The Suitors (15 page)

MENU

Stuffed Baby Vegetables
Melons, Figs, Prosciutto
Pasta Salad with Chicken and Pignoli
Crab Parisienne
Curried Lamb
Waldorf Salad
Tomato and French Green Bean Salad
Cheeses
Coeur à la Crème with Berries

Marie and I went back on duty with our guests only at lunchtime, in the loggia, where the view now featured an ocean liner that had appeared on the horizon, visible through the scattered parasol pines, like a toy set down on a shelf. Four round tables had been set up along the edge of the terrace. This was an almost daily occurrence, because many people considered lunch at L’Agapanthe an obligatory part of their stay in the Midi. Like the most fashionable restaurants, we were thus forced to turn people away, and for the same reasons: because it was one of
the
places to visit, where one met well-known or interesting personalities, and lunch here was something to boast about back in Paris.

Often, however, we really didn’t know who was coming, because people we knew would call up to tell us
they’d be bringing along however many houseguests they had at the moment, so we’d have to wait until the guests strolled into the loggia to discover who they were, like those flimsy little surprise gifts one used to find inside old-fashioned party favors.

Each household did, however, have its own brand of guests, which helped us out a little. One house might collect pretty girls; another, down-at-the-heels aristocrats or businessmen; a third would favor show people. And by ricochet, the habitués of those houses became in turn regulars at our luncheons, which wound up gathering together a breathtaking number of the most varied guests.

So we welcomed Alain Gandouin, whom Jean-Michel had sent his chauffeur to fetch at the Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he was staying, while our parents handled greeting their contingent of guests, among whom were the director of the Fondation Maeght; Maurice Saatchi and his novelist wife; Lord Hindlip, the former chairman of Christie’s; Karl Lagerfeld; Martha Stewart, and one of her friends, a world-famous chef whose Flemish name we didn’t recognize; along with François Sallois, a star in the firmament of fusion acquisitions, and his wife Héloise. My mother made all the introductions and discovered to her amazement that
none of her daughters’ houseguests had ever heard of Martha Stewart.

“Heavens! But Oprah Winfrey, let’s say—surely that name rings a bell?” she said with gentle acidity to Laetitia Braissant, who was spending too much time simpering at my father for her taste. Whispering in my ear, she added, “The fine flower of the French intelligentsia? My eye! They’ve never left Paris, or what?”

Taking advantage of a lull in the cocktail chatter, Gérard announced—quietly this time, I’d seen to that—“Luncheon is served, Madame.” My mother swept a few people along into the winter dining room where, like ushers stationed along the red carpet at a film festival, attendants were posted at either end of the buffet to hand plates, napkins, and cutlery to the guests who would soon be hesitating before the profusion of dishes. And in spite of this bountiful spread, my mother (who would be content with a few leaves of lettuce and a morsel of cheese) still took my sister and me aside for her ritual admonition: “I’m afraid there won’t be enough, so wait until the guests have served themselves.” Which suited Marie and me just fine, given the terrible impression that always came over us, after about a day and a half at L’Agapanthe, of having done nothing but eat ever since our arrival. And it wasn’t simply our imaginations. On average, our guests
gained from four to six pounds on each visit—as the scales in each guest bathroom obligingly pointed out to them—because it was nigh impossible to resist the excellence of the dishes prepared by the cooks and the outstanding wines that accompanied them.

My mother then undertook, from her usual table, to ensure the relaxed atmosphere of a festive luncheon in the Midi without sacrificing protocol or carefully orchestrated organization. She seated her guests as strictly as if she had set place cards on the tables, but she did so without seeming to, pretending to be suddenly inspired by whoever was returning from the buffet.

“Karl, I’m kidnapping you! Come and sit with Maurice Saatchi and me.” While striking up a conversation with her tablemates, she called out playfully, “François! The girls are waiting for you at their table with Alain Gandouin!” And switching easily to English she burbled, “Martha, why don’t you go sit next to Edmond and Charles Hinley—I know they’d be delighted.”

She permitted her guests to dawdle and cruise around the buffet table at the beginning of the meal, to keep up the appropriate ambiance of cheerful freedom, but had them sit down as soon as possible, to be served at their tables by attendants who set the pace of the meal, so that it would not drag on interminably. Her guests
were thus spared even the slightest discomfort inherent in buffets, which inspire trivial worries that would have nibbled away at their pleasure: “When should I get up, and what do I do with my dirty plate? I can’t very well be the
only
one going to get some dessert! How can I interrupt my neighbor to go get more to eat? Is the cheese out on the buffet yet?” Everyone was at liberty to savor the luxury of service worthy of a grand hotel, yet in a decidedly bohemian atmosphere—even if they were (as often happened) too impressed by the quality of the food and the number of servants and important guests to even notice this. And although I teased my mother relentlessly, I was grateful to her for the trouble she took, because her refinement, all the more subtle in that it went unnoticed, implied a sense of delicacy and nuance that I found touching. How many hostesses, adding thoughtfulness and discretion to luxury, still managed to turn it into elegance?

