The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain Page B

Spanish girl serving the food brought out a large silver platter. The fowl took pride of place in the centre of the dish, but was covered in a dubious-looking sauce and surrounded by shrivelled apricots. Bernard had a breast which turned out to be so dry it made him thirsty for the rest of the night.
    Luckily, the wine was within reach. He intended to employ a straightforward technique: keep offering the bottle around to his neighbours so he could top himself up as often as he liked. The conversation hummed around the topic of visits to the theatre, cinema and concerts.
    â€˜We had dinner next to Esther Kerwitcz just last night,’ said Charlotte Lavallière, certain of getting a reaction. She let the gasps die down before telling the story of visiting the splendid brasserie with a couple of friends and spotting the famous pianist just a few tables away, having dinner with her husband and son.
    Marie-France Chastagnier was envious – what luck to have seen such a great artist close up! – and gushed as she recalled an Esther Kerwitcz concert at the Salle Pleyel three years earlier. Her husband made a face and declared he preferred Rubinstein, to which Marie-Laurence de Rochefort replied that Rubinstein didn’t play Bach.
    Jean-Patrick Le Baussier brought up the name Glenn Gould. Colonel Larnier stated matter-of-factly that all the great musicians were Jewish.
    For his part, Gérard Peraunot pointed out that EstherKerwitcz was a very beautiful woman, earning him a furious glance from his wife, and then they moved on to talking about their children.
    A variety of anecdotes about Scout and Brownie weekends ensued, and plans to make pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela were shared. Everyone sang the praises of Father Humbert, who was so good with the children and whom they described deferentially as a holy man. (No one had any inkling that the clergyman would be arrested sixteen years later as part of a huge police operation which would uncover no less than 87,000 indecent images of children on the hard drive of his computer.)
    The upbringing of their offspring led them on to the topic of television, root of all evil, a devilish device which did little more than hold a mirror up to their decadent society.
    The presenter Stéphane Collaro was singled out for particular scorn: not content with dulling the brains of the nation’s youth, his programme
Cocoboy
was also guilty of tainting Saturday nights with ‘you know what’ since it showed – or so they had been told – a girl performing a most risqué striptease.
    The Larniers confessed to keeping their set solely for the purposes of watching
Apostrophes
. This weekly dose of culture left them with the impression that they had read every book discussed on the show. The colonel’s wife thus felt quite entitled to give her opinion on any novel reviewed on
Apostrophes
, while adding that she had not actually got around to buying a copy. Serge Gainsbourg’s appearanceon the show the previous December, tanked up on Pastis 51 and Gitanes and treating a fellow guest like a peasant, had outraged the Larniers. They had seriously considered getting rid of their television, but the reassuring sight of a respectable writer on the following week’s programme put that rash idea out of their heads.
    The mere mention of Michel Polac provoked a chorus of indignation from the guests, but – thank goodness – the new owner of channel TF1 had just rid France of the shouting match that was
Droit de réponse
. Hubert and Frédérique de la Tour were struggling to follow all this, but they weren’t sorry; they prided themselves on not owning a television.
    Their steadfast refusal to purchase a set meant one whole French family had never heard of Michel Drucker; a permanent chat-show fixture, he could have been a fourth-century Hindu mathematician for all they knew. They knew exactly who the Mourousis were: an old aristocratic