Free The Unknown Masterpiece by Honoré de Balzac Page B

which means I am a born chef. But what use is instinct without knowledge? Knowledge! I’ve spent thirty years acquiring knowledge, and you see where it’s brought me. Mine is the story of all men of talent! My discoveries, my experiments have ruined three restaurants in succession, in Naples, in Parma, in Rome. Today, now that I’m reduced to making a trade of my art, I indulge my ruling passions more than ever before. I serve these poor refugees some of my favorite dishes—and that’s how I ruin myself! Nonsense, you’ll say? I’m well aware of the fact; but what can I do? Talent is too much for me: I cannot resist creating a dish which tempts me. These guests of mine always know what’s being served, they can tell if it’s me or my wife who handles the saucepans. And what’s the result? Out of the sixty guests I would see around my table every dinner in the days when I founded this wretched restaurant, no more than twenty come today, and most of those dine on credit, thanks to me! The Piedmontese and the Savoyards have left, but the connoisseurs, the people of taste, the true Italians have stayed with me. And for them I would make any sacrifice! I often give them a dinner for twenty-five sous a head that costs me twice as much to make!”
    Signor Giardini’s aria was so redolent of naïve Neapolitan cunning that the delighted count imagined he was back at a puppet theater.
    “If that’s the case, my dear host,” he replied to the chef quite familiarly, “since chance and your confidences have revealed the secret of your daily sacrifices, permit me to double the sum I pay you.” As he spoke these words, Andrea spun a forty-franc piece on the stove, out of which munificence Signor Giardini religiously returned two francs fifty centimes, not without various discreet gestures which delighted the young nobleman.
    “In a few minutes,” Giardini continued, “you will see your
donnina
. I’ll seat you next to the husband, and if you want to be in his good graces, talk music. I’ve invited both of them, poor souls! Because of the New Year, I’ve created a special dish in which I believe I’ve surpassed myself...”
    Signor Giardini’s voice was drowned out by the noisy greetings of the guests who arrived quite capriciously, in pairs and singly, following the custom of the table d’hôte. Giardini chose to stand near the count, in order to point out his regular customers. He was determined by his comic turns to bring a smile to the lips of a man whom his Neapolitan instincts identified as a rich patron ripe for plucking.
    “That man,” he said, “is a poor composer who’d like to abandon ballads for opera, but he can’t manage it. He complains about directors, about music dealers, about everyone except himself, and of course he has no crueler enemy. You see what a florid complexion he has, what chubby self-satisfaction, how little effort there is in his features—appropriate for ballads but nothing else. The man who’s with him, the one who looks like a match seller, is one of our greatest musical celebrities, Gigelmi, the greatest orchestra conductor in all Italy; but he’s gone deaf and now he’s ending his days in misery, deprived of the very thing that made his life so beautiful. Oh! Here comes our great Ottoboni, the most naïve old man on earth, but suspected of being the wildest of all those lunatics conspiring to regenerate Italy. I wonder how such a lovable old man could ever be banished?”
    Here Giardini glanced at the count, who, realizing he was being interrogated as to his political allegiances, withdrew into an impassivity altogether Italian.
    “A man obliged to cook for the world must deny himself political opinions,
eccellenza
,” the chef announced as he continued. “But at the sight of this good man, who resembles a sheep much more than a lion, everyone would say just what I think about him to the Austrian ambassador himself! For that matter, these are times when liberty is no