Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1012
The lady looked at me curiously….
“I wish you would tell me, Ford,” she said, “whether you really know Latin or whether you do as other writers do–look up some quotations and write your story up to them….”
And, remembering how often the part of me that now is on a hard rock, had stung as the penalty for writing a false quantity in Latin verse, I began:
“Infandwm Duchesa jubes….”
Her charming face lit up with a certain kindly contempt.
She exclaimed:
“Oh, that…” and catching out of the corner of her charming and satirical eyes the form of my French friend re-descending the hill with a gadget for his invalided 16cv, she tripped lightly back the way she had come.
Alas, it was in the middle of the dogdays. I had been up at five and dug till seven when I had had my coffee; I had irrigated till nine when those two martyrs to indigestion had come upon me…. After that I had written till one–which is too long; had lunched off a tomato salad; taken my siesta; set out some romaine plants–and a hell of a lot of watering they would need if they were to come to anything…. And I will confess that very few of them have. Still they will give us a salad or two…. Then, having no cooking either to think of or suggest, I wrote from five till seven–which is too long….
And suddenly I came to the conclusion that must have been lurking all day in my craven heart…. I couldn’t face it…. I can normally digest a keg of nails…. But not when I have written too long–as I had been doing daily for some time…. I would have attempted Hamburger buec klinge; or Boston beans; or goose-breast en paté; or pea-soup with noodles…. Any one of them…. But all of them–with trimmings and makeweights…. Ah, mais non…. In Mecklenburg-Schwerin in December, perhaps…. But not looking out on the moonlit island where the syrens sang … in the full glare of the immense dog-star….
I was suddenly reminded of a novel–I think by the Freiherr von Ompteda that I had read during the war…. Its heroine came in one day from a glorious ride on the moors in the stinging breath of the October wind. She threw her reins to the butler, sprang from her horse and exclaimed: Bring me a snack. … Bring me five poached eggs, a liver sausage and a quart of beer…. After that she had lunch…. And, says the author, that is the way our glorious German women are brought up so as to give to the Empire its incomparable millions of soldiers….
And for the first time in my life I failed to take up a challenge. I must have been ageing. I sent the rest of my family to partake of that banquet, telling them to say, for the pleasure of my really amiable and distinguished friend, that I was suffering from a touch of sunstroke and indigestion…. There is no pleasure so great as being able to say “I told you so.” … And that enthusiastic controversialist availed herself of that opportunity for a couple of hours…. As for me I dined off a soft-boiled egg taken in a glass more Americano and afterwards did some more irrigation by the light of the moon and the dog-star….
And–curious detail and one that I cannot explain–when my family came back from that banquet they smelt so strong of garlic that I had to implore them to keep their distances. It appeared that her kind Grace, determined that for once in my life I should have enough food to eat had had a couple of capons cooked and had them stuffed each with twenty-five cloves…. She was under the impression that she would thus be giving me poulet béarnais but she was a little mistaken. The dish of Henri Quatre has the garlic stewed under the fowl and you–though I don’t–eat the garlic-cloves as if they were haricots blancs…. Boston beans…. I may be a hero but I am not such a one as the roi bon enfant….
And I will here again take occasion to emphasise that the real function of the condiment is not to be tasted but to be just merely suspected and to clean your tongue so that you may appreciate the flavour…. A chef whose dishes leave you certain of the ingredients he has used is not a good chef…. You should be left in the condition of thinking that you catch fleetingly the perfume of garlic, thyme, absinthia officinalis, nutmeg, clove or anything but perhaps taragon or basil of which certain quantities may on special occasions be used. Such regional cooking as the poulet béarnais is suited for the regions in which it is cooked, by reason of climate, occupation or for other local reasons … or of course for Protestant Kings who are above the law…. So that in one region of France you should never eat the plats régionaux of another region … except in Paris which has no plats of its own.
… ANY MORE THAN IF YOU COME FROM PUTNEY OR THE BRONX YOU SHOULD ASK IN PROVENCE FOR YOUR NATIVE FOODS AND AMUSEMENTS OR THAN I IF I VISITED YOU OUGHT TO BE OFFENSIVE IF YOU FAILED TO PROVIDE ME WITH BOUILLABAISSE BOURIDOU OR BULLFIGHTS….
To that–which is the final moral of this work about what Mr Allen Tate calls “the sweet land” of Provence–I will return. … For the moment I am still intrigued by the case of the Duchess and the cloves of garlic…. I cannot feel sure why she did it….
