Peter
. . . learning the deep inner meaning of all opera from the programme book. I think the statue looks like something out of Edward Gorey.
Let them eat cake
I read (or fall asleep) in the bath. Peter commits satire.
This is a bit out of date. I’ve told you before that I’m a slow writer.
I was lying in my bath last Monday morning listening to the news on the radio. The chap who’d introduced the programme had mentioned that it was Bastille Day, and the first news item was the spokesman for some ministry telling us that an apparently inane remark by his minister had been misrepresented by the wicked media. The two items resonated, and I decided that the time had come to tell the world of what was revealed to me by hooded officials of the Bourbon Society among the secret files of the Ancien Regime Press department of the Versailles press office.
The usual story is that Queen Marie Antoinette heard an uproar from the forecourt of the palace and asked what the trouble was. She was told that Paris was in turmoil because of the shortage of bread. “Well, let them eat cake,” she is reported to have replied.
That much is true, and the words have gone down in history as a typical example of the frivolous and irresponsible attitude of the court of Versailles to the sufferings of the common people. This, according to the papers I was given, is a complete fabrication. The words were not a silly quip but a royal command. The order was conveyed to the palace kitchens, and that immense and sophisticated culinary machine trundled into action. Never was such baking. Wagons of flour, barges laded with raisins, nuts, sugar-cherries, butter, sugar and brandy flowed towards Versailles. The palace hens laid overtime. A series of gigantic cakes began to pour from the ovens. The odour of them wafted through the streets. Royal agents worked their way through the crowds, telling them of them of the feast that was being prepared for them. The tumult stilled in expectation.
This was not at all to the liking of the revolutionary hotheads who had first engineered an unnecessary bread-shortage and then brought the crowd to the palace gates. They reacted by calling the secretly unionised waiters and waitresses out on strike with a demand for “dirty money”, on the grounds that it was a long understood condition their employment that they should be required to wait only on the nobility, and that to wait on the rabble in the streets would be demeaning, and should be compensated for by a hefty pay-rise.
The production line halted. The cakes cooled. The odour of baking faded from eager nostrils. And the revolutionaries spread the rumour that the cake was after all being withheld and had been taken to be stored in the Bastille. So on the fourteenth of July 1789 the crowd roared off and stormed the ancient fortress. The history books record that the only prisoners found there were a few old men whom everyone had forgotten about. No mention, of course, is made of an absence of cake. So, famously or infamously, depending on one’s point of view, began the French Revolution.
That, however, was not the end of the matter. The queen’s would-be generosity had two further effects. It has often been remarked how astonishing it was that the ragged, ill-trained, ill-equipped and near-starving armies of the Republic were able to repel the professional armies of the other European nations when they invaded to restore the Bourbons to their throne. Three of those adjectives may be justified, the fourth is certainly not. The regiments that marched towards the frontier were closely followed by wagon-trains loaded with life-sustaining cake, rich in protein, fat and carbohydrates, as fresh as ever thanks to the preservative quality of pre-Napoleon* brandy, in effect the equivalent of several hundred thousand energy bars. No wonder the armies of the republic fought like tigers and the pride of European soldiery were sent reeling.
The second effect was less world-changing but in its way even more remarkable. The royal bakers were incapable of baking a plain cake, so the ones they made in response to the royal command were lavishly iced (frosted) in the usual manner. When the time came to send them to the front it was recognised that these masterpieces of the patissier’s art ought to be preserved, so they were stored in a back room at the Louvre. There they remained until an engineering student, researching the structural properties of icing-sugar for his doctoral thesis, rediscovered them. He is said to have gazed at the most majestic of them entranced, and exclaimed “Voila! C’est ça que demande Paris!”
The only pity is that the most familiar object on the Parisian sky-line should take its name from an obscure provincial engineer and not from a great and generous queen.
