The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain Page A

Aslan

 

    ASLAN
    Â 
    Monsieur,
    Â 
    My press secretary has again passed on a letter from you. As you are being so persistent, I will try to make my reply as clear as possible: I don’t have your hat any more because I lost it in a brasserie. To be even more specific, that evening there was an unfortunate mix-up. The cloakroom attendant gave me back a hat that was identical to yours in every particular, except that the golden initials were not F.M., they were B.L. I only noticed this when it was too late. I went back to the brasserie the next day but the hat was no longer there.
    I hope that I have enlightened you sufficiently in this matter and I would ask you not to write to me again. I like my solitude, very rarely answer the telephone and almost never reply to letters.
    Â 
    Yours sincerely,
    Â 
    Pierre Aslan

 

    ASLAN
    Â 
    Monsieur,
    Â 
    Please find enclosed the answer to your third request, the address of the brasserie where I lost the hat that means so much to you, along with details of the exact date and time of the loss. This now concludes our correspondence once and for all.
    You will also find enclosed a bottle of my latest creation which you may offer to the woman of your choice. This letter requires no response.
    Â 
    Aslan

 
    Bernard Lavallière slammed the door of his Peugeot 505. The dinner had gone badly and his wife had not said a word to him since their bust-up in the car. Pierre and Marie-Laure de Vaunoy had invited them to their apartment on the Champ-de-Mars, along with three other couples. It should have been like any other dinner party, when you expect at least to relish the conversation, if not what’s on the menu.
    The food is always terrible in town, especially amongst the aristocracy. The upper classes might get out the family china and crested silverware, but they very often take a perverse pleasure in serving food the cobbler or the concierge would turn their nose up at.
    The only way to get a decent dinner is to eat with the people, Bernard liked to say; not that he had sat down to eat ‘with the people’ for several decades, but he cherished childhood memories of the housekeeper’s cooking at the family estate in Beaune – memories he had no one to share with and which from time to time, when the meal in frontof him was really too awful to stomach, he felt he could almost taste again.
    Yet the evening’s drama could not wholly be put down to the de Vaunoys’ cooking. ‘It is worse than a crime, Sire, it’s a mistake,’ Antoine Boulay de la Meurthe had said to Napoleon on learning of the execution of the Duc d’Enghien in the moat at Vincennes. Bernard Lavallière hadn’t put anyone in front of a firing squad, but his mistake had rung out like a gunshot in the middle of the meal.
    Â 
    It all began with a glass of champagne – just the one, and distinctly mediocre – served with dry crackers the hostess was eager to point out had been bought on the cheap from Félix Potin.
    The guests had arrived punctually, a few at a time. They rang the doorbell to be greeted by cries of ‘Ah, here they are! Do come in!’ or ‘Why, look who it is! Come in, we’ve been longing to see you …’ – the usual over- the-top exclamations hammed up further by Marie-Laure de Vaunoy’s apparent amazement at finding each invitee on her doorstep, as though it were by some incredible coincidence that they had turned up there.
    The ladies left their shawls and handbags in the entrance hall before making their way to the living room where the men were shaking hands and complaining about how long it had taken to find a parking space. The husbands who had arrived before them sympathised with resigned, manly sighs.
    In the car on the way there, Bernard had already begunto dread that they would once again have to endure the de Vaunoys’ chicken with apricots. After a starter of cucumber and cream, the