"Charleston at Table" is a limited series by Thomas Ellen. It is in the fashion of Eugene Briffault's "Paris à Table." (pictured) Enjoy Part I!
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I have drunk life to the lees. I have abstained from est modus in rebus. Quantum mutatus ab illo! No longer can I walk by my feet—palanquin required for any measly trip. You, down there, come along, hoist yourself in—let me tell you my story here in Charleston: what I have seen, what I have heard, what I have drunk and ate and smelled.
Gout-riddled, apnea-disturbed—mutato nomine de te fabula narrator! Six foot one and a still appealing two-hundred fifteen: I maintain a pleasing appearance, but the flesh and soul are tormented by insatiable tastes.
I am retiring from this life, no more a gourmet—I eat and drink now to sustain a pulse. You will likely find most of this obscene, even profane; you may declare I have been an irredeemable gourmand, that no soul such as mine can be saved, that the piercing, grinding blade betwixt my toe’s joints is just desserts for a dissolute life. But I must save it, and perhaps my tale can save yours too. My pain, your felix culpa.
Know this, we are not here describing some trite nostalgie de la boue, no drag through the merde. Do not find any allusive or anagogical method. Didactic does not describe what follows. Let us elevate to a heightened form.
Charleston is a fine town. It resides in the dream of every Condé Nast subscriber; they hope to spend a weekend or two here, perhaps even to purchase property somewhere in town where they can walk to their every want and need. Always atop every list, Charleston is. It is the food and the drink that bring them all here in surplus quantity. Our pols and chattering class all revolve around delivering experience to the low, the bourgeois, the high. It is democratic here, all represented, though concerns always emerge of whether it is attainable for each and every. The soft despotism pervades.
Forgive me, I will avoid all attempts to fill-ossifize. This is panorama, or more likely a physiologie from Balzac’s Paris. The critics will scorn this work.
Where was I?
It is a city that starts slow and tapers off. Breakfast is taken late. Drinks are had upon the turn of noon. Dinner is taken at a stroll. Supper is a feast. Revelry sophisticate and debauched is had each day of the week into the early morning. And thus, the cycle goes on.
Charleston fills the appetite only, with little to please the mind—decadence is the word you are thinking of. Is it the horizon we occupy, or an aspect of this thin sliver we stand upon? I am not an historian, and I will not offer you any firm answers. Though Charleston once boasted luminaries of thought, as Hugh Swinton Legaré and William Gilmore Simms and Basil Gildersleeve can prove, we are now relegated to a museum with a wide spread and plenty to drink. Catch a buzz and squat in front of Rainbow Row—come to this sacred pilgrimage site of bachelorette parties, where mysterious rites are performed to bless a marriage with fruit. Or so it will appear in the record written a thousand years from now.
I am too glib. But nothing is taken too serious here, aside from reputation. So small is Charleston one can ruin his name forever if he says something untoward to the wrong person. A small circle can bring you in, lift you from your dull life, and turn you into a prince. That same circle can then expel you, exiled to Summerville or Moncks Corner. Don’t expect an invitation to the Carolina Club after your behavior here this evening, monsieur!
Let us, to continue this introduction, examine a synchronicity I enjoy.
In Carolana, temperance and chastity were and are as wanting as in the palaces of Charles II. The Merry Monarch’s ways were seemingly transferred to the planter class and their many generations: debauched and wanton young men, dueling in the narrow alleys, livers giving way in the bloom of youth. A visitor today may walk along Tradd Street and adore the window boxes of snapdragon and lantanas unaware that the building may have hosted brawling sailors from lands far flung. During her Golden Age from the 1730’s to the 1820’s, the Holy City was anything but sacred.
With the languor brought on by the stultifying airs and the enormous wealth affording so much time for leisure, a Frenchman named Alexander Placide opened a pleasure garden at the northeast corner of Broad and what is today Legare Street in 1799. Evening concerts were held here among, I imagine—and this is all we can do today, the record being mostly lost—the many varieties of flora imported from Japan and China: crepe myrtles and their white or pink petals; jasmine, gardenia, gingko; or those plants found here on this peninsula naturally, magnolias and Carolina jessamine and the adored live oaks. To displace any and all from the most foreign and strange was the elephant held here. Mr. Placide named his garden Vaux Hall—variously written as Vauxhall or Vauxhall Gardens—bearing the name of a similar and more noted establishment in England.
