Chapter VII (9)

At one of the _petits soupers_ of Paris, in this olden time, when wit and philosophy had temporarily dethroned religion, a little abbé, who had the air of a full-grown Cupid in a semi-clerical disguise, or who was like Rose Pomaponne in a carnival suit at the Courtille, took upon himself to amuse the assembled company with stories intended to ridicule the old-fashioned faith, (as the philosophers styled Christianity,) and its professors. He was particularly comic on the subject of hell and eternal punishments, upon which questions he dilated with a fulness that would have scarcely edified either Professor Maurice or Dr. Jelf. The whole of the amiable society exploded in inextinguishable laughter at hearing this villanous abbé speak of hell itself as his “feu de joie!” There was, however, one face there that bore upon it no traces of a smile. It was that of an old marechal-de-camp, who might have said, like the old beadle of St. Mary’s, Oxford, “I have held this office, sir, for more than thirty years, and, thank heaven, I am a Christian yet!” Well, the old maréchal frowned as, looking at the infidel abbé, he remarked, “I see very plainly, sir, by your uniform, to what regiment you belong, but it seems to me that you must be a deserter.” “My dear maréchal,” answered the profligate priest, with a beaming smile, “it may indeed be a little as you say, but then, you see, I do not hold in my troop the rank which you enjoy in yours. I am not a marechal-de-camp!” “Parbleu,” rejoined the old soldier, “you never could have reached such a rank, for, to judge by your conduct and sentiment, you would have been hanged long before your chance came for promotion.”

At the _soupers_ of Paris, however, there were few men who were of the character of our marechal-de-camp. Bungener, in his “Voltaire et son Temps,” illustrates the confusion into which men’s ideas had got upon the subject of things spiritual and things temporal, by noticing the affair of the Chevalier de la Barre, in 1766. Amid the accusations brought against him was one, according to which it was laid to his charge that he had recited in public a certain filthy ode. He was condemned to be broken on the wheel, on charges of irreligion, of which this was one. But the part of the question that must have made Astræa weep through the bandage with which poets have bound her eyes, was this, namely, that the author of the obscene ode objected to, Piron, was then in the reception of a pension from the court; and this pension had been procured for him by Montesquieu, by way of compensation for his having lost his seat at the Academy, in consequence of his having been the author of this very ode. This confusion of rewards and penalties was enough to make Justice dash her brains out with her own scales. Piron would have been in no wise troubled by such a catastrophe; the pension from the court enabled him to keep a joyous table, and that was enough for him.

Duclos was a contemporary and a co-disciple with Piron, in the temple of philosophy. In 1766, he was at Rome, where he gave such charming little suppers, that the Sacred College gratefully extended to him the privileged permission of reading improper books! The philosophers were then in possession of considerable influence. Marmontel, who was one of them, was sent to the Bastille, on a certain Friday, in the year 1760. Soon after his arrival, he was supplied with an excellent dinner _maigre_, the which he ate without thinking of complaining. His servant was just on the point of addressing himself to the scanty remains, when lo! an admirable but somewhat irreligious repast, of meat and other things which come under the denomination of _gras_, and are therefore forbidden on fast-days, was brought in. The unorthodox banquet was intended for Marmontel; the more lenten fare was intended for his servant. For in those days, although philosophers were sent to prison, their appetites were left to their heretical freedom.

This liberty was allowed by the state, but it was neither sanctioned nor practised by the Church. The authority of the latter was great previous to the Revolution. There was then a clerical police, which looked into the dishes as well as the consciences of the people--of all degrees. I have somewhere read of a body of this police coming in collision, during Lent, with the officers of the household of the Prince of Conti, who were conveying through the streets, from a neighbouring _rotisseur’s_ to the ducal palace, a supper, through the covers of which there penetrated an odour which savoured strongly of something succulent and sinful, of gravy and gravity. Thereupon the archbishop’s alguazils bade the prince’s men stand and deliver. The followers of the house of Conti drew their swords in defence of their rights and sauces. Much of the latter on the side of Conti, and a little malapert blood on both sides, was spilt, to the edification of the standers by. Finally, the transgressors of the Church law were dragged to prison. The damaged repast remained on the pavé, for the benefit of poor souls who assumed ecclesiastical licence to devour it without fear of damnation; and the servants of Conti were left in damp cells to meditate at their leisure upon the argument which Dean Swift at another period had thus cast into verse:--

“Who can declare, with common sense,
That bacon fried gives God offence?
Or that a herring hath the charm
Almighty vengeance to disarm?
Wrapt up in Majesty divine,
Doth He regard on what we dine?”

