Cautionary Tales – Lacking Fish and Deadly Feasts: Ritual and Wreck on the Solar King’s Desk


Within the gilded courtroom of Louis XIV, seventeenth Century France, manners are all the things. The place to sit down, the right way to eat, what to put on – any misstep is expensive. Nobody is aware of this higher than François Vatel, the best occasion planner in all of France. Tonight, Vatel should ship the final word banquet, an opportunity for his grasp to rise via the ranks and win the king’s favour. However the place there may be alternative there may be hazard, and even one mistake may show lethal. 

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Additional Studying

The important thing supply for story of the occasion at Vaux-le-Vicomte is Apples of Gold in Settings of Silver: Tales of Dinner as a Work of Artwork (2002) by Carolin C. Younger

Different sources embody

Savoring the Previous: The French Kitchen and Desk from 1300 to 1789 by Barbara Ketcham Wheaton

King of the World: The Lifetime of Louis XIV by Philip Mansel

Vatel et la naissance de la gastronomie by Patrick Rambourg

And by Norbert Elias: The Courtroom Society (1968) and The Civilising Course of (1939)

Modern accounts and sources included:

Le Cuisinier, Pierre de Lune (first printed 1656)

The Letters of Madame de Sévigné to Her Daughter and Her Mates

Memoirs of Louis XIV., by The Duke of Saint-Simon

Helpful articles:

Good servants and dangerous masters: the a number of deaths of François Vatel by Daniel M. Lavery (twenty ninth August 2022) 

Chateau raises a glass to occasion planner undone by lacking fish by Adam Sage (eighth August 2023) 

The web sites Etiquipedia and en.ChateauVersailles.fr

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