Femmes du monde

At the end of Dreaming in French, in ‘A Note on Sources’, Alice Kaplan terms her narrative ‘this pièce montée’, which is the only time she neglects to supply an English translation. From a scholar of her eminence — she is a historian and critic of French modernity, a professor at Yale, and the acclaimed author of The Collaborator, The Interpreter and French Lessons — such neglect must surely be deliberate.

The term was new to me, and the best I could manage was ‘assembled piece’, which in the context seems to be just a pretentious way of saying ‘book’. So I looked it up, as Kaplan probably hoped her more ignorant readers might, and I am glad I did. Pièces montées are those sculpted confectionary centrepieces at banquets, which achieved their apogee in the kitchens of Antonin Carême (1784–1833), who was chef to Talleyrand, the Prince Regent and Tsar Alexander I, invented the toque, and is reported to have said that, as architecture is the noblest art, so pastry is the noblest form of architecture.