Russian Caviar, French Champagne

 This is how we rollin' here in the times of plague and various other unpleasantness.

Here is an impromptu al-fresco lunch for two, involving principally some Russian caviar and a bottle of cheapish French champagne, but also soft cheese, butter, pineapple rings and orange juice for mimosas.

The caviar was Siberian caviar not some filthy and polluted, not to mention depleted, Caspian slop.

This was Lena sturgeon.

Re: Champaign, seemed good enough with evidence of genuine secondary in-bottle fermentation on the taste.. maybe... lively and a note of live yeast on the taste if not on the nose anyway.

 

 

Regarding Marquis de Sade himself, he was of course a prolific writer of fiction and a major proponent of back door entry, But did you know, it was he who started the French revolution in earnest by precipitating the storming of La Bastille?

Some time at start of July 1789, crowds in Paris began to congregate around the Bastille. They believed there were people imprisoned in the royal fortress turned prison with whom they sympathized and whom they might liberate from the King's despotic rule.

The crowds, however, did not know that only a few aristocrats were held there, mainly on morals charges, and scarcely deserving liberation in the name of the people. On July 2, the crowds in the street heard a voice, apparently amplified by a megaphone improvised out of a rain spout, shouting that prisoners were being slaughtered and needed rescue. The prisoner to whom that voice belonged was summarily transferred two days later to the Clarenton insane asylum. But it was too late, the crowds stormed the Bastille on July fourteenth.

The man who attempted so outrageous a ruse in order to regain freedom after twelve years of imprisonment we know today as the Marquis de Sade!

(adapted from Forbidden Knowledge by Roger Shattuck)

So three cheers for Marquis de Sade, Hero of the French Revolution!!!