It may well be that, having so efficiently roasted me with her tongue in the morning, she thought she ought to make it up to me by succulent viands. That would be in tune with her kind nature. Or she may have thought that such an excess of what she took to be my favourite and unspeakable condiment might disgust and so uplift me…. Or it may be that, being German, she did not flinch from knoblauch–And I will here insert the statement that outside Burgundy, Paris and such regions of France as no Anglo-Saxon ever visited–the general run of German cookery is certainly the best and the best-adapted to its climate of any that I know…. I mean not merely the cooking in private houses but the public foods of restaurants. Except for rare mediæval survivals like smoked tongue with plum sauce and assafœtida, you will get in almost any German restaurant–and in quite cheap ones–good meats, really cooked and prepared with properly balanced condiments…. So obviously, as a German, she would not shrink from the indispensable accompaniment to all meat dishes…. But as an American? …
Is it then possible that the impossible has been accomplished and that one Anglo-Saxon traveller’s mind has at last been opened? For a convert may be pardoned for zeal; to employ twenty-five cloves of garlic when three would have been more than sufficient is wrong. But what would that be as against the glorious fact of a turn in the tide of international pickings? For one of the greatest dangers to the peace of the world is the Anglo-Saxon, of whichever branch of that great sister-cousin-hood–who, travelling for pleasure, rings the welkin with complaints at not finding in the more civilised countries that he visits his own special home nastinesses.
The first thing that the traveller of any nationality must learn is that the habits of the country that he visits are infinitely more adapted to the leading of a reasoned and harmonious life there than are those of his own country. Then, after long travel, he may find some sense of international proportions and may venture to criticise the foreigner and even to spend some praise on his own country. As an expatriate I may properly praise in England the admirable nature of her constitution, of her public services and institutions. I am entitled to praise also the kindliness of her population or the incomparable traditions of her judiciary. I may even go so far as to palliate the atrocities of her cuisine and the complete absence of aesthetico-critical alertness of her peoples by laying them to the account of her lamentable climate and her imbecile tariffs which occasion the permanent, brain-numbing, indigestion in her inhabitants…. But I must not, if I am a public-schoolboy paying my first week-end visit to Paris and being asked ten sous for a postage stamp, yell out at the top of my voice that all Frenchmen are robbers because I receive only fifty centimes change for the franc that I have tendered. I must wait to form a judgment until I have discovered that a sou is five centimes.
I hate Germany, her constitution, the rigidity of her scholastic thought, her heroic traditions and every side of her public life and manifestations and all her inhabitants north of a line drawn from Hamburg to Frankfort on the Oder–a territory that with the exception of Nietszche–and what an exception!–has produced no single artist or thinker since the world began. I hope that the end of Mr Hitler–and soon–may be a long stay in a cage in the Thiergarten of some small South German town. But I hate Germany only as a disturber of the world and I am ready to assert that the South and Middle German is a man of infinite conscientiousness, kindliness, love for the arts, domestic self-respect and dignity who contrives, even in a Northern climate, to make his territory flow with music, poetry and simple, innocent, kindly and deeply pacific merriment–and all this to a degree unknown outside Provence and the Mediterranean littoral. If, in short, you could transfuse into Germany the public psychology of England, into England the spirit of the private life of the Germans, into North France some of the spirit of the public services of England and some of the personal kindliness of manner of the German of the South–and of course the Austrian! … And if you could take the fine flower of the result ant population and settle them alongside the Provençaux “between the Durance and the sea.” … And if you could let all the remaining populations of those other regions blissfully fall asleep and never re-awaken (And of course you would have to apply a similar process to the mixed populations of the North American Republic, settling them on the Atlantic and Pacific littorals below the fortieth parallel where Florida, Louisiana and Mexico supply a good flow of the Latin tradition) …. Why then the Western World could, without shame, and in perpetual peace, face the rest of Civilisation.
Until the traveller can voyage with that end in his mind there will be no hope for humanity. That day must eventually arrive for the end of humanity is not yet and in no other way can it logically be preserved…. Let us then go to the bull-fight, leaving Paris and taking the spectacle of the exploits of Lalanda, Chicuelo and Dominguez en route for the pleasures of the Riviera and the great view into Italy from Provence, that singular eastern frontier at the Pont St Louis where as I have said the traveller finds himself faced by a minatory array of fixed bayonets, machine-guns, uniforms and arresting fists…. Looking back into Provence he sees, as if symbolically, that that country is guarded by a man lolling in a deck chair, a Stetson hat well down over his closed eyes, waving to the passing traveller a negligent hand that tells him to put back his extended passport. I do not say that the frontier of Provence is not as efficiently guarded as that of the outside world: it is no doubt even more efficiently attended to. But as an international gesture the dozing guardian is more satisfactory…. Manners after all makyth Nations.
A single day in Paris is a bewildering experience. It is as if the film of your life had been hastened up rather than slowed down. You arrive at the Gare St Lazare at an hour you don’t know because you are allowed to sleep in the train till about eight…. Your last previous sensation has been that of a sudden feeling of liberation at arriving in black Dieppe in the smallest hours.
And that reminds me that I have never recounted the bévue that I made in Sussex on my way to Paris and the South. I was walking along the quasi-sunlit road of Sussex with my kind host between the yews of the Anglo-Saxon churchyard and the little yews that cast shadows on the downs. There burst suddenly from my lips the words:
“My God! Am I realty going to be out of this prison tomorrow?”
I do not apologise for the sentiment. It has been that that has built up our Sister-Cousin Empires–the adventurous lads sighing to be out of sound of Bow Bells or sight of Manhattan Island. But it was not a sentiment to give vent to in the hearing of a kind, cultured and admirable host who over shining naperies in venerable manorial rooms, had dispensed cyder fit for heroes and dishes almost too good for the Gods….