An amphitheater was added; baths were installed after. Benches and tables were assembled, and food was served—one could order ice cream once they finished warm plates. At its peak, fireworks illumined the night and brought closure to concerts and dances. Mr. Placide would pass away in 1812, but Vaux Hall carried on with his widow taking the reins.
I imagine it as Charleston was and largely remains: jovial with an appearance of sophistication, incredible excess, and sensuous. This garden would be fragrant from all the flowers and aromatic dishes spinning with rich sauces. Animals exotic or familiar lumbering or trotting and making their different calls—an elephant trumpet or a horse’s whinny. Cellos and violins playing elaborate pieces with dance partners gliding across the floor. Man’s unmatched ability to create captured here between manicured rows of pink, red, and yellow blossoms below aerial bursts.
Much like the old wall of dirt and palmetto logs with its bastions named for the Lords Proprietors would be pushed into and fill the moat; much like the Half Moon battery would be scrapped and over it the Exchange was raised to handle the money fast coming after so many years of conflict against French, Native, and Spaniard: Vaux Hall would also give way. In 1821, the Right Reverend John England, the first Bishop of Carolina, would purchase the land with the intention of constructing a cathedral—an influx of Irish immigrants created demand. But from the start they would have to settle with a wooden chapel.
A cathedral began to rise shortly after. Construction started on Saint John the Baptist and Saint Finbar in 1821 and was completed during the episcopate of the Right Reverend Ignatius Reynolds in 1854. It was designed by Patrick Charles Keely, architect of innumerable churches and their adjoining structures in the United States. It was built with Connecticut brownstone in the Gothic style with a 200-foot spire. It was undoubtedly one of the finer churches in Charleston, a city known for having an array of choices.
On December 11, 1861, a fire broke out near the Cooper River. This flame would rise to a storm and ride the wind west to the Ashley, consuming a third of the city. Among its victims was the cathedral, so newly built. The steeple collapsed, the sanctuary scorched, the Seminary Library of 17,000 volumes lost. What remained were the gates and fence which still stand. The final insult came in 1886 when the great earthquake brought the remains down into a heap.
The task of creating what we see today, the Gothic brownstone star-dimpled with golden cross atop copper spire, did not begin until 1890. The debris was removed and the land made ready. In 1907, Saint John the Baptist—dropping Saint Finbar—was nearly finished. The architect?—Keely again. His design attempted to replicate brick by brick the old cathedral. I said nearly finished because the cathedral did not have the spire we see today. They had to settle instead with a square tower due to financial shortcomings.
The spire was assembled and golden Celtic Cross placed on March 8, 2010. This needed the approval of Charleston’s fastidious Board of Architectural Review. It is said they demanded original prints describing a steeple and spire, that word of mouth and old drawings from artists would not do. Deep within the surviving records, a blueprint was revealed again giving them the license to ascend higher in Charleston’s steepled skyline.
From untended land beyond the walls of Charles Town, to a garden filled with earthly delight, to a cathedral destroyed by fire and earthquake. The vaulted ceiling today with the azure sky and rising marble columns lifting and holding this heaven above you as you sit on Flemish oak listening to the pipes of the organ bellow and you wonder what you will do that day in this city, the Holy City, but still filled with all those pleasures that if you are not careful will exceed—da mihi castitatem et continentam, sed noli modo.
Placide’s old garden did not shutter, it just spread from its old spot.
Here, with Charleston’s grandest cathedral, we find the entire life of Man. The struggle for virtue, the desire to build heaven on earth—it’s all here, right there, all around you. The Old World lives!
Let us go forth, let us narrow our vision, let us focus on the manners and customs of those who live here in this exhausted age—we all know what they consume. Let us eat, let us drink, for it is the hour, il est l’heure de s’enivrer! Pour n’être pas les esclaves martyrisés du Temps, enivrez-vous; enivrez-vous sans cesse!
I am feeling myself again. Set it down here, the toe is fine now, and I need the walk.
Briffault!—you jester, reveal yourself!
Trimalchio!—speak!