The Decadent Cookbook (16 page)

As for drink to accompany this meal, the most obvious choice is Egri Bikavér, the famous Hungarian red wine otherwise known as “Bulls’ Blood”. There is a legend that during the Middle Ages bulls’ blood was indeed added to the wine to give it its dark red, almost black colour. The other possibilities are somewhat more recherché. At certain high-class Japanese restaurants one can sample a mixture of sake and turtle’s blood, while the equivalent establishment in the Philippines offers fortifying draughts of snake blood, poured straight from the serpent’s throat freshly slit at the customer’s table.

by Jean Lorrain

She stands at a window beside a lilac curtain patterned with silver thistle. She is supporting herself upon the sill while looking out over the courtyard of the hotel, at the avenue lined with chestnut-trees, resplendent in their green autumn foliage. Her pose is business-like, but just a little theatrical: her face uplifted, her right arm carelessly dangling.

Behind her, the high wall of the vast hallway curves away into the distance; beneath her feet the polished parquet floor carries the reflected gleam of the early morning sun. On the opposite wall is a mirror which reflects the sumptuous and glacially pure interior, which is devoid of furniture and ornament save for a large wooden table with curved legs. On top of the table is an immense vase of Venetian glass, moulded in the shape of a conch-shell lightly patterned with flecks of gold; and in the vase is a sheaf of delicate flowers.

All the flowers are white: white irises, white tulips, white narcissi. Only the textures are different, some as glossy as pearls, others sparkling like frost, others as smooth as drifting snow; the petals seem as delicate as translucent porcelain, glazed with a chimerical beauty. The only hint of colour is the pale gold at the heart of each narcissus. The scent which the flowers exude is strangely ambivalent: ethereal, but with a certain sharpness somehow suggestive of cruelty, whose hardness threatens to transform the irises into iron pikes, the tulips into jagged-edged cups, the narcissi into shooting-stars fallen from the winter sky.

And the woman, whose shadow extends from where she stands at the window to the foot of the table - she too has something of that same ambivalent coldness and apparent cruelty. She is dressed as if to resemble the floral spray, in a long dress of white velvet trimmed with fine-spun lace; her gold-filigreed belt has slipped down to rest upon her hips. Her pale-skinned arms protrude from loose satin sleeves and the white nape of her neck is visible beneath her ash-blonde hair. Her profile is clean-cut; her eyes are steel-grey; her pallid face seems bloodless save for the faint pinkness of her thin, half-smiling lips. The overall effect is that the woman fits her surroundings perfectly; she is clearly from the north - a typical woman of the fair-skinned kind, cold and refined but possessed of a controlled and meditative passion.

She is slightly nervous, occasionally glancing away from the window into the room; when she does so her eyes cannot help but encounter her image reflected in the mirror on the opposite wall. When that happens, she laughs; the sight reminds her of Juliet awaiting Romeo - the costume is almost right, and the pose is perfect.

Come, night! come Romeo! come, thou day in night!

For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night

Whiter than new snow upon a raven’s back.

As she looks into the mirror she sees herself once again in the long white robe of the daughter of the Capulets; she strikes the remembered pose, and stands no longer in the plush corridor of the hotel but upon a balcony mounted above the wings of the stage in a great theatre, beneath the dazzling glare of the electric lights, before a Verona of painted cloth, tormenting herself with whispered words of love.

Wilt thou be gone? it is not yet near day:

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear.

Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

And afterwards, how fervently she and her Romeo would be applauded, as they took their bows before the house!

After the triumph of Juliet, there had been the triumph of Marguerite, then the triumph of Ophelia - the Ophelia which she had recreated for herself, her unforgettable performance now enshrined in legend:
That’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember!
All dressed in white, garlanded with flowers in the birch-wood! Then she had played the Queen of the Night in
The Magic Flute;
and Flotow’s
Martha;
the fiancée of
Tannhauser
; Elsa in
Lohengrin
. She had played the parts of all the great heroines, personifying them as blondes, bringing them to life with the crystal clarity of her soprano voice and the perfection of her virginal profile, haloed by her golden hair.

