The Map and the Territory (8 page)

“I had a long conversation with Mademoiselle Sheremoyova, with whom I believe—” again he searched for the right words, which is a disadvantage with former pupils of the Polytechnique; they’re a bit cheaper to hire than those of the École Nationale d’Administration, but they take more time finding their words; finally, he noticed that he was off subject. “In short, we’ve concluded that marketing them directly through our networks is unthinkable. It’s out of the question for us to appear to take away your artistic independence. I believe,” he continued uncertainly, “that usually the trade in artworks happens via
galleries …
”

“I don’t have a gallerist.”

“That’s what I understood. So, I thought of the following arrangement. We could look after the designing of an Internet site where you would present your works, and put them directly on sale. Naturally the site would be in your name—Michelin would be mentioned nowhere. I believe it’s best that you personally oversee the making of the prints. That said, we can completely handle the logistics and the shipping.”

“I agree.”

“That’s perfect, perfect. This time, I believe we’re genuinely in a win-win situation!” he enthused. “I have formalized all that in a draft contract, which of course I will leave for you to study.”

Jed went out into a very bright long corridor; in the distance a bay window looked out onto the arches of La Défense; the sky was a splendid winter blue, which appeared almost artificial—a phthalo blue, Jed
fleetingly thought. He was walking slowly, hesitantly, as if he were crossing cotton wool; he knew that he had just reached a new turning point in his life. The door of Olga’s office was open and she smiled at him.

“Well, it’s exactly as you told me.”

Jed’s studies had been purely literary and artistic, and he had never had the occasion to meditate on the capitalist mystery par excellence: that of
price formation
. He had opted for Hahnemühle FineArt canvas, which offered an excellent saturation of colors and very good performance over time. But with this paper the correct calibration of colors was difficult to achieve and very unstable. The Epson driver wasn’t quite right, either, so he decided to limit himself to twenty enlargements per photo. A print cost him about thirty euros; he thought he would offer them at two hundred euros on the site.

When he put the first photograph online, an enlargement of the Hazebrouck region, the series was sold out in a little under three hours. Obviously, the price wasn’t quite right. After a few tentative weeks it stabilized at around two thousand euros for a 40-by-60-format print. There, that was now sorted out: he knew his
market price
.

Spring was settling over Paris, and without having planned it, he was becoming comfortably well off. In April, they noticed with surprise that his monthly income had just overtaken Olga’s. That year, the long weekends in May were exceptional: May Day fell on a Thursday, as did VE Day—then there was Ascension Day, and it all ended with the long weekend of Pentecost. The new French Touch catalogue had just come out. Olga had supervised its production, occasionally correcting the texts proposed by the hoteliers, choosing the photos, and having them
retaken if those proposed by the establishments didn’t seem sufficiently attractive.

Evening was falling on the Jardin du Luxembourg. They sat out on the balcony in the mild air; the last cries of children were disappearing in the distance, and the gates would soon be closed for the night. Of France Olga basically knew only Paris, Jed thought as he flicked through the French Touch guide; and he, in truth, hardly knew more. Throughout the guide, France appeared as an enchanted land, a mosaic of superb
terroirs
spangled with châteaux and manors, of an astonishing variety but in which, everywhere,
life was good
.

“Would you like to go away this weekend?” he proposed as he put down the volume. “In one of the hotels described in your guide?”

“Yes, that’s a good idea.” She thought for a few seconds. “But incognito. Without saying I work for Michelin.”

Even in these conditions, thought Jed, they could expect from the hoteliers a special welcome: a rich young urban couple without children, aesthetically very decorative, still in the first phase of their love affair—and for this reason quick to marvel at everything, in the hope of building up a store of
beautiful memories
that would come in handy when they reached the difficult years, perhaps enabling them to overcome a
crisis in their relationship
. They represented, for any professional in the hotel-restaurant trade, the archetype of ideal clients.

“Where would you like to go first?”

