a vacation from life’s nonsense.
Of course, there is a right and a wrong way to wear cigars, and anyone serious about them will do well to observe the following rules:
We have all seen short men with small faces trying unsuccessfully to look at ease with a cigar that is several sizes too big for them. It doesn’t work. Choose a cigar that fits your face, from the small panatela (about four and a half inches long) to the double corona (between eight and nine inches). The regular corona, at five and a quarter inches, is probably the best bet for anyone with a conventionally sized face.
Don’t keep a cigar in your mouth. It makes speech difficult and the end wet.
There is no need to invest in a cigar holder. Smoking a Havana through a holder is a disappointing experience, rather like drinking good claret from a Styrofoam cup.
Although King Edward VII is supposed to have said that the way to deal with a cigar was to pierce it with a lance, light it and wave it in the air, it is best to avoid grand gestures. You will lose the ash prematurely and constitute a fire hazard to your companions.
The cost of cigar-induced pleasure will obviously depend on how often and how seriously you take it. If all you want is an occasional treat, it’s best to buy your cigars one at a time from a reputable merchant. It doesn’t make sense to buy a box if you anticipate smoking a mere half a dozen cigars a year, because dry heat or air-conditioning will spoil the rest. Annual expenditure, therefore, is unlikely to be more than about £100. A regular smoker, however, can easily spend this much in a week, and a passionate smoker will have to add on the price of board and lodging. Good cigars need to be kept as carefully as good wines.
The climate preferred by cigars is warm—between 65 and 75 degrees—with a humidity of 75 percent. Few of us live permanently in these conditions, so they have to be artificially maintained in a humidor. There are, it’s true, simple and inexpensive humidors that will do a perfectly adequate job tucked away in a corner of your living room. But sooner or later reports will reach you of a cigar Utopia, where the conditions are not just adequate but perfect. Needless to say, the inconvenience and extra costs involved in keeping your cigars in such a place add substantially to their appeal. And so you find yourself going to one of the great cigar houses, such as Dunhill in New York, to reserve space in a humidor room.
Not only will your private stock be kept in the best possible conditions outside of Cuba, but you will have the immense satisfaction, when that young smart-ass in the next office wants to show you his new Porsche, of excusing yourself as follows: “I’m sorry,” you say, “but I have to go and visit my cigars.”
15
House Guests
My wife is incurably hospitable, and we live in Provence. This is a disastrous combination if, like me, you feel the occasional need for solitude and regular hours, an orderly life, time to read, and all the other advantages of burying yourself in the country. I have found that burial doesn’t work. Someone is always arriving to exhume me.
When we first moved here, we were given a prophecy of things to come in the form of a visitors’ book. It is becoming dog-eared and wine-stained, its pages filled with often incoherent remarks about the plumbing, the food, and the general level of service and customer satisfaction. I looked through the book at the end of last year. Between the beginning of October and Christmas, we had the house to ourselves for a total of ten days. Ten days without guests, and that was our off-peak, out-of-season period. I can’t begin to describe what the pages from the summer months look like.
This is not a complaint, but I hope it will serve to establish my credentials as someone who is qualified, or maybe even over-qualified, to comment on the joys of sharing your home with a procession of visitors. No doubt there are lessons to be learned here, even if you live in a fourth-floor walk-up with only a couch to offer in the way of accommodation.
When guests occupy a large part of daily life, there is every reason to include them in the domestic budget along with the other regular expenses, such as liquor and laundry. And naturally, when you consider the guest as an item of expenditure, it is difficult to avoid applying the same criteria that you would to any significant investment, such as a car. So you begin to look at servicing costs, miles per gallon (of wine) and value for money, as well as more technical details like the ability to start in the morning. These will vary; all guests are not created equal.
At the top of the list, underscored in red and marked with a health warning, is the guest who is bound to you by ties of blood, with a permanent claim on your spare room and visiting rights to your most comfortable chair, the cigars you were saving for Christmas and your stock of malt whiskey. It is, of course, that privileged figure, the Relative, who might be an impoverished cousin from Arkansas, a sporting uncle on the run from his bookie, a mother-in-law, a recently divorced brother—the precise form of the relationship doesn’t matter, because the behavioural pattern is always the same. It must have something to do with genes.