She had made Juliet blonde, and Rosalind, and Desdemona, so that Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London had not only accepted blondes in those roles but had applauded blondes - and had come, in the end, to expect and demand blondes. That was all her doing: the triumph of La Barnarina, who, as a little girl, had run bare-legged across the steppe, asking no more and no less than any other girl of her age, lying in wait for the sleighs and the troikas which passed through the tiny village - a poor hamlet of less than a hundred souls, with thirty muzhik peasants and a priest.

She was the daughter of peasants, but today she is a marquise - an authentic marquise, a millionaire four times over, the wedded wife of an ambassador whose name is inscribed in the
livre d’or
of the Venetian nobles, and entered upon the fortieth page of the Almanack of Gotha.

But this is still the same girl who once lived in the steppes, wild and indomitable. Even when she ceased to play in the falling snow, the snow continued to fall within her soul. She never sought lovers among the wealthy men and the crowned princes who prostrated themselves before her; her heart, like her voice, remained faultless. The reputation, temperament and talent of the woman partook of exactly the same crystalline transparency and icy clarity.

She is married now, though it is a marriage which was not contracted out of love, nor in the cause of ambition. She has enriched her husband more than he has enriched her, and she cares nothing for the fact that he was once a celebrity of the Tuileries in the days of the Empire, or that he became a star of the season at Biarritz as soon as he returned to Paris from the Italian court, following the disaster of Sedan.

Why, then, did she marry that one rather than another?

In fact, it was because she fell in love with his daughter.

The man was a widower, a widower with a very charming child, just fourteen years old. The daughter, Rosaria, was an Italian from Madrid - her mother had been Spanish - with a face like a Murillo archangel: huge dark eyes, moist and radiant, and a wide, laughing mouth. She had all the childish, yet instinctively amorous, gaiety of the most favoured children of the sunny Mediterranean.

Badly brought up by the widower whom she adored, and spoiled by that overgenerous treatment which is reserved for the daughters of the nobility, this child had been seized by an adoring passion for the diva whom she had so often applauded in the theatre. Because she was endowed with a tolerably pleasant voice the child had come to cherish the dream of taking lessons from La Barnarina. That dream, as soon as it was once denied, had quickly become an overpowering desire: an obsession, an
idée fixe;
and the marquis had been forced to give way. One day he had brought his daughter to the singer’s home, secure in the knowledge that she would be politely received - La Barnarina was accepted as an equal by members of the finest aristocracies in Europe - but fully expecting her request to be refused. But the child, with all the gentleness of a little girl, with the half-grandiose manners of the young aristocrat, with the innocent warmth of the novice in matters of love, had amused, seduced and conquered the diva.

Rosaria had become her pupil.

In time, she had come to regard her almost as a daughter.

Ten months after that first presentation, however, the marquis had been recalled by his government to Milan, where he expected to be asked to accept a position as envoy to some remote region - either Smyrna or Constantinople. He intended, of course, to take his daughter with him.

La Barnarina had not anticipated any such event, and had been unable to foresee what effect it would have on her.

When the time for the little girl’s departure came, La Barnarina had felt a sudden coldness possessing her heart, and suddenly knew that the separation would be intolerable: this child had become part of her, her own soul and her own flesh. La Barnarina, the cold and the dispassionate, had found the rock upon which her wave must break; the claims of love which she had kept at bay for so long now exerted themselves with a vengeance.

La Barnarina was a mother who had never given birth, as immaculate as the divine mothers of the Eastern religions. In the flesh which had never yearned to produce fruit of its own there had been lit a very ardent passion for the child of another’s loins.

Rosaria had also been reduced to tears by the thought of the parting; and the marquis soon became annoyed by the way the two women persistently sobbed in one another’s arms. He quickly lost patience with the business of trying to patch up the situation, but hesitated to suggest the only possible solution.

