French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose
sauce Nantua,
a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few
langoustes
and a turbot—and, of course, a fine
civet
made from the
marcassin,
or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, “we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace—no more ’34s and hardly any ’37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.”
M. Mirande had to his credit a hundred produced plays, including a number of great Paris hits, but he had just written his first book for print, so he said “my publisher” in a special mock-impressive tone. “An informal sketch for my definitive autobiography,” he would say of this production. The informal sketch, which I cherish, begins with the most important decision in Mirande’s life. He was almost seventeen and living in the small Breton port of Lannion—his offstage family name was Le Querrec—when his father, a retired naval officer, said to him, “It is time to decide your future career. Which will it be, the Navy or the Church?” No other choice was conceivable in Lannion. At dawn, Yves ran away to Paris. There, he had read a thousand times, all the famous wits and cocottes frequented the tables in front of the Café Napolitain, on the Boulevard des Capucines. He presented himself at the café at nine the next morning—late in the day for Lannion—and found that the place had not yet opened. Soon he became a newspaperman. It was a newspaper era as cynically animated as the corresponding period of the Bennett-Pulitzer-Hearst competition in New York, and in his second or third job he worked for a press lord who was as notional and niggardly as most press lords are; the publisher insisted that his reporters be well turned out, but did not pay them salaries that permitted cab fares when it rained. Mirande lived near the fashionable Montmartre cemetery and solved his rainy-day pants-crease problem by crashing funeral parties as they broke up and riding, gratis, in the carriages returning to the center of town. Early in his career, he became personal secretary to Clemenceau and then to Briand, but the gay theatre attracted him more than politics, and he made the second great decision of his life after one of his political patrons had caused him to be appointed
sous-préfet
in a provincial city. A
sous-préfet
is the administrator of one of the districts into which each of the ninety
départements
of France is divided, and a young
sous-préfet
is often headed for a precocious rise to high positions of state. Mirande, attired in the magnificent uniform that was then de rigueur, went to his “capital,” spent one night there, and then ran off to Paris again to direct a one-act farce. Nevertheless, his connections with the serious world remained cordial. In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, he introduced me to Colette, by that time a national glory of letters.
The regimen fabricated by Mirande’s culinary protégée, Mme. G., maintained him
en pleine forme.
When I first met him, in the restaurant during the summer of the Liberation, he was a sprightly sixty-nine. In the spring of 1955, when we renewed a friendship that had begun in admiration of each other’s appetite, he was as good as ever. On the occasion of our reunion, we began with a
truite au bleu
—a live trout simply done to
sauce Nantua,
a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few
langoustes
and a turbot—and, of course, a fine
civet
made from the
marcassin,
or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. “And while I think of it,” I once heard him say, “we haven’t had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace—no more ’34s and hardly any ’37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative.”
M. Mirande had to his credit a hundred produced plays, including a number of great Paris hits, but he had just written his first book for print, so he said “my publisher” in a special mock-impressive tone. “An informal sketch for my definitive autobiography,” he would say of this production. The informal sketch, which I cherish, begins with the most important decision in Mirande’s life. He was almost seventeen and living in the small Breton port of Lannion—his offstage family name was Le Querrec—when his father, a retired naval officer, said to him, “It is time to decide your future career. Which will it be, the Navy or the Church?” No other choice was conceivable in Lannion. At dawn, Yves ran away to Paris. There, he had read a thousand times, all the famous wits and cocottes frequented the tables in front of the Café Napolitain, on the Boulevard des Capucines. He presented himself at the café at nine the next morning—late in the day for Lannion—and found that the place had not yet opened. Soon he became a newspaperman. It was a newspaper era as cynically animated as the corresponding period of the Bennett-Pulitzer-Hearst competition in New York, and in his second or third job he worked for a press lord who was as notional and niggardly as most press lords are; the publisher insisted that his reporters be well turned out, but did not pay them salaries that permitted cab fares when it rained. Mirande lived near the fashionable Montmartre cemetery and solved his rainy-day pants-crease problem by crashing funeral parties as they broke up and riding, gratis, in the carriages returning to the center of town. Early in his career, he became personal secretary to Clemenceau and then to Briand, but the gay theatre attracted him more than politics, and he made the second great decision of his life after one of his political patrons had caused him to be appointed
sous-préfet
in a provincial city. A
sous-préfet
is the administrator of one of the districts into which each of the ninety
départements
of France is divided, and a young
sous-préfet
is often headed for a precocious rise to high positions of state. Mirande, attired in the magnificent uniform that was then de rigueur, went to his “capital,” spent one night there, and then ran off to Paris again to direct a one-act farce. Nevertheless, his connections with the serious world remained cordial. In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, he introduced me to Colette, by that time a national glory of letters.
The regimen fabricated by Mirande’s culinary protégée, Mme. G., maintained him
en pleine forme.
When I first met him, in the restaurant during the summer of the Liberation, he was a sprightly sixty-nine. In the spring of 1955, when we renewed a friendship that had begun in admiration of each other’s appetite, he was as good as ever. On the occasion of our reunion, we began with a
truite au bleu
—a live trout simply done to
Similar Books
