Marcel Boulestin

He worked as secretary and ghostwriter to the author "Willy" (Henry Gauthier-Villars) in Paris, and then moved to London, where he made his home and career from 1906 onward.

[2] He was educated in Poitiers, and later in Bordeaux, where he was nominally a law student, but in practice was a full-time concert-goer and member of the musical scene of the city.

[1] After compulsory military service in 1899, Boulestin moved to Paris and worked for Willy as a secretary and as one of the several ghostwriters he employed for his sensational and well-selling books, among them Curnonsky and Colette.

His Claudine and Minne series and other novels sketched Colette's youth, peppered with characters taken from other spheres, like the clearly homosexual "Hicksem" and "Blackspot", both taken from Boulestin's personality.

He attempted to convince his family of the virtues of mint sauce with mutton, bought mince pies and marmalade in Paris, and took Colette to afternoon tea.

[8] At first he earned his living by writing humorous "Letters from London" for several magazines, among them Akademos, a sumptuous monthly published by Jacques d'Adelswärd-Fersen.

For Akademos, Boulestin also wrote a serial novel with a homosexual theme, Les Fréquentations de Maurice, under the pseudonym "Sidney Place".

I had bought stuffs at Darmstadt, Munich and Vienna; Berlin and Florence supplied me with certain papers, Paris with new and amusing vases, pottery, porcelain, glass, and a few fine pieces of Negro art".

"[16] During this period Boulestin edited a book of essays and stories, Keepsake, which was illustrated by his friend Jean Émile Laboureur.

[1] The new location featured circus-theme murals by Laboureur and the French artist Marie Laurencin and fabrics by Raoul Dufy.

The carpet is wine colour, the curtains are of patterned yellow brocade; over the mantelpiece is a painting of a dinner table ... the lounge portion of the room is illuminated and decorated by a square of hanging silk balloon lights.

In a prominent place is an immense bottle of 1869 liqueur brandy de la maison, a graceful reminder that the place studies drink equally with meat.The culinary reputation of the establishment was high; the writer Edward Laroque Tinker declared in The New York Times that at Boulestin's "one gets the most perfect and récherché dinner to be found in all London".

[22] Some of these were written in collaboration with Arthur Henry "Robin" Adair, a British food writer who in 1923 became Boulestin's companion, literary partner and translator.

[1] Among those influenced by Boulestin's writing was Elizabeth David, who after his death emerged as the leading writer in Britain on the subject of food.

He was not an unswerving advocate of classic French recipes, and wrote with enthusiasm about curries, Basque pipérade, and Irish stew.

[32] Adair was released at the end of the war and returned to England, becoming the cookery correspondent of the British magazine Harper's Bazaar.