will leave you alone.’
He seemed to be saying that Dr Pascal and the other masters should see me read books and the boys above should see me punch people. I checked, and that was exactly what he meant. I was six and he was nearly eight, older and worldly wise. I did my best to obey his suggestion. The result was the masters liked me, and my friends grew in number. Those I hit wanted to be friends so I didn’t hit them again, and their friends wanted to be my friends so I didn’t hit them to start with. Inside a year I stopped having to hit people and stopped worrying about being their friends. They were still friendly to me but got little in return. Emile was the exception.
We played together and he got permission from his father to bring me home for a weekend. I arrived in near rags and left wearing Emile’s old clothes. More to the point, I left fed and with my pockets filled with slivers of five different cheeses. Emile’s mother thought my passion for Roquefort funny and asked who’d given it to me.
‘Monsieur le Régent.’
She looked at her husband, who looked at Emile, who shrugged slightly to say he didn’t know if it was true but it was possible. And so I came to tell them about the day the duc d’Orléans rode into my father’s courtyard and left a row of kicking villagers strung from the trees behind him. I left out eating beetles.
Emile told me later what she said. Sometimes life is kinder than one thinks. Sometimes it is even kind to those in desperate need of kindness. I adored her and she became the mother mine had never bothered to be. This amused Emile as his possessiveness of me extended to expecting his mother to like me also. An only child, in his home he was as spoilt and cosseted as a dauphin. Even the prickly Maître Duras approved of my friendship with his son.
A small man with expensively tailored clothes and a jewelled ring on one finger, his coat was buttoned tight to the neck and his nails always clean. Occasionally I would find him staring from me to his son as if considering the difference. Emile was cleaner and still taller, although I was catching up. My appetite was bigger and I ate everything put in front of me, which endeared me to Madame Duras, a large woman fond of her gold bracelets, her supper parties and her garden. Maître Duras acted for the school, and for baron de Bellvit, which was how Emile came to be at the school and why the school agreed when Maître Duras suggested I might come to his for a few days over the holiday since I had nowhere else to go.
I was noble and instinctively polite and treated his son as an equal because no one had suggested I shouldn’t. Later, other boys became my friends. Some of them in the first few terms suggested Emile was too common to be friends with people like us. And I looked at them and I looked at myself and I looked at Emile and wondered what the difference was. We wore the same uniform and went to the same school, we ate the same food and attended the same classes. The only difference was that Emile looked a little cleaner and had clothes that were a little neater and slept at home rather than in the dorms. To me that made him luckier than us not worse. All of us knew we were different from the peasantry.
That sullen indistinguishable mass who stared at us with flat eyes from the fields on the two occasions a year we were allowed to leave the school grounds: once to visit the fair at Mabonne and again to be fed by the baron de Bellvit, our local landowner and titular master, under its founding articles, of our school. The peasants dressed in rags and dirt and lived in hovels – it was hard beneath the mud and sweat and stink to tell the men from the women. And though we might see a wide-eyed boy only a little younger than we were, or a girl pretty enough to make us notice her, we knew what they would become. It had always been this way and we believed it always would. More to the point, they believed it and so it was.
1728
Hanging the Dog
To cook mice
Drown first. Clubbing produces sharp fragments of bone. Gut, skin and clean in water. Wrap three or four together in wet clay and bake in a bonfire. Alternatively, halve along length, fry with sliced onions and season with salt, pepper and thyme. This also works for sparrows. Tastes like chicken.
To cook sparrow
Gut, pluck, remove legs and clean carcase in water. Alternate layers of salt and cleaned sparrow in a jar. When needed, wash away salt and fry with a little olive oil. In a separate pan fry onions until clear and add diced tomatoes. Put sparrows on top of sauce and garnish dish with basil. Tastes like chicken.
To cook cat
Gut animal, skin, remove head and tail, cut off paws and lower limb at joint, wash body cavity thoroughly. Carcass looks just like rabbit and can be roasted in similar way. Spit, brush with oil, season with tarragon. Cook until juices run clear when meat pierced with a knife. Tastes like chicken.
To cook dog
Gut, skin and joint. The thighs are too fatty to make good eating, the flanks can be trimmed for steak, the rest can be stewed or fried at a pinch. Boiling the meat before roasting or frying removes fat and helps lessen the distinctive flavour. Sauce heavily or season with chillies. Tastes like sour mutton.
The sad truth is that, apart from dog, one animal tastes much like another, and those that don’t taste like chicken mostly taste like beef, with the rest tasting like mutton. The secret of variety for meat is in the spicing. Vegetables, fruits, herbs have far wider variations in taste than the creatures that pick, browse or gnaw upon them. Even the way we describe the taste of meats other than the obvious ones is wrong. We say cat tastes like chicken when, had we been weaned on kitten stew, we’d say chicken tastes like cat.
‘To cook mice’ was my first recipe, written in careful lettering in a small notebook stolen from a master. I was ten and lied about the taste. It tasted more like chicken than beef because my palate was too inexperienced to make a better comparison. A cat and a dog changed my life. The cat came first, although the cat in this bit of the story is not that cat, simply a wild cat found trapped in a bush. But before this cat came a whipping. The old headmaster died the winter I was nine. The school was hushed into silence and slow movement. We knew in our common rooms and dorms that something was wrong because that afternoon’s lessons were cancelled and the doctor was seen entering the gates in his cart and was hurried up the main stairs by the old headmaster’s son himself.
The whole school attended his funeral.
The year I was ten no one died – and the year I turned eleven Dr Faure arrived. He taught Latin and theology and disliked me from the start. He disliked my face, my friendship with Emile, which he found suspicious, and he disliked that I was due to stay with Emile during the coming holiday when the terms of my attendance said I should remain at St Luce. He whipped me in his first week at school for being disgusting.
That is, he whipped me for eating a raw snail. Snails were common in the stews we were given and the masters ate snails boiled in butter and seasoned with garlic. This was different apparently. Because I took the snail from a pile of night soil collected from the school’s latrines and I ate the snail raw. He announced he would transfer that rawness from the snail to my buttocks. After Friday prayers and the blessing, I was called forward, climbed the steps to the dais, and told to drop my breeches and grip the far edge of a small table – a position that left me stretched across the table with my behind exposed.
He used a switch of willow twigs, soaked overnight in a tub of brine that was carried in between two