Alain Gandouin was fat, squat, and badly dressed. He had a pasty complexion, yellow teeth, and a habit of resting his elbows on the table with his hands at right angles and then stroking the outer rim of his ear with his pinkie or ring finger. Bernard Braissant seemed enchanted to see him again. He wasn’t important enough to have many chances of meeting him in Paris, probably, since
his newspaper, which gave him the intoxicating illusion of intimacy with the major upheavals of the world by allowing him to take personally the liberation of a hostage or the election of a pope, was nevertheless of small circulation and not influential enough for Gandouin to bother taking an interest in him.

Frédéric, as usual, made bawdy jokes.

“Tolerance? Not for nothing do we French call a brothel a
maison de tolérance
,” he sniffed to Héloise Sallois, the banker’s wife, a Sunday painter whose cloying goody-goody personality had finally ticked Frédéric off.

Yet at first impression, she seemed an advantage to her husband, whom one would have expected to come equipped with a more spectacular companion, a trophy wife, as the Americans say. Short, slender, with limpid eyes, she seemed unaffectedly gentle. There was something moving and poetic in her way of wearing her age well and not striving to be beautiful. Yet in spite of her subtle, tart sense of humor, it wasn’t long before she blindsided us by steering the conversation, with a contrite air, to her hiking holidays of backpacking and roughing it in mountain shelters, the significance of which became clear when she quizzed us about the meaning of our frivolous vacations. She gave the bizarre impression of conducting a catechism class polished by
the practice of worldliness, and exuded a pious but petty austerity. Delighted with herself and with the way she imagined having avoided the perils of proselytism, she still came across as a self-righteous prig lecturing, out of pure generosity, on tolerance.

“Oh, well!” exclaimed her husband, with an attempt at humor that baffled the rest of us. “Entrust your wife to a Jesuit and your savings to a Dominican, but never the reverse!”

The talk at our table, turning to the CAC 40,
³
became so stodgy and off-putting that Frédéric kept stage-whispering remarks to me, hoping for a smile.

“Have you been elevated to the empyrean heights of the CAC 40?”

“Go to your CAC 40 immediately and stay there!”

“Well if
that’s
the way you’re going to be, I’m going home to the CAC 40!”

But for most of the luncheon, our table watched Alain Gandouin and Jean-Michel Destret seducing each other. Jean-Michel, who hoped to demonstrate his status as a captain of industry to the prestigious consultant, with whom he’d had little contact until then, used the occasion to reveal his talent for running the gamut of
emotions. As cunningly as an old gypsy violinist bringing tears to a crowd’s eyes, he played his listeners like a baby grand, shamelessly.

Which now lent credence to all those press cuttings hailing him as a showman who could galvanize his audience at the shareholders’ meetings of his firm. Still, his vocabulary struck me as ridiculous and as conventionally pretentious as the feel-good emotions he was trying to tap into at every turn. He claimed to have been not “changed” but “tempered” by success. He “spent time with” ideas, including the rather obscure one of “corporeity,” and trotting out some cheap poetry, he confessed that he had “too much living” behind him and sometimes had to pull himself together “by fighting through fits of the blues,” followed by “splashes of sunshine” in his soul. I was aghast.

As for Alain Gandouin, he went all out to dazzle Jean-Michel on the hot-button topics of the moment, not just because he was an exhibitionist and enjoyed demonstrating his gifts at analysis but also because he wouldn’t have minded picking Jean-Michel up as a client, either. He seemed to have his technique down pat. Once he’d established the superiority of his intellect, he tossed out two or three anecdotes intended to prove that he had no qualms about taking on powerful people.

It was Gay who had the last word. Primed by a few glasses of vodka, she amused us with sallies along the lines of, “I was so lovely you could hear silverware clattering onto plates whenever I entered a restaurant.” And
her
coup de grâce took the cake. Noticing that the banker’s wife, Héloise, had a scar on one leg, she asked impertinently, “Shouldn’t someone tell her she has a run in her stocking?”

As often happened, we had a world of trouble getting rid of our luncheon clients, who were enjoying themselves so much that they would willingly have stayed all afternoon to take advantage of our beach, whereas the rest of us could think only of quietly retreating to our rooms with a book, or of diving headlong, without them, into the sea.

Laetitia wanted to visit the Fondation Maeght but didn’t feel like going there by herself, so I came loudly to her rescue by suggesting various departure routes to our guests and asking if anyone needed a ride home. Jean-Michel offered his chauffeur around, for which I thanked him effusively, and it was past five o’clock when Bernard and Laetitia took their seats in the back of Jean-Michel’s Safrane to go to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, followed down our drive by a Hummer, a Maserati, a Bentley, a Twingo, and a Ferrari.

“Oof! It’s about time,” we all exclaimed and headed for our rooms.

I wasn’t tired. But I was curious: someone somewhere was running sound checks on an orchestra tuning up. I could hear the noise in my bedroom, along with the throaty rumble of outboard motors and the harangues of ice-cream vendors crisscrossing the bay in little boats, hawking their wares to the pleasure boaters. I went down to the beach.

The beach in winter