* * *
*Napoleon himself was of course much too young to have a brandy distilled, let alone matured enough, to commemorate his reign as emperor. The usurper did, however, already have a very different drink named after him. At his birth his mother, as was the custom, handed him over to a wet-nurse to feed. This woman, however, was only able to apply for the job as she had recently given birth to triplets, so she needed the money and concealed the fact. Naturally enough she preferred to feed her own offspring first, and didn’t produce enough milk for four. With the help of her aunt, a skilled herbalist, she devised a formula of cow’s milk laced with herbs which appeared to do the trick, and could even be dried and stored. What effect this double rejection, both by his natural mother and her surrogate, may have had on the infant emperor’s psyche can only be surmised. His short stature, pallid complexion and general ill-health may also be the consequence of diet deficient in important nutrients at an early stage in his life.
When his parents discovered the deception his mother was of course outraged. His father, on the other hand, with typically Corsican entrepreneurial flair, saw a business opportunity, and built a plant to manufacture the formula, and then marketed it under the name of Lait Bébé Napoleon. In his early career Napoleon used to deny any connection with the stuff, though the profits from its sale had helped to put his though military college, and as soon as he had the power he suppressed its manufacture and sale.
At the same time he obliterated, as far as he could, all true record of his early years, and substituted the fictitious account of his early years that can be found in all subsequent biographies. He was, however, unable to reach the only veridical documentation of his early years which the Bourbon Society had smuggled out of Paris and with the connivance of the Dean and Chapter, stored in a secret vault beneath Westminster Abbey.
All that now remains is for somebody to make a blockbuster film of these events, though perhaps the Bourbon Society doesn’t carry quite the resonance as the Order of the Knights Templar of St John of the Cross, or whatever they’re called.
Proofs
I finished reading the new page proofs of SUNSHINE in one great almost-hundred-page wallop today. I am brain dead.* It’s a good thing Part Four moves as fast as it does and drags–and dragged–me along or the book would never have got written. Even now, even this umpty-umpth read-through, I get to the end of Part Three, with Sunshine sitting on her balcony watching the sun set and waiting for Con to turn up so they can seek out Bo for their final confrontation, and . . . I want to stop and go do something else. Even preventing myself from getting up and finding some dishes to wash or some dog crate to divest of its accumulation of crumbs**, I find myself reaching for the nail file*** or positively needing another cup of tea.
All my books have no-no-I-don’t-want-to-go-there scenes† in them, some worse than others. DEERSKIN is the worst. SUNSHINE is probably second. I have said many times that I wrote SUNSHINE for wimps like me, wimps who love Dracula†† but can’t stick horror. Who love the sex/blood, the monster/lover, power/death thing but like it, you know, a little restrained. Seven years ago when I was writing it–even five years ago when it came out–the New Vampire hadn’t really been invented yet, and it was still mostly about mayhem.††† When the first edition of SUNSHINE was racked in horror I got all twittery and frantic, because its audience wasn’t going to find it there.
Five years later there’s been such a burst of softcore–of the stuff I wanted to read in the first place–SUNSHINE looks almost hard. O tempora, o mores, I guess. Whatever, the last battle with Bo is a rough one and I’m right there with Sunshine peering into the bottomless pit and wondering if her hands are going to go rogue, as she’s spent most of the book wondering if all of her is. It’s funny, I write these love-loyalty-friendship-and-honour books but my underlying world view is still pretty bleak.‡ Maybe we will all be under the dark in a hundred years. And then again maybe we won’t, because if there are Bos out there, there are Sunshines too. And Cons.
And Mels. If I ever manage to write a sequel, one of reasons why will be to do something with Mel, who is about the most criminally underutilised character I’ve ever been responsible for. I couldn’t help it–it’s the way the story went–but I can not like it. And I do. I don’t like it a lot. I also want to find out more about what the Blaises are up to. I know they’re up to something. Trust me, I’m even more aware of all the loose ends than you are: but I can still only write what I’m given to write, and what I know about SUNSHINE II, while there’s quite a lot of it, remains obstinately fragmentary.
