I can still recall that wondrous first glimpse of Le Saule Pleureur. It was, to me, more stunning than the Taj in Bombay. It wasn’t its size, but its perfection: the lichen-covered rock garden, the fluffy white duvets, the old stables with the leaded windows. Everything fit perfectly, the very essence of understated European elegance that was so completely foreign to my own upbringing.

But the more I try and recall that moment when I first set eyes on Le Saule Pleureur, the more certain I am I also saw a white face looking darkly down at me from an attic window.

Lumière

Chapter Five

The old woman staring down at me from the window across the street from so many years ago, that first day we moved into the Dufour estate, that face belonged to Madame Gertrude Mallory. The story I tell is God’s truth, even if I did not witness every event firsthand; the fact is many of the details of my own story were revealed to me only years after the fact, when Mallory and the others at long last told me their version of events.

But this you must know: Madame Mallory, across the street from the Dufour estate, was an innkeeper from a long line of distinguished hoteliers, originally from the Loire. She was also very much the culinary nun, a chef who had lived alone in the attic rooms above Le Saule Pleureur for thirty-four years by the time we arrived in Lumière. Just as the Bach family turned out classical musicians, so, too, the Mallorys had reared generation after generation of great French hoteliers, and Gertrude Mallory was no exception.

At the age of seventeen, Mallory was sent to the best hotel school in Geneva to continue her education, and it was there she acquired a taste for the rugged mountain range along the French and Swiss border. An awkward, sharp-tongued young woman with little talent for making friends, Mallory spent her spare time hiking alone through the Alps and the Jura, until one weekend she discovered Lumière. Shortly after her graduation an aunt died and left Mallory an inheritance, and the young chef promptly converted her windfall into a large house in this mountain outpost, remote Lumière perfectly suiting her taste for the austere life of the kitchen.

And there she went to work. Over the next decades Mallory diligently applied her first-rate education and stamina for long hours in the kitchen, building what cognoscenti eventually considered one of France’s finest small country hotels—Le Saule Pleureur.

She was a classicist by education and instinct. A rare collection of cookbooks consumed her private attic rooms from floor to ceiling, an archive that grew like a fungus above and around her good pieces of furniture, such as the seventeenth-century gueridonor the Louis XV–style walnut bergère armchair. The book collection was, it must be said, of international renown, built discreetly over thirty years by simply applying her good eye and a modest amount of money to the nation’s book bins and country auctions.

Her most valuable book was an early edition of De Re Coquinaria by Apicius, the only surviving cookbook of ancient Rome. On her days off Mallory frequently sipped chamomile tea and sat alone in her attic flat with this rare document on her lap, lost in the past, marveling at the sheer range of the Roman kitchen. She so admired Apicius’s versatility, how he could handle dormice and flamingos and porcupines just as easily as pork and fish.

Of course, even though most of Apicius’s recipes were quite incompatible with modern palates—relying as they did on sickening doses of honey—Mallory did possess an inquisitive mind. And as she also had a taste for testicles, particularly a fighting bull’s criadillas prepared Basque-style, Madame Mallory inevitably and most memorably re-created for her guests Apicius’s recipe for lumbuli—lumbuli being the Latin for the testicles of young bulls that the Roman chef stuffed with pine nuts and powdered fennel seed, then pan-seared in olive oil and fish pickle before roasting in the oven. Well, that was the kind of chef Mallory was. Classical, but challenging, always challenging. Even of her guests.

The De Re Coquinaria, of course, was only the oldest cookbook in her library. The collection rolled right through time, documenting century after century of changing culinary tastes and epochs, ending finally with the handwritten 1907 version of Margaridou: The Journal of an Auvergne Cook, and that simple countrywoman’s recipe for the classic French onion soup.

But it was precisely this rigorous intellectual approach to cuisine that made Madame Mallory a chef’s chef, a master technician much admired by the other leading chefs of France. And it was this reputation among the cognoscenti that one day prompted a national television station to invite Mallory up to Paris for a studio interview.

Lumière was a rather provincial outpost, so it was not surprising Madame Mallory’s television debut became a local event, villagers all across the valley tuning in to FR3 to watch their very own Madame Mallory rattle off fascinating culinary facts on air. And as the villagers sipped rough marcin the town’s bars or in the comforts of farmhouse parlors, a flickering Mallory up on the box explained how, during the nineteenth century’s Franco-Prussian War, starving Parisians survived the long Prussian siege of their capital by eating dogs, cats, and rats. There was an amazed roar when Madame Mallory explained that the 1871 edition of Larousse Gastronomique, quite simply the text of classic French cuisine, recommended skinning and gutting rats found in wine cellars—so much more flavorful. It further advised, the chef haughtily informed the television audience, rubbing the rat in olive oil and crushed shallots, grilling it over a wood fire made from smashed wine barrels, and serving it with a Bordelaisesauce, but Curnonsky’s recipe, of course. Well, you can imagine. Instantly Madame Mallory was a minor celebrity across all France, not just in little Lumière.

The point is, Mallory never relied on her family connections but had, in her own right, earned her place among France’s culinary establishment. And she took seriously the responsibility that came with this elite position, tirelessly writing letters to the papers when it was necessary to safeguard France’s culinary traditions from the meddling of the EU bureaucrats in Brussels, so eager to impose their ridiculous standards. In particular it was her cri du coeur in defense of French butchering methods—printed in the radical booklet Vive La Charcuterie Française—that was so much admired by the nation’s opinion makers.

And that was why the space around Mallory’s priceless collection of antique cookbooks was stuffed with framed awards and letters of appreciation, from Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Baron de Rothschild and Bernard Arnault. The flat simply reflected a lifetime of considerable achievement, including a letter from the Élysée Palace on the occasion of her Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

There was, however, still one small bit of unoccupied wall in her crowded top-floor flat, a bald spot just above her favorite red leather armchair. In this corner of her quarters Mallory hung her most prized possessions, two gilt-framed articles, each clipped from Le Monde. The article on the left announced her first Michelin star, in May 1979. The article on the right, dated March 1986, announced her second star. Mallory had reserved an empty space on the wall for the third article. It had not come.

And there we are. Madame Mallory reached her sixty-fifth birthday the day before we arrived in Lumière, and that evening her loyal manager, Monsieur Henri Leblanc, along with the rest of Le Saule Pleureur’s staff, gathered in the kitchen at closing to present her with a cake and to sing happy birthday.