Savoir-Faire - Solution

This solution is by David Welbourn, and is based on Release 6 of the game. Note that this is a verbose walkthrough filled with many unessential and false steps, for those players who want to see it all (or close to it). If you prefer a minimal walkthrough, use only the underlined commands.

Related links: the Savoir-Faire homepage, and the Baf's Guide listing for Savoir-Faire.

The Walkthrough

A few pre-game commands. INFO is the most important with regards to gameplay, since it tells you about the new verbs for this game: REMEMBER and LINK.

You are Pierre, a Parisian. You are in debt, and have come to the estate of the Count, your adoptive father, to ask for monetary assistance. But he is unaccountably absent. The time period is not exactly stated, but is definitely an era before the advent of electricity. (Since the outer planets are not represented in the solar system model, this is probably set before their discovery. Uranus, in our history, was discovered in 1781.)

First spend a little time examining yourself and your possessions. REMEMBER SNUFFBOX gives you an example of the sort of things that “linking” can do. You also learn that this form of sympathetic magic, known as the lavori d’Aracne, is normally only performed by the nobility.

Next: examine the garden, well, sundial, and shed. The sundial is wholly decorative. The roses cannot be cut with the sword, nor any other blade in the game.

You want to pick up the sack as soon as possible. It’s your “rucksack” object. It’s capable of holding every portable object in the game except liquids and powders, or open containers that contain liquids or powders.

Also note, when you first examine one of the dishes, you’ll get another lesson on linking: the more similar things are, the more likely that you can link them together. Finally, you can’t take the Tea Recipe from the drain just yet.

The machine is a mechanical chef. The silver cylinders are recipes. At a later point in the game, you must make and eat either a vegetarian or non-vegetarian meal. If you plan to go vegetarian, you don’t need the sausages.

>X MACHINE. X DIAL. TURN DIAL. (repeat TURN DIAL until you’ve seen all six settings: NONE, LEAF, ROSE, FISH, SHOE, HEART.)

First, when you first enter the Dining Room, you’ll become hungry. And you’ll continue to get hungrier and hungrier. Unfortunately, you can’t just eat any food lying around; you have standards. You must eat a proper meal. Fortunately, you will never die of your hunger in the meantime.

Second, REMEMBER WALLPAPER is our first lesson on reverse linking. You can REVERSE LINK one object to another, but it’s much harder and less likely to succeed than normal linking.

The model is part of a puzzle; REMEMBER MODEL tells you that the model is linked to something south from here (the clock). The books are useful information sources. The portrait is pure scenery, although REMEMBER PORTRAIT is most interesting.

>X WINES. READ IT. AGAIN. (repeat until you’ve seen all four entries: mead, Sauvignon Blanc, Chateauneuf du Pape, and tainted vines.)

You can’t deal with the hangings or gothic door just yet. Pulling the weights starts the clock (and the model that it’s linked to). You may set the clock’s time, eg: SET CLOCK TO 11:59.

>PLAY PIANO. PLAY ARIA. PLAY CHOPSTICKS. PLAY CHARLESTON. PLAY GAVOTTE. PLAY JAZZ. PLAY MINUETTE. PLAY TANGO. PLAY WALTZ.

This is one way to get the bauble, by making it "soft", then throwing any heavier throwable object at it that you won’t need later. Another way is to PUT RUG UNDER SHELF (the rug’s in the sitting room down the hall), then throw a soft object like the hat at it, so the bauble won’t break against either impact.

Linking the mirrors together lets you see the contents of the box from Marie’s Chamber, or see Marie’s Chamber from the box. It also turns the inset mirror into a light source, since it now reflects the light coming in from Marie’s window instead of the room that the box is in.

Don’t break the case yet; the bee will kill you unless you have a method for trapping it or avoiding it.

Note that you have two light sources now: the bauble and the inset mirror. Of the foodstuffs you find here, you definitely need the vanilla bean. If you’re going vegetarian, you also need the lentils. You may ignore the apples and salted pork.

Welcome to the cellar maze. Every door here is linked to any other door with the same color as it. The brass door counts as a “yellow” door.

To make blue light, you must put the bauble in the blue jar. You don’t have to close the jar.

Note that all the doors in the cellars (and your hanky) change color accordingly in the blue light. Likewise, you can generate red light by using the red jar, or green light by using the green jar (which we haven’t got to yet in this walkthrough).

The light trick doesn’t work with the inset mirror because the wooden box is supposed to be too big to fit in any of the jars.

If you don’t have the corkscrew, you can open a wine bottle by linking it to a closed glass jar, then opening the jar. Make sure you keep the cork! Since the mead bottle cannot be recorked, you should drop the bottle somewhere, or drink up the remaining mead, or transfer the remaining mead to a closeable container. You cannot put an open container containing liquid in your sack. (There are probably other methods of dealing with the bee, too.)

Time to make a meal! Decide now whether to make either the andouillettes or the lentil soup. In any case, start with:

>PUT PLATE IN MACHINE. (You may now TURN DIAL repeatedly to any setting you like; the sliced sausages in the cooked meal will be arranged on the plate in that shape.)

>TAKE BLUE JAR. OPEN IT. PUT SALT IN MACHINE. (You may ignore the dial when making the soup.)

You must eat your meal here. You must have the fork to eat the sausages, or the spoon to eat the soup. Soon after you’ve eaten, you will become sleepy, and need to find a bed.

