MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES1814: Freed at last, Picaud recovers his fortune and travels north toward Paris, transformed and beyond recognition. The steaming cocotte, the goblet of Burgundy, the serving hand—his metamorphosis claims the table before it claims his vengeance.
In the autumn of 1814, within a Dijon coaching inn, former convict François Picaud sits before a steaming cocotte to devour his hatred before striking Paris.
Seven years of darkness had been required for the shoemaker of Nîmes to be utterly erased beneath stone. Seven years during which the biting wind of the Piedmontese Alps swept through the embrasures of the Fort of Fenestrelle, whistling the same sepulchral dirge against the broken loins of François Picaud. In the imperial prison registers, his name had dwindled to an illegible scrawl of faded ink, the dry annotation of a political suspect cast into solitary confinement without trial upon the word of an infamous denunciation. Yet, in the spring of 1814, as Napoleon’s eagles foundered in the mud of Champagne, the rusted bolts shrieked one final time. The Austrian wardens flung open the iron gates with utter indifference toward the specters that drifted forth into the day.
Picaud stepped out into the open air, but the ingenuous artisan who had once dreamed of wedding Marguerite was no more. Crossing the postern gate, he cast off the withered slough of his youth and bore away a secret wrung from the dying gasps of an aged Milanese priest expired on the neighboring straw: a colossal fortune buried beneath the flagstones of a Lombard palazzo. A few months later, having exhumed his benefactor’s diamonds, sequins, and gold from the plains of the Po, the man turned aside from any thought of oblivion or gilded exile. Clothed in finely tailored black broadcloth, bearing the waxy complexion of the tomb and eyes alight with an apocalyptic glare, he scaled the Mont-Cenis pass and wheeled his horse northward. The revenant was marching toward Burgundy.
The mail coach that set him down at dusk before the ramparts of Dijon rattled over paving stones glistening with freezing rain. The Empire had fallen, the Bourbons paraded once more through the Tuileries, and France bound up her wounds in an uneasy mingling of relief and rancor. Stepping heavily down from the footboard, Picaud carried as his sole baggage an immense saddler’s leather portmanteau, secured by triple iron clasps, the sheer weight of which drew a wince from the postilion. This chest held neither a change of linen nor the trinkets of a traveler, but stacks of banknotes, handfuls of freshly minted gold louis, and a slender notebook bound in vellum, in which four names were inscribed in red ink: Loupian, Chaubart, Solari, Allut.
“Prison walls may have ears, but the post-roads of Burgundy have wayside taverns where vengeance halts to drink.”
The traveler slipped a silver crown into the driver’s hand and plunged at a deliberate pace into the labyrinthine alleys of old Dijon, shunning the brightly illuminated coaching inns where the garrison officers took their ease. He sought a shadow, a discreet refuge, one of those provincial tables where no questions are put to a taciturn guest so long as he settles his reckoning in good royal coin. At the sign of a modest lodging tucked into the corner of a dark, wind-scoured lane, he pushed open the heavy studded oak door. The dense odor of mutton tallow, burning vine shoots, and slow-simmered meat seized his throat like a sudden vertigo.
In the low-ceilinged hall, the master of the house wiped the corner table with a flick of his apron, where the newcomer had just taken his seat, back pressed against the masonry to keep the room in full view. Picaud uttered scarcely ten words. With a curt gesture, he called for whatever was bubbling on the hearth: a heavy cast-iron cocotte exhaling fragrant plumes of beef long braised in the wine of the nearby slopes, enriched with browned lardons, pearl onions, and wild berries. A glazed stoneware pitcher, brimming with a coarse, dark, and robust Beaune wine, was set before him beside a thick-crusted peasant loaf.
For seven winters, his sustenance had consisted solely of moldering beans and foul water drawn from the fortress cisterns. The contrast was so violent that his hands, once hardened by the awl and the leather-knife, trembled as he took up his pewter fork. Yet this repast was no mere gourmet respite: it was a somber liturgy, the blood communion of a man relearning the savors of the living world only to sow death more surely within it. Each mouthful of that melting flesh seemed to restore the sinews wasted by chains; each draught of that thick, fleshy vintage, coursing down his parched throat, washed away the bitterness of the dungeon and supplanted it with pure venom. Around him, the local merchants laughed lustily, clinking goblets to the return of peace; he, motionless as a wax effigy, watched them without blinking, savoring in this earthly feast the first down payment on his terrible reckoning.
The night wore on, the tallow dips drowned in pools of gray grease, and the common room emptied of its revellers. Left alone beneath the soot-blackened rafters, François Picaud did not sleep. He drew from his greatcoat the miniature ledger of his enmities and laid it open upon the cloth stained with crimson wine. By the flickering gleam of the last candle-end, he tallied in his mind the gold accumulated in his portmanteau. He already knew that brute force would never suffice to chastise the wretches who had robbed him of his youth, his betrothed, and his honor. What he required was the genius of disguise, the patience of the spider, and the munificence of an Eastern prince.
It was there, in the very heart of the Dijon mists, gorged on the primeval strength of the Burgundian soil, that the outcast forged his final avatar. He would not ascend to Paris in the rags of a destitute laborer crying out for justice before corrupt tribunals. He would enter masked, transfigured by the wealth of Italy, unrecognizable under the guise of an enigmatic retainer or a clandestine abbé, prepared to insinuate himself into the very hearth of Loupian. When he rose at dawn to settle with the innkeeper, leaving on the rough-hewn table a gratuity that struck the host pale with astonishment, Picaud cast one last backward glance southward, where his Alpine fetters lay dormant. The innocent shoemaker had perished irrevocably in the fosses of Fenestrelle; the avenging specter, nourished upon the black wine of Burgundy, had just mounted the Paris diligence.