With Baudelaire in Brussels, #12
The men stop for lunch. Baudelaire is disgusted by the sight of water on the table; he orders Pommard wine. French fries are to be eaten with one's fingers. “It is heresy to stab them with a fork.”
To mark the 160th anniversary of Georges Barral’s trip to Brussels and his five-day visit with the poet Charles Baudelaire, I am publishing my translation of the first four days from his memoir on Substack. You can find the previous instalments here.
We quicken our pace. After a few hundred metres we reach the old Hôtel des Colonnes, which was Hugo’s summer residence in 1861. As we make our way, Baudelaire explains his exact feelings about the head of the Romantic movement. He remains deeply grateful for the support Hugo gave him during the Fleurs du mal trial. He admires without reservation the poet who wrote the Orientales, the Feulles d’Automne, the Contemplations, and the Légende des Siècles. He is overwhelmed by the writer’s genius and productivity. But he holds the character of the political man in infinitely lower esteem, a revolutionary who fell into demagoguery ... here Baudelaire stops, falls silent, looks at me with a smile on his lips, and continues, “I was going to say it was ignoble demagoguery, but let us call it international.”
However, he has retained a warm literary piety for Hugo, albeit slightly reduced by the grandiloquence and social tendencies of Les Misérables. Baudelaire hoped to find him when he arrived in Brussels on April 16 of that year (1864). He was bitterly disappointed by the Belgian desert he found, where he did not meet a single Frenchman of note. There was no conversation, no soul with whom to speak, no courtesy, each Belgian was a mute, self-contained fortress. And to add to his misery, he learned recently that Victor Hugo had rented a small house in Saint-Josse, but given his eldest son Charles’s upcoming wedding, he would not move there until March of 1865.
By this point we had nearly reached the centre of the populous village of Mont-Saint-Jean, which comes after the town of Waterloo. The tip of the terrain extends to the imposing road to Ohain. The plain below, where the terrible battle was fought on June 18, 1815, belongs to the communities of Braine-l’Alleud, Merbes-Braine, Lillois, Plancenoit, and Ohain.
The Hôtel des Colonnes rises before us. It is a modest inn, and the entrance is decorated with two slim columns. It is situated on the corner of de la Chaussée and the road to Nivelles.
We enter after we have surveyed the poet’s balcony. We are hungry, as it is nearly one o’clock. We remove our coats quickly. Baudelaire takes off his black cloak, and I my brown raglan. It is time to order lunch.
“Mr. Victor Hugo’s usual order,” exclaims Baudelaire. “And surprise us with it!”
“That is very easy, gentlemen,” replies Joseph Dehaze, the older of the establishment’s two owners. “You are certainly not the first ones to ask for it. Mr. Hugo’s typical meal has become a tradition in this house. It will be served to you near the windows overlooking the road, and on the very table where Mr. Hugo sat when he was not dining in his room.”
They put down a tablecloth, two place-mats, four glasses — a larger and a smaller one for each guest — and an immense carafe of very clear water. Baudelaire is taken aback, considers it with surprise, and repeats a joke that he often made at his own expense (for people often used to refer to it and imply that he was a drunkard): “That water must be removed. The sight of it makes me ill,” he says.
They soon brought each of us three eggs, laid out in the shape of a triangle. They are lightly vinegared, salted and peppered to just the right extent, and swimming in an abundant pool of black butter. The steam rising from our two plates is most inviting. We soon give them a hearty welcome. We are barely finished when they place a large earthenware bowl in the middle of the table, spilling over with yellow fried potatoes, crisp and tender at the same time. It is a masterpiece of frying, a rare thing in Belgium.
Baudelaire says they are exquisite. He picks them up slowly with his fingers, one by one, and chews them lightly – the classical method as outlined by Brillat-Savarin. For that matter it is an essentially Parisian gesture, as fried potatoes are a Parisian invention. It is heresy to stab them with a fork. We call Mr. Josepf Dehaze to give him our compliments, and he assures us that Mr. Victor Hugo also ate them with his fingers. He tells us it was the French exiles who introduced them to Brussels in 1851. Before that date, fried potatoes were unheard of in Brussels.
“It was Mr. Victor’s two sons who showed us how to cut and fry them in olive oil or lard, and not in odious beef fat or mutton grease, as many of my compatriots do out of ignorance or parsimony. We prepare a great many of them here, especially on Sundays – in the French style, not the Belgian.” Concluding his explanation, Mr. Dehaze asks us if we would like to “re-offend.” We agree eagerly, and a second plate of golden fries soon appears on the table. At one side is a tall shaker, pierced with numerous holes, from which to sprinkle salt as required. The shaker was one of Mr. Hugo’s dining necessities.
These copious and simple dishes are followed by an opulent piece of Gruyère cheese. Once again, according to the law of Brillat-Savarin (the gourmet’s patron saint), this is the proper complement to fries. Coffee rounds off this frugal and substantial meal. It is served to us by one of the owner’s sisters, Miss Dehaze, a spirited Walloon who sing-songs when she speaks. The bowls are large, and decorated with fantastical blue flowers. “Mr. Hugo admired them,” she says. “He used to say that it must be ‘old Rouen.’ ” They bring us bread in the Belgian fashion, which is to say in buttered slices. The wine is brought to us by the elder Mr. Dehaze. It is a slightly older Bordeaux, but not too old. Our cup-bearer tells us while we eat that Mr. Hugo drank wine mixed with water. He would swig it down in large glassfuls. When it came time for the cheese, they would bring him “his” bottle of Pommard. He would pour it into a small glass himself, the same quantity each time. Then he would replace the cork carefully and the bottle would be taken away and put back into the cupboard along with his serviette and napkin ring.
“And how many meals did Hugo make out of one bottle of wine?”, asked Baudelaire.
“About six meals, more or less.”
“Ah well,” continues Baudelaire, who looks at me and says without waiting for my approval, “Bring us a bottle of Pommard. Only do not expect us to leave any for this evening. We will empty the bottle. There are two of us, and we are not family men either!”
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Another wonderful installment! I especially loved 're-offend', a makeshift word to cover an inadequacy of English. When I compared it to the French verb 'récidiver', I realized that English has no verb stemming from the noun 'recidivism'. Hence 're-offend' or 'reoffend' will have to do. But there was something delightful about eating seconds as a version of committing a new offence!
Mesmerizing!