To pass from cooks and church to courtesy and coachmen, I may here speak of a certain Girard who was known in Paris, during the Terror, for his love of what he called liberty and good living. In his early days he was a very independent coachman, and was just on the point of concluding an engagement with an aristocratic old countess, when he remarked--“Before I finally close with madame, I should like to be informed for whom madame’s horses are to make way in the streets.” “For every one,” said the countess. “On questions of precedence, I am not difficult; if it is yielded to me, I take it; if not, I wait.” “In that case,” said the aristocratic John, “I shall not suit, madame, as I myself never draw aside except for the princes of the blood!” Now this great personage in livery was no other than the Girard who became, in 1793, the “public accuser,” and who sent to the scaffold those same nobles who had not been sufficiently noble for him in 1780.

Upon the matter of what became nobility, however, there was always much confusion in the “aristocratic idea” of the highest continental families. Thus who, in contemplating the famous Princess des Ursins, seated among the most honoured at the table of the King of Spain, would dream of her writing the following sentence in one of her letters to Madame de Maintenon? “It is I who have the honour of taking from his majesty his _robe de chambre_, when he gets into bed; and I am there to give it to him again, with his slippers, when he rises in the morning.”

The flattery paid to royalty in France was never more prodigally offered than at the period when “wit and philosophy” were beginning to undermine the throne. We have an instance of this in what happened when the queen of Louis XV. arrived, in 1765, at Ferté-sous-Jouarre, where she intended to sup and sleep. She was met beneath an avenue of trees, outside the town, by the authorities, who offered to her, according to custom, bread and wine. The queen took a portion of the bread, broke it in two, and ate thereof, as well as of some grapes, sipping also the wine; to the delight and edification of the admiring multitude. The authorities were so struck by the act of condescension on the part of the royal personage, that they made record of the fact in the register of the town council. And this they did in such terms as to cause a commentator to remark, that they could hardly have said more, had her majesty been a genuine goddess.

After all, this sort of homage had fallen off, in 1765, from what it had been two centuries before. When Louis XII. encountered his bride, Mary of England, outside Abbeville, he clapped his feeble hands, and wished the devil might seize him (and he _did_ die soon after) if she were not more beautiful than report had painted her! At the gates of Abbeville, the ill-assorted pair were met by the Bishop of Amiens and the municipal magistrates, to welcome them to the evening banquet ere they betook themselves to repose. The bishop presented the new Queen of France with a piece of the Real Cross. “The _mayeurs_ offered a gift, the nature of which brings it within my subject.” The gift was usual whenever king and queen appeared at the portals of the old monkish city. It consisted of three tuns of wine, three fat oxen, and fifteen quarters of oats, three pecks of which were presented to the astonished lady on bended knee, and in a measure painted light blue, and covered with golden fleurs-de-lys. A complimentary address to the king crowned all. “Sire,” said the chief local magistrate, “you may now conclude your marriage in this our good city, without any fear of committing sin thereby; for, in the year 1409 were reformed, as abuses, those synodal statutes by which men in our city were forbidden to live with their wives, during three whole mortal days after the wedding!” The monarch entered and sat down with his consort to a repast which rendered both ill for more than double the period just mentioned. Louis had well-nigh died, like La Matrie, the infidel philosopher at Berlin, of an indigestion. Had he done so, it might have been said of him, as the infidel Prussian king said of La Matrie: “He was a _gourmand_, but he died like a philosopher; let us have no more anxiety about him.”

Frederic himself loved philosophy more than faith, and philosophical though profligate kings, more than he did “Most Christian” or “Most Catholic” monarchs. He was wont, therefore, to laugh at the story of the famished beggar who, standing near the statue of Henri IV. on the Pont Neuf, solicited charity of a friend of Voltaire who was passing by. “In the name of God,” said the mendicant. The student of philosophy was deaf. “In the name of the Holy Virgin!”--“In the name of the saints!” The appeal was unheeded. “In the name of Henri IV!” exclaimed the petitioned; and forthwith the Voltairean put his hand in his pocket, giving a crown-piece, in the name of a philosophical profligate, while he refused a sou when asked for in the name of God. But, as Frederic used to say, “How divine is philosophy!” In his mouth the exclamation was like the well-known cry of Marcel, the ecstatic dancing-master: “Que de choses dans un minuit!”