This isn’t the only bed in the game. You may opt to put off sleeping until you find Marie’s much nicer bed, and sleep on it instead. You cannot sleep on the rug, no matter how soft Marie thought it was.

We will next retrieve the Tea Recipe from the drain. Since the bend in the pipe makes it unlikely for it to be flushed out the pipe, and we can’t fish it out, we’ll have to float it up to where we can reach it.

The first step is therefore to fill the pipe with water. The sponge is the most obvious object to plug the pipe with, but there may be other items that can plug the pipe. Use whatever non-porous containers you have available to carry water to the scullery, but not the one holding the bee! Make as many* trips as necessary between the well and the scullery. As near as I can tell, the cup, teapot, and glass jars all have equal liquid capacities (6 sips), and you’ll need slightly under 7 cupfuls to fill the pipe.

(*Actually, I've since learned that only one cupful is necessary; the game will assume that you have the right idea and not force you to make repeated trips to the well.)

Time to make yellow dye, using the Tea Recipe. The hint for this was in one of the books in the library. You can later, if you wish, also make mint tea or bay tea with this recipe. Herbal teas have no effect on hunger or sleepiness.

If you're wondering why you can’t just dye the hanky with the mead... well, you can but... the mead is the wrong shade of yellow. Yes, really. Don’t use the mead as a dye.

In earlier versions of the game, you could link the hanky to the hangings without dyeing the hanky first. This bug has been fixed. The sword’s hilt is ornate, which makes the sword similar enough to the ornate key. Make sure the sword is in its sheath before you turn it.

Unhappily, you cannot take the one chair in the entire game back to the conservatory and finally reach the high shelf.

The Count’s secret message to Marie, hinted at in the old letter, is finally revealed by looking at the rug in the chapel’s green and blue light. You can also see the message in two disjoint parts, by looking at the rug under green and blue light separately in the cellars.

There’s a few ways to kill the rat. As far as I know, all methods involve luring the rat out of his hole with cheese.

>PUT GOAT CHEESE IN TIN. (the mouse tries to get the cheese, and the bee stings him. One dead rat, and the bee is now harmless.)

>KILL RAT WITH SWORD. G. (repeat 30 times or so, until you manage to kill him. If you’re persistent, you will eventually kill him, but the lure of cheese must be there.)

Unfortunately, the dead roses are disintegrating and cannot be linked to the tangle of roses guarding the shed. You can only link things that are sufficiently cohesive.

We’re almost at the finale, so we’ll stop here briefly to get the Last Lousy Point, as suggested by the table’s description. Having full points will also slightly change the wording of the game’s epilogue. You may as well eat the cheeses now, too.

You may also wish to dally one last time in the kitchen to make mint tea and bay tea. You can also reverse link a pair of recipe cylinders, and then try out one of the pair on the machine for an amusing comment on the combined recipe.

The vase must be filled with water before you can link it to the well. Note: Refilling the linked vase with water will not refill the well. Any dreams you had of refilling the well with onion dye, or mead, or whatever just isn’t going to happen, no matter how cool you thought it would be. Not in this version of the game, at any rate. If you simply must destroy things, smash the mirrors or throw something hard at the chapel windows.

>DROP ALL. INVENTORY. (You need both hands free to climb down the ladder, and a light source. So you can only take wearables with you, or things inside what’s worn. If you throw something into the empty well, then it is lost forever. Make sure you’re wearing the bag, pin, and bracelet before going down into the well.)

Regarding the mirror’s password: The first mention of this kind of mirror is in the Lavori d’Aracne, but the page is torn. The wadded paper is the missing part of that page, and had a written message about the mirror coming from the Rue des Arbres. This street is also mentioned in the unscrambled old letter, and mentions a M. Couligne on that street. Since the mirror’s mark is a "C", Couligne probably made this mirror.

Once both cuffs and window are dealt with, timing is critical. You have only one chance to reverse-link the stone to the pillow.

Putting the story together

Pierre was born to ordinary parents, and was born an ordinary child. His life changed on the day Marie tried to climb the bar and fell into the well. Fearing for Marie’s life, the Count secretly took the dangerous step of reverse-linking Marie and Pierre together. As long as Pierre lived, so would Marie. Pierre’s father descended into the well, and rescued Marie. In debt to Pierre’s father’s act of heroism, the Count offered to bring up Pierre as if he were his own son, and his father agreed.

Pierre and Marie grew up together, as if they were brother and sister. Pierre grew estranged from his natural parents. In time, it was discovered that he could do links, something normally capable only by the nobility. The Countess suspected at first that Pierre was a bastard son of the Count, but the Count revealed his secret to her: that Pierre and Marie were linked. Pierre could do links because Marie could, duplicating her magical ability. Marie, at some point, also began to feel an unsisterly affection for Pierre, as witness the crumpled paper.

As an man, Pierre moved to Paris, moving in the noble courts. Meanwhile, Marie used her mechanical ingenuity and magical aptitude to create the solar system model and the mechanical chef. Both were somewhat innocent of the festering malice of D’Envers, a distant cousin of the Count who coveted the Count’s title and property.

The Count and Countess vanished without notice. Their fate is unknown and D’Envers may have engineered this in some manner. He began to make unwelcome advances to Marie, since Marie’s husband would become the new Count. D’Envers simultaneously endeavoured to put Pierre in monetary debt, in an attempt to remove Pierre as a rival. In Pierre’s case, this strategy misfired, since it prompted Pierre to visit the Count’s estate and thus gained the means to defeat D’Envers once and for all.