Big and bloody history: Ernest Meissonier’s artwork depicts the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War. Babette’s Feast is set in the aftermath
Refugees have been a feature of human society from its beginnings. The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden arguably makes them humankind’s very first migrants.
Envy, acquisitiveness, territorial ambition, greed, war, famine, disease, floods, earthquakes, volcanos, tornados and climate change — all these have contributed to forced mass movements of people across the planet. To uproot, turn one’s back on home and journey dangerously in search of sanctuary, peace and the means to a livelihood, are not the voluntary actions of free people. Trapped by circumstance and history, our millennium’s migrants are the latest in a continuum of the displaced and the dispossessed.
Often, the sheer scale of migration and its accompanying wake of disaster and premature death deadens sensibilities and sympathies. It is probably true that “migration fatigue”, the 21st century equivalent of “compassion fatigue”, has set in among countries and peoples taking in and hosting migrants.
Reporting on refugees, asylum seekers and migrants risks the metric pitfall of Thomas Gradgrind, the character in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times who reduces everything human to rules and measures and the mechanical application of statistics, and ignores the reality that people are individuals with sentiments and emotions.
Focusing on a particular story often provides a better idea of the larger picture: the microcosm becomes the macrocosm. So it is that one of the most affecting refugee stories comes in the form of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen’s Babette’s Feast. Dinesen is the pen name of Karen Blixen, best known for Out of Africa, the memoir of life on her coffee farm in the Ngong Hills of Kenya.
Babette’s tale unfolds in the tiny Norwegian hamlet of Berlevaag, near the fjord of the same name. Here, two unmarried sisters live in one of the town’s characteristic yellow houses, keeping alive the flame of their father, the late and much-revered founder and dean of a pious ecclesiastic Christian sect.
Dinesen writes: “These two ladies had a French maid-of-all-work, Babette.
“It was a strange thing for a couple of Puritan women in a small Norwegian town; it might even seem to call for an explanation. The people of Berlevaag found the explanation in the sisters’ piety and kindness of heart … And Babette had come to that door 12 years ago as a friendless fugitive, almost mad with grief and fear.
“But the true reason for Babette’s presence in the two sisters’ house was to be found further back in time and deeper down in the domain of human hearts.”
Babette serves the sisters quietly, efficiently and with humility for many years. One day she announces that the French lottery ticket she has subscribed to for years has come in: she has won 10 000 francs, a fortune in the early 1880s. The sisters assume that Babette will return to her motherland. But she has a request to make of them: she would like to prepare a special dinner for the birthday of the late dean, with his now aged and very small flock as the guests.
At first surprised and conflicted — food in their view is merely sustenance, not a staple of celebration or joy — eventually the sisters relent and grant Babette her wish. Through her merchant shipman nephew, Babette orders the ingredients from France. They turn up in barrowloads from the docks: champagne, the finest wines, essential ingredients and — to the horror of sisters Martine and Philippa — a huge turtle
The night of the dinner arrives and the assembled company of 12, including two guests from outside the village, sit down to eat. The 10 from the dean’s congregation have sworn in advance not to comment on the food or to give even a soupçon of a hint that it might be tasty or that they are enjoying it.
Not so one of the guests, General Löwenhielm, who does not demur. He is astonished by the champagne, the wines, the meal. He recognises each of the courses as having the signature stamp of the very great chef who once graced the Café Anglais in Paris. This was before the Franco-Prussian War and the French surrender on 28 January 1871 when the fall of Paris was imminent.
Löwenhielm recalls dining at the Café Anglais with another officer who told him that the chef is “a person known all over Paris as the greatest culinary genius of the age and —most surprisingly — a woman!”
Babette does not emerge from the kitchen. She does not meet the general, whom she had known as one of the diners at the Café Anglais. But after the party has dispersed, the alchemy of her food having healed decades-long grudges between the diners, Babette tells the sisters that she was, indeed, the chef at the Café Anglais. She had left there and Paris — abandoned a life of artistic fulfilment, recognition and acclaim — because she had been a Communard.
She had loaded her husband’s rifle as he manned one of the barricades set up around Paris to try to halt the advance into the city of the Versailles faction — the nominal official government of France after its surrender to Prussia. He had been killed — along with 20 000 Communards, history tells us — and she had fled France devastated and in fear of her life.
A small story of 21 pages that magnifies a big and bloody page of history, and with a superb twist. The sisters ask when Babette will be returning to France. Nonplussed, she looks at them and then says, matter of factly, that she has no money. Impossible, they say — what of the 10 000 francs?
Ah, well: the price of a dinner for 12 at the Café Anglais was 10 000 francs. To exercise her art and artistry, Babette spent that sum and besides, as she says, “Artists are never poor.”
This is an edited version of an article that was first published on New Frame.