“Oh papa, what are we to do?” pleaded Rosaria, in a choked whisper.

“Yes, marquis, tell us what to do,” added the singer, as she stood before him embracing the young girl.

So the marquis, spreading his arms wide with the palms open, smiling as sadly as Cassandra, was left to point the way to the obvious conclusion.

“I believe, my dear children, there is one way…”

And with a grand salute, a truly courtly gesture, to the unhappy actress, he said:

“You must leave the stage and become my wife, so that you may take charge of the child!”

And so she married him, leaving behind the former life which she had loved so ardently and which had made her so rich. At the height of her career, and with her talent still in full bloom, she had left behind the Opera, her public, and all her triumphs. The star became a marquise - all for the love of Rosaria.

It is that same Rosaria for whom she is waiting at this very moment, slightly ruffled by impatience, as she stands before the high window in her white lace and her soft white velvet, in her pose which is just a little theatrical because she cannot help remembering Juliet awaiting the arrival of Romeo!

Romeo! As she silently stammers the name of Romeo, La Barnarina becomes even paler.

In Shakespeare’s play, as she knows only too well, Romeo dies and Juliet cannot survive without his love; the two of them yield up their souls together, the one upon the corpse of the other - a dark wedding amid the shadows of the tomb. La Barnarina - who is, after all, the daughter of Russian peasants - is superstitious, and cannot help but regret her involuntary reverie.

Here, of all places, and now, of all times, she has dreamed of Romeo!

The reason for her distress is that Rosaria, alas, has come to know suffering. Since the departure of her father she has changed, and changed considerably. The poor darling’s features have been transfigured: the lips which were so red are now tinged with violet; dark shadowy circles like blurred splashes of kohl are visible beneath her eyes and they continue to deepen; she has lost that faint ambience, reminiscent of fresh raspberries, which testifies to the health of adolescents. She has never complained, never having been one to seek sympathy, but it did not take long for La Barnarina to become alarmed once she saw that the girl’s complexion had taken on the pallor of wax, save for feverish periods when it would be inflamed by the colour of little red apples.

“It is nothing, my dear!” the child said, so lovingly - but La Barnarina hurried to seek advice.

The results of her consultations had been quite explicit, and La Barnarina felt that she had been touched by Death’s cold hand. “You love that girl too much, madame,” they had said, “and the child in her turn has learned to love you too much; you are killing her with your caresses.”

Rosaria did not understand, but her mother understood only too well; from that day on she had begun to cut the child off from her kisses and embraces; desperately, she had gone from doctor to doctor - seeking out the celebrated and the obscure, the empirically-inclined and the homeopathic - but at every turn she had been met with a sad shake of the head. Only one of them had taken it upon himself to indicate a possible remedy: Rosaria must join the ranks of the consumptives who go at dawn to the abattoirs to drink lukewarm blood freshly taken from the calves which are bled to make veal.

On the first few occasions, the marquise had taken it upon herself to lead the child down into the abattoirs; but the horrid odour of the blood, the warm carcasses, the bellowing of the beasts as they came to be slaughtered, the carnage of the butchering…all that had caused her terrible anguish, and had sickened her heart. She could not stand it.

Rosaria had been less intimidated. She had bravely swallowed the lukewarm blood, saying only: “This red milk is a little thick for my taste.”

Now, it is a governess who has the task of conducting the girl into the depths; every morning they go down, at five or six o’clock, to that devils’ kitchen beneath the rue de Flandre, to an enclosure where the blood is drained from the living calves, to make the white and tender meat.

And while the young girl makes her descent into that place, where bright- burning fires warm the water in porcelain bathtubs to scald the flesh of the slaughtered beasts, La Barnarina stays here, by the window in the great hallway, perfectly tragic in her velvet and her lace, mirroring in her mode of dress the snow-whiteness of the narcissi, the frost-whiteness of the tulips, and the nacreous whiteness of the irises; here, striking a pose with just a hint of theatricality, she watches.