At any rate, arrived at Dieppe and once in the train, though still filled with English comestibles…. No, no–that is not the way to put it; nor is it even yet the truth…. Because then, the cuisine of our kind host had been most admirably cosmopolitan we knew no longer the terrors of Night Starvation, Insomnia, Bile Trouble and the rest of the nightmares that for months had attended on our couches…. “As per advt.”, is I believe the phrase…. But no sooner were we in the train than deep sleep sealed our eyelids and we were being awakened at the Gare St Lazare and I found myself saying: “It’s the fifteenth of May, the feast of St Boniface … no, of Ste Denise…. There ought to be a mise à mort at Nîmes to celebrate Pentecost. And on the way we will eat tournedos-foie-gras and drink one of the noblest of vintages at Dijon…. At Dijon which is in Burgundy where grew the finest of all Primitives except for Avignon…. Think, amiable transfuge from the Bowery…. Tomorrow we shall be seeing the Adoration des Bergers of Robert Campin and the Annunciation of Melchior Brederlamm. … And next day the Roman Theatre at Orange…. And next day the Roman villas, hundreds and hundreds of them at Vaison…. And next day the Fromentins and the Unknown Masters of Avignon and the marvellous Quarton at Villeneuve les Avignon…. And next day the Only Bastide, confronting the white tower of Aucassin across the Rhone…. And next day, if the Gods are kind on the Feast of Tongues, in the arena that the Romans built….”
My New York friend shivered and muttered;
“You are mixing your theology…. The Feast of Tongues is a Christian festival…. Christians are monotheists…. The Gods on the other hand….”
I said: “Connu; connu, aimable pedant Occidental…. Nevertheless the Universe is very large and in it there is room for an infinite number of Deities….”
He said: “Where did you pick that up?” … I answered: “From one of my own books that you have never read, old bean.”
I don’t know how my soul had leisure to appreciate the ESCARGOTS DE BOURGOGNE; the TOURNEDOS FOIE GRAS; the CLOS ROMANEE that passed at Dijon our enchanted lips…. By an amiable remains of the Trans-Atlantic barbaric that poor fellow took hors d’œuvres instead of snails … and admirable the hors d’œuvres of Dijon are. But you should have seen his face when he smelt the perfume across the table, from my snails…. Hors d’œuvres–the very best of hors d’œuvres are lamentable things intended by their exaggerated flavourings to blind your tongue to the defects of the meats that follow…. And when he tasted the sauce from the shell….
He forgot entirely to discuss the morality of witnessing bull-fights, a topic that he had saved up for that repast…. And indeed he never did get an opportunity to discuss that subject.
The rush in Paris had been so incredible…. They will tell you that Paris is empty of English and Americans…. I only know that we moved about in troops of them…. And of Russians and Palestinians and Poles…. And we ate in Russian, in Armenian, in Greek, in Belgian, bistrots and bought peanuts from an Abyssinian Jew who–black as the Shulamite–was descended from king Solomon and spoke the dialect of Sullivan Street…. How, in the ten minutes prescribed by my friend, I got together the dates for this book and for the “History of Our Own Times” that I am writing not even the omniscient Principal Librarian of the British Museum could tell you…. The most I know is that you have seen some of the results here….
And the trouble for that over-seas hesitator as to the morality of bull-fights was that, as always happens when one passes through Paris, troops of candidates for expatriation detached themselves from that capital and decided to have the benefit of my guidance through Provence…. That has always been my agreeable destiny…. And there is really nothing I like better than pointing out Birthplaces to enthusiastic searchers into the associations of Lafayette–who was born at Chavagnac on the Hautè Loire…. Nevertheless it is not always all beer and skittles…. Champagne will come creeping in….
I see that my time has come to talk about wine.
There is one only course to pursue if you wish to taste the best wines of France. I have drunk French wines ever since I was eight and ought therefore to know all about it…. It is to ask the proprietor of any restaurant in which you may eat, what wines he suggests should go with the dishes you have ordered. Do not ask the maître d’hotel who will have an interest in. telling you to take the most expensive wines on his list. If the proprietor is out ask the sommelier–the wine waiter–and tell him you do not want to pay more than seven or twelve or twenty francs a bottle…. No one should want to drink wine costing more than twenty francs a bottle…. And the proprietor–to whom you may leave the question of price altogether–will tell you the best wine to take with your food. It will be the best and, as a rule, the cheapest…. A good restaurant proprietor is as a rule an artist and desires to retain your custom–and the great majority of the proprietors in modest restaurants are good men and true…. Of course if you go to gilded and famous palaces you will get your deserts as a fool…. Nevertheless, wanting one day to impress a publisher, I took him to a famous place on the Quais and gave him canneton Ronennais au sang–a gross dish whose distensive powers I detest. And I asked the proprietor what wine to order with that horror. He said: You will take my vin d’Arbois 1929…. According to the wine-publicity-agents vin d’Arbois is a third or fourth grade wine. I have known really great connoisseurs who have never tasted it…. Even Mr Shand confesses to that….