On reflection, Jed noticed that the question was far from simple. Many regions, as far as he knew, were of real interest. It was conceivably true, he thought, that France was a marvelous country—at least from the tourist’s point of view.

“We’ll start with the Massif Central,” he finally decided. “For you, it’s perfect. It’s perhaps not the best, but I think it’s very French; I mean, it could only be in France.”

It was Olga’s turn to flick through the guide, and she pointed out a hotel to him. Jed frowned. “The shutters are badly chosen. On gray stone I would’ve put brown or red shutters, green in a pinch, but certainly not blue.” He looked further at the introduction, and his perplexity increased. “What is this gibberish? ‘In the heart of a Cantal crossed with the Midi where tradition rhymes with relaxation and freedom with respect …’ ‘Freedom’ and ‘respect’—they don’t even rhyme!”

Olga took the guide from him, and read the text closely. “Ah, yes, I see now … ‘Martine and Omar make us discover the authenticity of the food and wine.’ She married an Arab: that’s why ‘respect’ is there.”

“That could be all right, especially if he’s Moroccan. It’s damn good, Moroccan cuisine. Maybe they do Franco-Moroccan fusion food, foie gras pastilla and the like.”

“Yes,” said Olga, unconvinced. “But I’m a tourist. I want something Franco-French. A Franco-Moroccan or Franco-Vietnamese thing can work for a trendy restaurant on the Canal Saint-Martin; certainly not for a
hôtel de charme
in the Cantal. I’m maybe going to remove it from the guide, this hotel.”

She did nothing of the sort, but this conversation gave her food for thought, and a few days later she proposed to the management that they organize a statistical survey of the dishes actually consumed in the hotels. The results were only known six months later, but they largely validated her first intuition. Creative cuisine, as well as Asian, was unanimously rejected. North African cooking was appreciated only in the far south and on Corsica. Whatever the region, the restaurants boasting a “traditional” or
“à l’ancienne”
image registered bills sixty-three percent higher than the average. Pork products and cheeses were a safe bet; but above all the dishes based on bizarre animals, with not only a French but also a regional connotation, such as wood pigeon, snails, and lamprey, achieved exceptional scores. The editor of the section “Food, Luxury, and Intermediary,” who authored the summary accompanying the report, concluded categorically:

They had several happy weeks. It was not, it couldn’t be, the exacerbated, feverish happiness of young people, and it was no longer a question for them in the course of a weekend to get
plastered
or
totally shit-faced;
it was already—but they were still young enough to laugh about it—the preparation for that epicurean, peaceful, refined but unsnobbish happiness that Western society offered the representatives of its middle-to-upper classes in middle age. They got used to the theatrical tone adopted by waiters in high-star establishments as they announced the composition of the
amuse-bouches
and other appetizers; and also to that elastic and declamatory way in which they exclaimed:
“Excellente continuation, messieurs, dames!”
each time they brought the next course, and which each time reminded Jed of the
“Bonne célébration!”
that a flabby and probably Socialist young priest had said to him when he and Geneviève, on an irrational whim, had entered the church of Notre-Dame-des-Champs, at Sunday-morning mass, just after making love in the studio flat she then had in the boulevard Montparnasse. Several times afterward he’d thought of this priest: physically he looked a bit like François Hollande, but unlike the political leader he had
made himself a eunuch for God
. Many years later, after he had started the Series of Simple Professions, Jed had sometimes envisioned doing a portrait of one of those men who, chaste and devoted, less and less numerous, criss-crossed the big cities to bring the comfort of their faith. But he had failed, and hadn’t even managed to
comprehend the subject. Inheritors of a millennia-old spiritual tradition that nobody really understood anymore, once placed in the front rank of society, priests were today reduced, at the end of terrifyingly long and difficult studies that involved mastering Latin, canon law, rational theology, and other almost incomprehensible subjects, to surviving in miserable material conditions. They took the Métro alongside other men, going from a Gospels-reading group to a literacy workshop, saying mass every morning for a thin and aging audience, being forbidden all sensual joy or even the elementary pleasures of family life, yet obliged by their function to display day after day an unwavering optimism. Almost all of Jed Martin’s paintings, art historians would later note, represent men and women practicing their profession in a spirit of
goodwill
, but what was expressed there was a sensible goodwill, where submission to professional imperatives guaranteed in return, in variable proportions, a mixture of financial satisfaction and the gratification of self-esteem. Humble and penniless, sneered at by everyone, subjected to all the problems of urban life without having access to any of its pleasures, young urban priests constituted, for those who did not share their faith, a puzzling and inaccessible subject.

