silver vessel and, turning away from the prince, but towards me, deliberately spat out the melted residue of what he had been tasting. This was not a palate-piquing spectacle.
The prince cackled maliciously. “I look forward to the day when someone has poisoned it, you ancient swine, and you fall to the floor and die, foaming at the mouth and writhing in agony.”
Rupert’s dried-apple countenance stayed noncommittal as, using two spoons, he built, within a capacious golden bowl, a Himalayan peak of ice cream. Sebastian watched the project with every appearance of mesmerization. When the mountain had at last been sculptured to Rupert’s taste, the old man lifted a gold sauceboat high as his shoulder and poured from it a stream of butterscotch syrup onto the summit of the vanilla Everest. From other golden vessels he took, in turn, whipped cream, crushed nuts, chocolate sprinkles, those edible little silver beads, and finally a garishly red maraschino cherry.
When Sebastian saw that the dish had been completed, his importunate cries became more shrill, and when the old retainer at last delivered it to him he fell upon it with a ferocity for which the word “attacked” would be a euphemism. So swift was his work that for an instant I believed he was using no tool but rather shoveling it in with both bare fists. But after my eye adjusted to the motion I could identify, along with the spoon in his right hand, a fork in his left, and though he ate so rapidly, he employed these instruments with the deftness of a surgeon.
No sooner had the last spoonful gone from bowl to prince than a lackey whisked away the former and old Rupert supplied his sovereign with a napkin the size of a beach towel. Sebastian made vigorous use of this linen sheet, but in point of fact I saw not the least besmirchment of his mouth after the furious bout with the elaborately garnished ice cream.
For a few moments after the withdrawal of the empty bowl Sebastian sat with closed eyes, his expression one of momentarily weary sweet sadness, suggesting the well-known postcoital effect, but then his eyes sprang open and he looked at me for the first time since I had sat down.
“It is probably not easy to accept the display you’ve just seen as not gluttony but a heroic effort to allay it.”
“Indeed.”
“By eating a sweet course as opener, one kills a good deal of the appetite for the rest of the meal,” said the prince, earnestly compressing his several chins against his upper chest. “It’s an American technique.”
“Sounds like it,” I could not forbear saying: I really had lost some of my awe of him after witnessing the foregoing scene.
“And the infantilism serves an emotional purpose,” he went on. “Being royal is to be deprived of the warmer human feelings. You may not be aware of it, Mr. Wren. It was not my mother the queen who gave me suck, but rather a peasant wetnurse whom I never knew, and I was reared by nannies and servants. In a word, that mound of ice cream topped with the preserved cherry might well represent the royal dug I was denied.”
In America a grasp of basic Freudianism was now enjoyed by millhand and shopgirl: it was instructive for me to hear such platitudes from an absolute monarch.
I offered, “Or perhaps that of the wetnurse?”
Sebastian stared above my head. “No, the whipped cream and other embellishments would suggest a higher class.” He fluttered his long lashes: he really had very nice eyes. “In any event it’s a theory that derives from the studies of a certain professor who was not appreciated at the University of Vienna, but my great-grandfather saw the fellow’s possibilities and brought him here. Froelich?”
“Or perhaps Freud, Your Royal Highness?”
Sebastian shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“He became quite well known.”
“For this theory of the substitute tit?” The prince smiled. “Is it not extraordinary what frivolous enterprises will succeed in the world beyond Saint
The prince cackled maliciously. “I look forward to the day when someone has poisoned it, you ancient swine, and you fall to the floor and die, foaming at the mouth and writhing in agony.”
Rupert’s dried-apple countenance stayed noncommittal as, using two spoons, he built, within a capacious golden bowl, a Himalayan peak of ice cream. Sebastian watched the project with every appearance of mesmerization. When the mountain had at last been sculptured to Rupert’s taste, the old man lifted a gold sauceboat high as his shoulder and poured from it a stream of butterscotch syrup onto the summit of the vanilla Everest. From other golden vessels he took, in turn, whipped cream, crushed nuts, chocolate sprinkles, those edible little silver beads, and finally a garishly red maraschino cherry.
When Sebastian saw that the dish had been completed, his importunate cries became more shrill, and when the old retainer at last delivered it to him he fell upon it with a ferocity for which the word “attacked” would be a euphemism. So swift was his work that for an instant I believed he was using no tool but rather shoveling it in with both bare fists. But after my eye adjusted to the motion I could identify, along with the spoon in his right hand, a fork in his left, and though he ate so rapidly, he employed these instruments with the deftness of a surgeon.
No sooner had the last spoonful gone from bowl to prince than a lackey whisked away the former and old Rupert supplied his sovereign with a napkin the size of a beach towel. Sebastian made vigorous use of this linen sheet, but in point of fact I saw not the least besmirchment of his mouth after the furious bout with the elaborately garnished ice cream.
For a few moments after the withdrawal of the empty bowl Sebastian sat with closed eyes, his expression one of momentarily weary sweet sadness, suggesting the well-known postcoital effect, but then his eyes sprang open and he looked at me for the first time since I had sat down.
“It is probably not easy to accept the display you’ve just seen as not gluttony but a heroic effort to allay it.”
“Indeed.”
“By eating a sweet course as opener, one kills a good deal of the appetite for the rest of the meal,” said the prince, earnestly compressing his several chins against his upper chest. “It’s an American technique.”
“Sounds like it,” I could not forbear saying: I really had lost some of my awe of him after witnessing the foregoing scene.
“And the infantilism serves an emotional purpose,” he went on. “Being royal is to be deprived of the warmer human feelings. You may not be aware of it, Mr. Wren. It was not my mother the queen who gave me suck, but rather a peasant wetnurse whom I never knew, and I was reared by nannies and servants. In a word, that mound of ice cream topped with the preserved cherry might well represent the royal dug I was denied.”
In America a grasp of basic Freudianism was now enjoyed by millhand and shopgirl: it was instructive for me to hear such platitudes from an absolute monarch.
I offered, “Or perhaps that of the wetnurse?”
Sebastian stared above my head. “No, the whipped cream and other embellishments would suggest a higher class.” He fluttered his long lashes: he really had very nice eyes. “In any event it’s a theory that derives from the studies of a certain professor who was not appreciated at the University of Vienna, but my great-grandfather saw the fellow’s possibilities and brought him here. Froelich?”
“Or perhaps Freud, Your Royal Highness?”
Sebastian shrugged. “Perhaps.”
“He became quite well known.”
“For this theory of the substitute tit?” The prince smiled. “Is it not extraordinary what frivolous enterprises will succeed in the world beyond Saint
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