Epilogue

I left school in the summer of 1963, and that autumn I started a three-year cookery course at the Collège d’Enseignement Technique Reffye at Tarbes. This choice of career was a natural one. All my life, almost without knowing it, I had been interested in and curious about cooking; I can even remember that one afternoon when I was about eight years old and had been playing with four or five other children in the village, I invited them all back to the Oratoire for a meal. My grandparents were both out of the house at the time, but I opened up one of the jars of confit, heated up its contents over the fire and served them a very good supper. When Camille came back she found me standing at the head of the table with an expression of complete happiness on my face as I watched the other children eating away with a hearty appetite. ‘Just think,’ she used to say later on, ‘it was your very first restaurant!’ It was also the occasion when I first made the important discovery that you can only cook well for people if you sincerely want to make them happy with the food you give them.