Pascal Merigeau - Jean Renoir

Late on the morning of February 20, 1979, Jean Renoir was interred in the family vault in Essoyes cemetery, next to his older brother, Pierre, and their father, Auguste. His mother, Aline, and younger brother, Claude, lay nearby.

It was cold that Tuesday. The ground was frozen, the roads icy; the few faithful whod come to pay their respects to the memory of the Master worried theyd never make it as far as Essoyes. Driven by Jean Carmet who voiced his certainty that the Boss wouldnt have had it otherwise, the little group swept into a caf as soon as arriving and ordered ham and eggs, which were served at the exact moment the funeral procession crossed the square. That same evening in Neuilly, Dido and Alain Renoir, the widow and only son of the director, reminisced about the deceased over a leg of lamb with beans, a specialty of Sbillon, the restaurant Renoir had frequented in the old days.

Jean Renoir had died at lunchtime on February 12, the Monday of the week before, in his house on Leona Drive in Beverly Hills Benedict Canyon. He was eighty-four years old. On Friday the sixteenth, a mass had been celebrated at the oldest church in Beverly Hills, Church of the Good Shepherd, the same one that had hosted Rudolph Valentinos funeral in 1926 and Gary Coopers in 1961 as well as the place where George Cukor had staged the funeral scene in the film A Star Is Born; and where, a little more than a year after Renoirs service, respects would be paid to Alfred Hitchcock, who would die on April 29, 1980. On the evening of Sunday the twenty-fifth, two thousand people visited the enormous Royce Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) for a ceremony in Renoirs honor, which had been planned some time before but had been transformed into a posthumous tribute at which Cukor, among others, spoke.

On the day after Renoirs death, deep within the part of the country where hed spent his childhood vacations, he was honored on a scale worthy of his renown, just as would happen in California, where hed lived the last thirty-eight years of his life. That renown was sizable, motivated as it was by admiration for his films, the aura of his personality as the son of a great painter, his reputation for openness to the world and to others, and his extraordinary lust for life and all the pleasures it affordedamong which those of the table ranked high. And so, another leg of lamb serves as a way to begin this story.

Alain Renoir had spent a long time preparing the dish, using a tiny knife to make the incisions into which he inserted slivers of garlic. Unearthing from a cupboard an electric rotisserie whose functioning only he knew, and cursing the appliance without really being annoyed, he finally plugged it in; soon after, it glowed red. He didnt take his eyes from the meat while it cooked, unless to serve himself a glass of champagne. Alain Renoir loved champagneFrench brands when he was in France, Californian when he was at home. That evening, or perhaps the day before, or the day before that, hed discovered one of the two films of his father that he hadnt known: