As one listens today to voices of indignant incredulity and looks back at one's past, I am reminded of mon maitre, my lawyer, who once wrote a tort for me in Paris. The day his wife was cremated at Père-Lachaise he took me to dinner, a sad, weeping man, and he said, “We must always do something like this to bring back this day, and I want you to have dinner with me. The past slips by so fast, and soon we shall all be dead a hundred years.”
He took me to a place that had a wide classic staircase, one of those perfect symmetrical Louis XV staircases you see only in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer pictures these days. He ordered a soup of oseille—sorrel— then a perfect sole in a white wine sauce, a caneton à la presse (very rare) and caviare aux blinis, made at the table, and of course two wines; a 1916 Montrachet, and with the meat, Clos de Bere.
And he was right, of course; I never forget the death of his wife. As we sat there eating, the blood lymph and salt of our bodies remembered her so lately dead, and when we said goodbye after drinking an 1870 Armagnac brandy, he said, “I have a felling you will soon go away from Paris. You have seen it at its best. The new hordes of sans-culottes are hunting pants again.”
And I went away and in a way he was right. I went to England soon after that and I learned to eat à l'anglaise, the worst food in the world. It happened this way…
At that time the market for paintings by Corot (who was dead, of course, and so couldn't enjoy his success) was very good in England. The wits were all saying that Corot had painted six thousand paintings, of which ten thousand were in England. It was that bad, but one day, Pettie, the English print dealer in Paris, called me into his shop and offered some ale and asked,
“Would you care, chappie, to do me a bit of business in London?”
“I like London.”
“Ai, it's a champion place…but you see I've just sold a Corot to Lord D.”
“What did you get for it?”
“That is no matter, lad, what I want to know is whether he got what I damn well sold him, which is a good one, landscape and ship, not one of those damn trees.”
“What worries you, Pettie?”
“The clerk that delivered it, I sacked him last week for selling prints—bad ones—on the side. Prints from old blocks he sold as originals. I have me a fear maybe that painting “Seaside,” I calls it, it was tampered with— changed. But I can't go and ask Lord D about it…I need a young chap who knows his way around to take a look at it, social like, and tell me if it's what I sold or something else.”
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