Relatives don’t arrive at your home; they invade it. They kick off their shoes and unpack expansively all over the living room floor. They pounce on your phone as though they have been starved of contact with the outside world. They have selective vision that excludes dirty dishes and empty bottles. And yet… all must be forgiven. They’re family, and y
ou can be sure that they will never understay their welcome. (Even if they might occasionally mutter about treating the place like a hotel, God forbid you should be so tactless as to mention a checkout time.) Experienced and cunning as I like to think I am, I’ve never found an effective method of keeping a determined relative at bay. The only sure defence is to be an orphan.
But it would be unkind to suggest that all relatives automatically qualify for the Worst Guest Award. There are many other contenders, and we have had our fair share of them over the years. While new and ingenious refinements in guest performance will probably surprise us in the months to come, the selection that follows represents the worst that we have so far encountered. Names have been withheld to protect the guilty. Potential hosts, be warned: what has arrived on our doorstep could one day arrive on yours.
The waifs
The phone rings, usually in the late afternoon. The caller and his companion have found themselves stranded without hotel reservations. Who would have thought that in mid-August a room would be so difficult to find? Fortunately, they are not far from our house. Would it be possible to squeeze them in just for the night? The night turns into two nights, and then a week, because every hotel for fifty miles is booked solid, the way hotels always are in August.
The indispensable executive
Within minutes of coming through the door, he is on the phone to his office in London. He’s been away from his desk for all of five hours, but God knows what might have happened—a management reshuffle engineered by the mail-room boy, a client in distress, the empire crumbling without the emperor. He spends his vacation with our phone sprouting from his ear, stopping only to eat and drink. He talks endlessly about work and is reluctant to leave the house because we don’t have an answering machine.
The man with the indestructible bank note
He carries no small change. All he has is this 500-franc note, which is equivalent to about £50, and you won’t get that sort of money changed when you’re just buying a newspaper or a packet of cigarettes or a couple of beers. So the bank note is taken out and given an airing, apologies are made for not having anything smaller, and someone else pays. It’s only a few francs. Anyway, we’re all going out to dinner, and restaurants are very happy to take 500-franc notes. But our man has left his cash at home and brought his credit cards, which the restaurant doesn’t accept. He promises to settle up later and orders a large cognac. The day of reckoning is postponed by a variety of manoeuvres, and the 500-franc note remains intact.
The virus victims
For the first two or three days they have a wonderful time. They eat, they drink, they take the sun, and then they start to drop like flies. It must have been something in the salade Niçoise that gave them a stomach bug. They retire to bed and call feebly for beef tea, refusing to admit that the virus is nothing more than their digestive systems’ rebelling against the enormous and unaccustomed quantities of pink wine that they have been drinking with such enthusiasm. The doctor comes and prescribes suppositories and abstinence, but recovery is gradual. They leave thinner and more pallid than when they arrived.
The open-ended lunch experts
“We thought you wouldn’t mind,” they say as they arrive, “if we brought our friends.” Lunch for four becomes lunch for six. It is quickly apparent that we have been chosen to divert them for the entire afternoon and beyond, because they tell us that they have no further plans for the day. They borrow swimsuits and settle themselves by the pool, and they leave with some disappointment at seven o’clock when it dawns on them that dinner was not included in the lunch invitation.
All visitors, even the most charming and well-behaved ones, cost money; not vast amounts if you take them individually, but enough collectively to make them our single biggest annual expense. There is also a hidden cost, impossible to calculate, and that is exhaustion.
The greatest problem with guests—apart from the indispensable executive—is simple and insoluble: they’re on vacation, and we’re not. We get up at seven, and I’m at my desk well before nine. They will sleep in, as people on vacation do, until ten or eleven and have a leisurely breakfast in the sun. An hour or so by the pool, and they’re ready for a drink and lunch. We go back to work and they go back to reading and sunbathing. Refreshed by a nap in the hammock under the pine trees, they come to life in the evening, moving into high social gear as my wife and I are falling asleep in the soup. And will they go to bed? Not on your life. Not while the night is young and the wine is flowing.
In theory, the one day of the week when we can all lie in and keep the same hours is Sunday, but every guest we have ever had wants to go to one of the big Sunday markets, which start early and finish around noon. So once again we’re up at seven, to drive our bleary-eyed and usually subdued passengers off for a morning among the stalls of food and flowers and antiques at Ile-sur-la-Sorgue. You may think it’s an easy life we lead down here, but I can tell you that it places severe demands on your stamina as well as your liver.
