As a result of all this, there were, by last summer, at least a few fortunate districts in France in which the restaurant keepers could begin to see hope and daylight ahead, districts in which they could begin to serve, to a few clients and on special occasions, meals almost worthy of their great days. Then, gradually, bits of unexpected and welcome good news began to circulate … it appeared that the incomparable cellar of the Hotel de la Côte d'Or, at Saulieu, walled up and camouflaged in the summer of 1940, was undamaged and intact … the stocks of cognac had increased, rather than declined, during the war … the oyster beds of Marennes, under German small-arms fire until April of this year, were in better shape than had been expected … the great Restaurant de la Pyramide, at Vienne, twice closed by the Germans, was serving luncheon four or five days a week … 1942 and 1943, in Burgundy, would prove among the best vintage years of the past two decades … despite heavy German requisitions, there was plenty of champagne in Epernay and Reims. Very slowly, one by one, all over France the lights were coming on.
There must, I suppose, be two hundred hotels and restaurants in France called the “Chapon Fin”—the august and celebrated house on the Place des Grands Hommes at Bordeaux, a scarcely less famous restaurant on the main square of Poitiers, numberless others large and small, pretentious and humble, known and unknown. My own favorite Chapon Fin has been, for at least a dozen years, a little hotel in the village of Thoissey, in that fertile and lovely province of epicures, La Bresse.
From the upstairs windows of the Chapon Fin, in Thoissey, you can see, beyond the meadows and across the Sâone River, the rolling, vine-covered hills of the Beaujolais country, and the famous villages of Fleurie, Morgon, Pouilly, Juliénas—known to wine lovers the world round. In front of the hotel is a wide place, planted with plane trees, under which the citizens of Thoissey used to play boule on Sundays in summer, before the war. The country round about is exceedingly rich, famous for its poultry, its charolais cattle, its vegetables and fruit. There are pike in the Sâone, out of which a knowing chef can make his own quenelles de brochet; there are myriads of frogs in the low meadows along the river, and, to complete the picture, there were, before the war, earthenware carafes of cool, pale Pouilly wine, and wooden pichets of fruity red Beaujolais.
The patron and chef is named Monsieur Blanc. He is still in his early thirties and far and away the best cook of his age that I have ever known, trained in the great Lyonnais tradition, loving his work, tireless and cheerful and blessed with an extraordinary memory for the personal preferences of his guests. Madame Blanc is as pretty as she is efficient; they have three children. Thoissey, thanks to them, was, in 1939, one of the pleasantest places under the sun.
It was not without misgivings, you may be sure, that I decided a few weeks after V-E day to go back. I was driving from Paris to Marseille; it was a warm Sunday toward the end of May, and the French countryside had never looked more beautiful, fresh and green as if there had never been a war. I took the familiar narrow road down the left bank of the Sâone, entered Thoissey, and turned a corner.
There was the square. Out under the plane trees a dozen of the village worthies were playing boule. The hotel stood behind its wide terrace just as I had pictured it a hundred times; even the poster beside the door—Un Repas Sans Vin Est Une Journée Sans Soleil—was faded but still there.
When I opened the door, Madame Blanc got down from behind the caisse and Monsieur Blanc emerged from the kitchen. He was wearing a white coat and white chef's cap, just as when I had last seen him. They took my hands.
“We have been expecting you,” said M. Blanc, “ever since the Americans landed in France. But today, vous tombez bien. Give me an hour.”
Finally we sat down to lunch together. Indeed, as Monsieur Blanc said, I had “fallen well.” If it had not been for the extremely visible changes that six years had made in the Blanc children, I might have believed, for a moment, that I was six years younger and that all that had happened since was merely a dark and unhappy dream. The Chapon Fin had not forgotten my old favorites: pâté de campagne, finely seasoned and not too finely ground; quenelles de brochet à la Nantua which are, as a famous gourmet once said, what happens to a pike when he goes to heaven; a chicken demi-deuil, or “half-mourning,” so called because of the black bands of sliced truffles that show through its transparent skin; green salad, wild strawberries, a glass of old marc. With it we had perhaps the best Pouilly I have ever drunk, a 1942 as clean and fragrant as new-mown grass.
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