There is a story told in connexion with this same great Frederic which is a good table trait in its way. Joachim von Ziethen was one of the bravest of the generals who stood by Frederic the Great in victory or defeat. He was the son of a poor gentleman, and had little education save what he could pick up in barracks, camps, and battle fields, in all of which he figured in early youth. If his head was not over-ballasted with learning, his heart was well freighted with that love for God, of which some portion, as the dismissed lecturer on Ecclesiastical History in King’s College tells us, is in almost every individual without exception, and forms the sheet-anchor which shall enable him to ride through the storms which keep him from his desired haven of rest. He became the terror of the foes of Prussia; but among his comrades, he was known only as “good father Ziethen.” He was remarkable for his swiftness at once of resolve and execution, and in remembrance as well as illustration thereof, a sudden surprise is spoken of by an astonished Prussian as “falling on one like Ziethen from an ambush.”

Now, old Ziethen, after the triumph achieved in the Seven Years’ War, was always a welcome guest at the table of Frederic the Second. His place was ever by the side of the royal master whose cause he had more than once saved from ruin; and he only sat lower at table when there happened to be present some foreign royal mediocrity, illustriously obscure. On one occasion, he received a command to dine with the king on Good Friday. Ziethen sent a messenger to his sovereign, stating that it was impossible for him to wait on his majesty, inasmuch as that he made a point of never omitting to take the sacrament on that day, and of always spending the subsequent portion of the day in private meditation.

A week elapsed before the scrupulous old soldier was again invited to the royal dinner-table. At length he appeared in his old place, and merry were the guests, the king himself setting an example of uproarious hilarity. The fun was running fast and furious,--it was at its very loudest, when Frederic, turning to Ziethen, smacked him familiarly on the back, and exclaimed, “Well, grave old Ziethen! how did the supper of Good Friday agree with your sanctimonious stomach? Have you properly digested the veritable body and blood?” At this blasphemy, and amid the thunders of pealing laughter, the saluting artillery of the delighted guests, Ziethen leaped to his feet, and after shaking his grey hairs with indignation, and silencing the revellers with a cry, as though they had been dogs, he turned to the godless master of the realm, and said--words, if not precisely these, certainly and exactly to this effect:--

“I shun no danger;--your majesty knows it. My life has been always ready for sacrifice, when my country and the throne required it. What I was, _that_ I am; and my head I would place on the block at this moment, if the striking of it off could purchase happiness for my king. But there is One who is greater than I, or any one here; and He is a greater sovereign than you who mock Him here from the throne in Berlin. He it is whose precious blood was shed for the salvation of all mankind. On Him, that Holy One, my faith reposes: He is my consoler in life, my hope in presence of death; and I _will not_ suffer His name to be derided and attacked where I am by, and have voice to protest against it. Sir, if your soldiers had not been firm in this faith, they would not have gained victories for you. If you mock this faith, and jeer at those who cling to it, you only lend a hand to bury yourself and the state in ruin.” After a pause he added, looking the while on the mute king:--“What I have spoken is God’s truth; receive it graciously.”

Frederic was the patron of Voltaire, who had dared to say at his own table that what it had taken God and twelve Apostles to build up, one man (Voltaire) would destroy. But Frederic was now, for the moment, more deeply moved by what had been uttered by the unphilosophical Ziethen than by anything that had ever fallen from the brilliant but irreligious Voltaire. He rose, flung his left arm over Ziethen’s shoulder, offered his right hand to the brave old Christian general, and exclaimed:--“Ziethen, you are a happy man! Would that I could be like you! Hold fast by your faith; and I will respect even where I cannot believe. What has occurred shall never happen again.”

A deep and solemn silence followed, and the dinner was spoiled, according to the guests, to whom the king gave the signal to disperse long before their appetites had been satisfied. Ziethen was preparing to withdraw with the rest, but Frederic, taking him by the hand, whispered:--“You, my friend, come with me to my cabinet.”

This anecdote was told by Bishop von Eylert to Frederic William III. That king, who had never heard of the incident, pronounced on it a three-piled eulogium of “excellent, pleasing, and instructive,” adding thereto a natural desire to know what passed between the king and Ziethen in the cabinet. It were doubtless well worth knowing, but I have sought for any notice of it, and all in vain. The good bishop, as he deserved, was invited to remain at Sans Souci, to supper. “I excused myself,” says the prelate, in his memoir of the king, “as having only a common upper coat on.” The king replied, smilingly, “I know very well that you have got a dollar and a dress-coat; you are the same person in either. I want _you_, not your coat; so, go in.”