And perhaps more than physical resilience, you need patience. When you have guests in the city, they haven’t come solely to see you: they want to shop, to go to the theatre, to visit the galleries and see the sights. They leave the apartment in the morning, and you can usually tuck them into bed, footsore and happy, not much later than midnight. In the country there is less organized entertainment and fewer distractions, so the burden of amusement falls on the hosts. In our case, it doesn’t stop at amusement, and we find ourselves running all kinds of strange and sometimes very personal errands when our guests’ knowledge of French is limited to reading menus.
In the past year, we have been pressed into service to haggle with antique dealers, to dispute garage bills, to make a deposition to the police about a stolen handbag, to return to cancel the deposition when the handbag was discovered under the front seat of the car, to query the currency rates at the bank and to make innumerable changes of airline reservations. On our guests’ behalf, we have become regular visitors to the local pharmacy, and we now have a small pharmacy of our own, filled with half-used remedies for diarrhoea and sunstroke, wasp stings, blisters, hay fever, and ailments of an intimate feminine nature.
It’s getting better. We have learned to say no to dimly remembered acquaintances who have a sudden desire to see us again, preferably for three weeks in July. The unlovely guests are not asked back a second time, and the people who stay with us now are people with whom we know we can live. And the pleasures of having them more than outweigh the effort and money involved.
It’s good to see how they change in the course of a few days—from being tense and tired and pale to being tanned and relaxed. We like it when they seem to love Provence as much as we do, when they learn to play boules and take their first bicycle ride in years, when they stop looking at their watches and slow down to our pace. They are a hobby and a lot of fun and a reminder of our good luck at being able to live here, and we would miss them if they didn’t come. They’re a habit.
16
The Shirt De Luxe
In the wardrobe of the Great Gatsby there were many shirts. “Piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high… shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel… shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.”
Gatsby was obviously an addict, and while one may have a few reservations about his weakness for coral and faint orange and scrolls—particularly the scrolls—there is no denying that a wardrobe stacked with shirts is a comforting sight. A man can never have too many. I certainly can’t. And so it was with a light step and a trembling wallet that I went to pay a call on Charvet, the most famous shirt-maker in Paris, to discover for myself how it has managed to survive wars, recessions, and the vagaries of fashion for 151 years.
Don’t expect to find a mere shop. The house of Charvet, at 28 Place Vendôme, occupies several floors of some of the most distinguished real estate in Paris. The ceiling
s are lofty, and no effort has been made to cram the space with merchandise. There is plenty of room to twirl your silver-topped cane as you stroll through the displays of shirts and ties that are scattered like islands around the ground floor.
A man in the corner gave a final tweak to an arrangement of ties and came over to see if he could be of help. I noticed his shirt. He noticed mine. (It’s a funny thing about makers of bespoke clothing. They can’t help making a quick assessment of what you’re wearing. It’s instinctive. I hoped my tie was straight.) He smiled, and inclined his head when I said I wanted some shirts. He escorted me to a tiny elevator, and we went up together. He introduced himself as Joseph and made a note of my name on a pad.
We stepped out of the elevator and into a collection of shirts that would have made young Gatsby giddy with indecision. Joseph gestured at them with a sweep of his arm. What did I have in mind? These were ready-made shirts—of impeccable quality, naturellement. Or perhaps… he paused, and right on cue I said I would prefer something made to measure.
Ah. In that case, said Joseph, I could choose between two possibilities. The first was full measure, when the entire shirt is constructed to your personal pattern. But there is a drawback: You need to return in ten days for an essayage, or fitting, and this is not always convenient for Charvet’s clients. Much as I loved the idea of killing time in Paris for ten days, I had to leave the following morning. Joseph was unperturbed. There was no problem. I could have, instead, the second possibility, which, as he explained it to me, seemed the ideal solution for anyone who wants the advantages of bespoke shirts minus the ten-day delay. This system is called half-measure, and it works like this.
You try on a number of shirts until you find a body size that fits—across the shoulders, through the chest and waist, and with the correct length. The body of your shirts will be cut to that existing pattern. The rest will be made to measure, exactly to your requirements, and the shirts will be sent to you in three weeks. An inspired compromise.