The French Touch guide, on the other hand, proposed a range of limited but attestable pleasures. You could share the satisfaction of the owner of the Laughing Marmot when he concluded his introduction with this serene and assured sentence: “Spacious bedrooms with
terrasses
and Jacuzzi bathtubs,
menus séduction
, ten homemade jams at breakfast: you are well and truly in a
hôtel de charme
.” You could let yourself be carried away by the poetic prose of the manager of the Carpe Diem when he presented a visit to his establishment in the following terms: “A smile will lead you from the garden (Mediterranean species) to your suite, a place which will stimulate your senses. Then you will need only close your eyes to remember the scents of paradise, the fountain murmuring in the white marble Turkish bath which lets one simple truth filter through: ‘Here, life is beautiful.’ ” In the grandiose setting of the Château de Bourbon-Busset, whose descendants elegantly perpetuated the art of hospitality, you could contemplate deeply moving souvenirs (moving for the Bourbon-Busset family, probably) that went back to the Crusades; some bedrooms were fitted with waterbeds. This juxtaposition of
Old France
or
terroir
elements with contemporary hedonistic
facilities sometimes had a strange effect, almost that of an error of taste; but it was perhaps this improbable mixture, Jed thought, that was sought by the chain’s clientele, or at least its
core target
. The factual promises in the presentation were kept all the same. The park of the Château des Gorges du Haut-Cézallier was supposed to be home to does, roe deer, and a little donkey; there was indeed a little donkey. While strolling in the gardens of the Vertical Inn, you were supposed to catch sight of Miguel Santamayor, an
intuitive chef
who carried out an “extraordinary synthesis of tradition and futurism”; in fact, you saw a guy who vaguely looked like a guru busying himself in the kitchen, until at the end of his “symphony of vegetables and seasoning” he personally came to offer you one of his
favorite Havanas
.

They spent their last weekend, over Pentecost, in the Château de Vault de Lugny, a
résidence d’exception
whose sumptuous bedrooms opened onto a park of forty hectares whose original layout was attributed to Le Nôtre. The cuisine, according to the guide, “lifted to sublime heights a
terroir
of infinite wealth”; you were in the presence of “one of the most beautiful compendiums of France.” It was there, on the Monday of Pentecost, that Olga announced to Jed that she was returning to Russia at the end of the month. At that moment she was tasting a wild-strawberry jam, and some birds indifferent to any human drama were twittering in the park originally designed by Le Nôtre. A few meters away, a Chinese family were stuffing their faces with Belgian waffles and sausages. The sausages at breakfast had originally been introduced at the Château de Vault de Lugny to appeal to the desires of a traditionalist Anglo-Saxon clientele, who were attached to a fatty, high-protein breakfast; they had been put under discussion, in the course of a brief but decisive business meeting; the tastes of this new Chinese clientele, which were still uncertain and clumsily formulated, but apparently drawn to sausages, had led to this food line being preserved on the menu. Other
hôtels de charme
in Burgundy, during those same years, reached an identical conclusion, and it was thus that the Martenot Sausages and Salted Meat Company, operating in the region since 1927, escaped bankruptcy, and the “Social Affairs” segment of the regional news program on FR3.