Author: Natasha Frost / Source: Atlas Obscura
The invitations were almost as large as they were bleak. Printed on black-rimmed paper almost two feet in length, they bore troubling news: “Madame Grimod de La Reynière is humbled to inform you of the painful loss of her husband.
The funeral will take place today, Tuesday July 7th. A convoy will depart for the mortuary from 8 rue des Champs-Élysées, at 4 p.m. precisely.” (The year was 1812.)It must have seemed at first shocking, and then enormously odd. Parisian high society was aghast: The dead man, Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, had not been ill, nor especially old. Announcing a funeral for the very same day was exceptionally unusual. And that 4 p.m. departure (at dinner time!) must also have seemed strange. Grimod was well known in Paris as the author of Almanach des Gourmands, an eight-volume series of the world’s first restaurant guides, and would have hated to deprive his friends of a hot evening meal.
In light of these sacrifices, the ranks of faithful friends who showed up to pay their respects were allegedly thin. Inside the house, which was draped with black, the coffin sat lugubriously, illuminated by two rows of torches. A hearse waited nearby. The guests stood around, and as they waited, described the many virtues of their departed friend. There was plenty to draw from: Grimod was perhaps the world’s first food critic, dedicated to the art of gastronomy.
He was impossibly clever, with a wicked sense of humor, and had trained as a lawyer. But an unexpected noise silenced the party. Two doors flung open, revealing a long table laden with food and lit by hundreds of candles. At its head sat a smiling Grimod. He looked at the mourners and said: “Dinner is served.”Astonished, they made their way to the table where, as the story goes, there was precisely the right number of places. Still recovering from their shock, the friends struggled to make headway on the dishes as they expressed their relief. These compliments were cut short by the host, who implored them to eat before the meal got cold.
Later in the night, Grimod revealed why he had gathered them in this way: “I wanted to know who my real friends were—there’s no better way to test that than to see who would come to my funeral, even if it meant missing dinner.”
Grimod grew up in lavish surroundings. The son of a wealthy Parisian tax collector, whom he despised, he had a rare condition that deformed his fingers and led his parents to keep him out of sight as a child. Perhaps fearing the implication it might have about their genetic diversity or the strength of their bloodline, they told their friends that he had fallen into a pigpen as a small child, and has his hands eaten by hogs. For the rest of his life, Grimod…
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