Gerald Durrell - The Picnic and Suchlike Pandemonium

“Le Petit Chanson”, when I came to it, was no disappointment. The road curved between two huge oak trees and there, in a garden like a patchwork quilt of flowers lay the hotel, a long low building with a red-tiled roof blotched here and there with emerald cushions of moss. The walls and part of the roof were almost invisible under one of the most flamboyant and magnificent wisterias I had ever seen. Over the years it had lovingly embraced the building, throwing coil after coil of itself round the walls and roof until the occupants had been hard pressed to keep it from barring the doors and windows. At ground level the trunk had a girth that any self-respecting python would have been proud of, and the whole complicated web of trunk and branch that had the house in its grip was as blue as a kingfisher’s wing with a riot of flowers.

In a small gravel square among the flower beds in front of the hotel neat white tables and chairs were laid out in the shade of six or seven Judas trees in full bloom. Their pinky-red blooms were starting to fall; the ground was red with them and the white table tops were bespattered as by gouts of dragon’s blood. Beyond the garden stretched woodland and great skyward sloping fields of mustard.

I parked the car and, carrying my overnight bag, walked into the hotel. The small hall smelt of food and wine and floor polish, and everything was clean and shining. I was first greeted by an enormous hairy dog that, had you met him in the woods, you would have been pardoned for thinking a bear. He was, however, most amiable. I soon found that he had several delicious, ticklish spots behind his ears and had him groaning with pleasure as I massaged them. Presently a young waiter made his appearance and I asked him if they had a room for the night.

“ Certainement, monsieur, ” he said with grave politeness and taking my case from me he led me down a passageway to a charming bedroom whose window was rimmed with blue wisteria framing the distant fields of mustard.

After I had bathed and changed I made my way downstairs and out into the garden, floodlit now with the rays of the setting sun. I sat down at a table and started to think hopefully that a Pernod might be a not entirely unacceptable idea when the young waiter appeared.

“Excuse me, monsieur ,” he said, “but monsieur le Patron asks whether you will drink a bottle of wine with him, for you are the first customer we have had this year and it is his custom to celebrate like this.”

I was enchanted by such a civilized idea.

“Of course I will be delighted to accept,” I said, “but I do hope that the Patron will come out and join me?”

“ Oui, monsieur, ” said the waiter, “I will tell him.”

I was anxious to meet the Patron for I felt sure that he was the one responsible for the quaint names of his various specialities, and I wanted to find out why they had been thus christened. Presently he appeared. His appearance was in keeping with the name of the hotel and the whole ambience of the place. He was a giant man, some six foot three in height, with shoulders as wide and solid as a café table. His massive face with an eagle nose and brilliant black eyes, framed in a shock of white hair, belonged to an Old Testament prophet. He wore an apron which was spotless and a chef’s hat perched jauntily on the back of his head and in his huge hands, the joints cobbled by arthritis, he carried a tray on which was a bottle of wine and two very beautifully-shaped glasses. He was, I judged, in his middle eighties, but gave the impression of being indestructible. You felt he would live to be well over a hundred. He beamed at me as he approached as though I was a dear friend of long standing; his eyes flashed with humour; his delighted smile was wide and his face fretted with a thousand lines that the laughter of his life had etched there,

“ Monsieur ,” he boomed as he set the tray carefully on the table, “welcome to my hotel. You are our first guest of the season and so are especially welcome.”

He wrung my hand with courteous enthusiasm and then sat down opposite me. The force of his personality was like a blast furnace. He exuded kindness and good will and humour in equal quantities and so was irresistible.

“I do hope that you will like this wine,” he continued, pouring it out carefully into the glasses. “It is a Beaujolais from my own little vineyard. I have enough grapes to make some twenty bottles a year, for my own consumption, you understand, and so I only open it on special occasions such as this.”

“I am honoured,” I said, raising my glass. The wine slid into my mouth like velvet and the fragrance illuminated my taste buds.

The old man rolled it round his mouth and swallowed thoughtfully. “It is a truthful wine,” he said.

“Very truthful,” I agreed.

“You are en vacances here?” he enquired.

“Yes,” I said. “I have a little house down in Provence and I try to go there every summer.”

“Ah! Provence ! . . . the country of herbs,” he said, “what a lovely area of France !”

“The whole of France is beautiful. I think it is one of the loveliest countries in the world.”

He beamed at me and nodded. We drank for a while in respectful silence that one gives to a special wine, and then the old man refilled our glasses.

“And now you wish for the menu?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” I said. “I was reading about some of your specialities in the Michelin. You must be an excellent chef to have obtained your star.”

He closed his eyes and an expression of anguish passed for a moment across his fine face.

“Ah, the star, the star,” he groaned. “You have no idea, monsieur , what I had to suffer to get that star. Wait, I will get you the menu and after you have chosen I will tell you about the star. It is, I assure you, a romance such as Dumas might have invented and yet it is all true. A moment while I get the menu.”

He went off into the hotel and returned presently with the menu and the wine list and placed them in front of me.

“If I may venture to make a suggestion,” he said as he recharged our glasses, “the ‘Pigeons for the Sake of Marie Theresa’ is something I am really proud of and I have some fine, plump, fresh squabs. As you are our first customer of the season I will, naturally, broach another bottle of my Beaujolais to accompany the pigeons.”

“You are very kind,” I said. “The pigeons sound admirable. Tell me, I notice that you give curious names to all your specialities. I presume they have some special significance?”

“Why yes, monsieur ,” he said gravely. “When one invents a new dish I think it is only befitting that its name should commemorate some event. For example, take the pigeons. I invented this dish when my wife was pregnant with our first child. You know the strange humours women get at such times, eh — ? Well, my wife developed a passion for tarragon and pigeons. Enfin ! It was incumbent upon me to invent a dish that would not only feed her and our unborn child, but would appeal to the finicky appetite of a pregnant woman of great beauty and sensibility. So, I invented this pigeon dish for the sake of Marie Theresa, which is my wife’s name.”

“What a fascinating idea,” I said. “I must start doing that myself, for I am something of a cook and I always think that so many lovely dishes have the dullest names.”

“It is true. I see no reason why imagination should not go into the creation of a dish and also into the naming of it.”

I perused the menu for a few moments.

“I think,” I said at last, “that with your ‘Pigeons for the Sake of Marie Theresa’ as a main dish, I would like to start with the ‘Pâté Commemorating the passing of Albert Henri Périgord’ and then finish with some cheese and perhaps ‘Tart of Wild Strawberries for the Delectation of Sophie Clemanceau’.”