Let’s start with an anti-climax.

The Jacob Verrall I wrote about last time, the man who owned Monk’s House in Sussex before Virginia and Leonard Woolf, probably wasn’t a close relation to our family. Looking through the genealogical research done by my mother-in-law, Mary Knox, I found no Verrall by the name of Jacob, and her research goes back to the beginning of the 18^th century. 

It’s true the Verrall family from which my husband is descended lived in the same few square miles of Sussex for all those hundreds of years. It’s a rare name, and Jacob Verrall is probably connected somehow.

Yet while failing to find Jacob, I spent many hours sitting cross-legged on the floor reading binders of potted biographies that delighted me. This is one way novels can be born, when a writer stumbles on forgotten stories. In this case, they involved a series of eccentric ancestors, many of them mentioned in a history of the Verrall family of Lewes written by a member, Percival Lucas, in 1916.

I realize that this is a long way from the house purge that threw me back into the binders, not to mention the book that first sent me there, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, by Alison Light. But I planned—and plan—to get back to both eventually.

In the meantime, I met Charles Verrall (1786-1859), a tallow chandler known as “Flutter” Verrall. Lucas gives no clue to the origin of the nickname, although that branch of the family seems to have gone in for gambling, and maybe Charles took one too many flutters on the horses.

There was also Sarah Verrall (1744-1828) known as “The White Rose of Sussex,” and publican William Verrall (1715-1761), who in 1769 published a cookbook stemming from the time he served under a French chef, to which he gave the fetching title: “A Complete System of Cookery, in which is set forth a variety of genuine Receipts, collected from several Years Experience under the celebrated Mr. de St. Clouet, sometime since Cook to his Grace the Duke of Newcastle…. Together with an Introductory Preface, shewing how every Dish is brought to Table, and in what manner the meanest Capacity shall never err in doing what his Bill of Fare contain. To which is added, A true Character of Mons. De St. Clouet;” a title designed to rocket to the top of the Amazon bestseller list.

I was well down the rabbit hole at this point. A bit of gleeful digging showed that the celebrated chef in question was Pierre de St. Clouet. Monsieur St. Clouet would leave the employ of the Duke of Newcastle to cook for the Earle of Albemarle. Later, he would be chef to the Duc de Richelieu, a famous womanizer and dandy who is said to have been the original of Valmont in Les Liaisons dangereuses, the 1782 novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. (That’s an illustration by Charles Monet from the 1796 edition above.)

More digging showed that in 1721, the French beauties Madame de Polignac and the Marquise de Nesle fought a notorious duel over Richelieu, which was covered in the early 18th century Ur-tabloids. The two noblewomen were sisters-in-law, and both were having affairs with the duke. They learned this when his secretary made a small mistake and arranged for his master to tryst with both of them at the same place at the same time. 

Mayhem ensued.

The women agreed to settle their differences in the Bois de Bologne, where they took their positions on either side of a handkerchief, guns at the ready. The Marquise fired first, hitting a tree branch. Then Madame de Polignac raised her pistol. A shot! The Marquise fell to the ground, her breast bloody. At first she seemed to be dead, but bystanders soon found that the bullet had only grazed her shoulder. As they helped her up, they asked if the Duke was worth it.

“Yes! Yes!” she cried. “He is worthy of even more noble blood being shed for him!”

I hadn’t known women fought duels, but apparently seven are known to history. In any case the aristocratic triangle was a long way from William Verrall, author of the cookbook with the enormous title and master of the White Hart Inn of Lewes, Sussex, who described himself as “what is vulgarly called a poor publican.”

Or almost no distance at all, if we’re talking degrees of separation. Since the ancestral publican had known the chef personally, he is separated by two degrees from the real-world Duc de Richelieu, i.e. Valmont in the 1782 novel and therefore (in movie terms) three degrees from John Malkovich, who played Valmont in Dangerous Liaisons, the 1988 film directed by Stephen Frears.

Malkovich, I can tell you, appeared with Kevin Bacon in the 1991 comedy, Queen’s Logic. This gives the 18th century publican William Verrall a very low Bacon number, meaning degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, the internet having researching family history so much more fun, not to mention a great time waster.

Back in the real world, or at least in the binders, it’s also worth noting that the Duke of Newcastle seems to have mourned the loss of his cook, M. St. Clouet, writing him a letter in which he complains that his new chef wasn’t up to scratch. “He never serves small hors d’oeuvres or light entrées,” the Duke wrote, “and he has no idea of the simple, unified dishes that you used to make for me and which are so much in fashion here, such as veal tendons, rabbit fillets, pigs’ and calves’ ears, and several other little dishes of the same kind.”

Veal tendons and pigs’ ears. This might give some idea of William Verrall’s “receipts,” which seem to have gone out of style before he published his cookbook. It failed to sell and William went bankrupt. Yet I find it interesting that the animals parts used by St. Clouet as ducal delicacies were later considered such offal they were given to slaves in Brazil–who used them, by the way, to make a delicious bean stew which is now the Brazilian national dish, feijoada.

One final family story concerns Harry Verrall (1713-1794). Harry was the two-times great-uncle of my husband’s three-times great-grandmother Hannah Verrall. He was also the one-time proprietor of the Whig Coffee House in Lewes, and he’s said to have inspired Tom Paine to compose the The Rights of Man.

Paine lived in Lewes from 1768 to 1774. One day, according to a memoir written fifty years later by his friend W.T. Sherwin, Paine “happened to be playing at bowls with some friends at Lewes; after they had finished playing, they went to a neighbouring house to drink some punch by way of refreshment.

“Mr. Verral, one of the bowlers, observed, in allusion to the wars of Frederick, ‘that the King of Prussia was the best fellow in the world for a King, he had so much of the Devil in him.’ This observation, trifling as it might appear, produced a very deep impression in the mind of Paine, and gave rise to the reflection, that if it were necessary for a King to have so much of the Devil in him Kings might be very well dispensed with.’”

I’d intended to think about stuff, and in a way I am, because I’ve been digging into an archive that takes up an enormous amount of space in my office. It’s not going anywhere, although it has to be organized, culled, digitized and printed out, but I first found my novel Mad Richard in the binders, when I discovered Richard Dadd, and there are probably a few more books crouching inside them.

Yet this doesn’t address the overall question of clutter and decluttering, and how we decide what we need to live with, and what to live without. In her de-cluttering advice books, Marie Kondo tells us to keep only those belongings which spark joy, tokimeko in Japanese, which apparently translates literally as things which “flutter, throb, palpitate.”

Joyous, throbbing, palpitating: the words aren’t right for what I want. They’re fast and solitary, butterfly sensations that beat their wings in a bare clean place.

The word I prefer is “evocative,” which has a denser, older, smokier feeling. I wonder if it’s more important that we surround ourselves with things which evoke. By which I mean they evoke connections, both with our past and with other people, living and dead, that make us part of a community. As we meanwhile get rid of extraneous items in a way that permits us to make another kind of connection, whether through organizations helping recently-arrived refugees or in women in shelters, taking the trouble to find new homes for our stuff instead of tossing it into a landfill.

To be continued.

Jump to Part Four here.