* * *
* I am also a moron, which is not the same thing, although some of the effects may be similar. I’ve been so hysterical about having two sets of proofs to read in the same fortnight–although after I screamed and started trying to climb out of my office window (which is one of those that opens sideways on a sliding bar and is therefore hell to get through) which might be a more graphic symbol of despair if the well, which is excellently placed beneath it, didn’t have an enormous grill across it covered in potted camellias, they gave me an extension–that when I reached the end of DRAGONHAVEN I merely set it down and picked up SUNSHINE. Which is to say I did not send my corrections in. And now what with inappropriately long hacks on a lovely grey mare of my acquaintance and Sunday service ring followed by an unusually long hellhound walk^ I didn’t get round to checking my emails till tonight. And there’s a bright, friendly little note from my editor from last Friday, saying, you have an extension on SUNSHINE but we really need anything for DRAGONHAVEN. The gods wept. The gods finished weeping and all rounded on my fairy godmother who^^ put up her hands and squeaked, Yes, she’s a moron, I know! But she writes books that people take to bed with them and drop in the bath and read on glaciers in the fog! Give her a break! –So I haven’t been struck by lightning after all. And tomorrow morning I get to spend writing up notes for DRAGONHAVEN.^^^
And, to all of you who have over the last year written to point out helpfully that bats are missing from DRAGON’s, or Jake’s, list of genuine wing-flapping flyers, they will be reinstated in the paperback, and the great mystery is how they fell out of the final manuscript and no one caught this. I’m crossest at myself, of course, but this is the sort of thing that someone should have noticed, some nice professional eye who hadn’t seen it all fourteen hundred and twelve times before and couldn’t focus any more on what’s there and what isn’t. DRAGONHAVEN more than usual for me had stuff put in and stuff taken out and stuff put in and stuff taken out, and bats are only one of the things I lost track of. I still read the page proofs this time–and how many times have I seen the book in its final form?–wondering where this or that scene or paragraph or joke had gone.
And I probably do know what happened to the bats: at one point there was a whole little riff about weird wildlife, including bats, and including that Australia did the best weird wildlife on the planet, and that really duck-billed platypuses should also fly: sort of the James Bond car of the animal world.+ And when I was going through for the fourteen hundred and eleventh time I decided this was a digression we could do without. But how all bats (except one or two references to them living in Smokehill caves) disappeared from all digressions about the life of dragons, I don’t know, and it’s impossible to do anything now but thrust in a ‘and bats’ somewhere. Novel writing is not an exact science. You may have noticed.
^ Of which more anon. Tomorrow, maybe.
^^ Word wants my fairy godmother to be a that, not a who! Stale doughnuts and bad coffee to all Microsoft grammarians!
^^^ Humming a little tune here and looking innocently at the sky. Well, New York is five hours later than we are, and I’m going to go watch Jenny ride the New Project and Connie again tomorrow morning.
+ I had a brief . . . and I do mean brief . . . glance at a couple of earlier drafts, thinking that if I could find that outtake I’d post it. Obviously I didn’t find it.
** One explanation for the unfaltering ribbiness of hellhounds is that not only don’t they eat, anything they take back to their bed with them and appear to eat, they merely render into crumbs and leave all over the floor of the crate.
*** You would think, the amount of time I spend trying to escape my authorial destiny, that I would always have short clean tidily filed fingernails. You would be wrong. It is one of the mysteries of life why my fingernails are always dirty, even if I haven’t done anything but sit at my desk. It’s also a natural law that in the hour before your piano lesson your fingernails will grow a quarter inch.
† Peter says he’s written scenes he’d never be able to read in someone else’s book.
†† And BUFFY
††† Except Angel, and when he got his own series I stopped watching because he was too much about mayhem.
‡ OUTLAWS is still my bleakest book in terms of world view–despite everything Sunshine says about her world. And the final face off with Guy of Gisbourne is right up there with the confrontation with Bo.
The spring of the moot
It was very clear