The Prussian soldiers, in the days of the great Frederic, used to be allowed unlimited liberty in providing themselves with food in an enemy’s country. The like permission, but somewhat enlarged, was given to the Croat soldiers, under the name of foraging for “supper;” but in that permission they included every meal. They are as ready at it as Abyssinians; they cut a slice out of the first beast they fall in with, salt it, put it between the saddle and the horse’s back, gallop till it gets warm, and then eat it with Croat appetite. The sportsmen of Dauphiny eat beccaficoes after much the same fashion; they pluck the bird, sprinkle it with pepper and salt, carry it on their hat to dry in the air, and eat it with relish for supper, without any further cooking. They declare it is far better so than when roasted.

Celebrated as the “petits soupers” of the French were during the last century, they were equalled in brilliancy, and perhaps surpassed in popularity, by those given in Paris by the Duchess of Kingston. The adventures of that very adventurous lady rendered her a favourite with our lively neighbours. When a rustic Devonshire beauty,--wayward, capricious, ignorant, and seductive, Elizabeth Chudleigh was suddenly transplanted to the court of the Princess of Wales, as maid of honour. She there captivated the youthful Duke of Hamilton, returned his affection, and accepted the offer of his hand. They loved intensely, quarrelled furiously, and were reconciled warmly; the enemies of both toiled incessantly to prevent the marriage, and each was daily told of the alleged infidelities of the other. One of these stories excited the ardent beauty to such rage that she dismissed her ducal lover, and in the whirlwind of her wrath gave her hand to Captain Hervey, brother of the Earl of Bristol. She married in haste, and repented quite as hastily. She hated her husband before they left the church together; and after six months of the most active domestic warfare, the ill-assorted pair separated by mutual consent. She went abroad to find solace for her disappointment, and was heartily welcomed at the courts of St. Petersburg, Prussia, and Saxony; she was the favoured guest of Catherine II., and of the great Frederic, at Berlin; and no electoral banquet took place at Dresden without being enlivened by her presence and her wit. When she accepted the invitation to resume her place at the English court, the reception she met with was enthusiastic: she played whist with the men, and she drove four-in-hand as if she had been the born daughter of a charioteer, brought up to her father’s business. Her accomplishments won the heart of the simplest of dukes and the gentlest of men, his grace of Kingston, and as an ecclesiastical court, in 1769, pronounced her marriage with Captain Hervey (now Earl of Bristol) null and void, she speedily espoused her ducal admirer, while her former husband bestowed an earl’s coronet on a second wife. The duke’s property was not entailed, and the duchess spent it with such reckless prodigality, that his grace was fairly frightened into consumption and death; and in 1773 she was a beautiful widow, with the large remnant of the duke’s fortune in her possession--as long as she did not marry again. Away she went to Rome, sailed up the Tiber in her own yacht, entertained the pope (Ganganelli) Clement XIV. at breakfast, dinner, and supper, and kept up such a state that the world had never beheld such extravagant splendour since the days of the most profuse and profligate of queens: the heirs of the duke, seeing their inheritance fast melting away, instituted against her the famous suit for bigamy, on the ground that the ecclesiastical court which broke her first marriage had no power to do so. To meet her accusers she hurried to England, where she considerably startled the modest among our grandmothers by her Sunday amusements, and the daily display afforded by the very lowest of dresses. But as she gave most splendid dinners she had no lack of friends, and few men could find it in their hearts to abandon a woman in distress, whose kitchen fires were never extinguished, who gave her guests green peas at Christmas, and whose commonest beverage was imperial tokay. The House of Lords judged her case, heard her defence, and pronounced her second marriage bigamy by overthrowing the decree of the ecclesiastical court with regard to her first union. To avoid the vulgar penalty she immediately fled, crossed the Channel in a storm, and proceeded to Munich, where she was royally entertained, especially as the law could not touch the property bequeathed her by the Duke of Kingston. The courtesy title of duchess was still allowed her, and the Elector of Bavaria added to it that of Countess of Warth. Great nobles gave entertainments in her honour, which lasted, for days, and ended with a ball, a banquet, and, instead of common-place fireworks, the storming of a town at midnight. Poor nobles vied with each other for her smiles and the life-interest of her possessions; but as she had once been nearly entrapped by a Greek Prince Warta, who turned out to be the son of an ass-driver in Trebizond, and who committed suicide in prison, she made and kept her resolution to be her own mistress for the future, and not that of either count or kaiser.

In France, where she ultimately resided, she purchased the estate of St. Assize au Port, which had formerly belonged to the Duke of Orleans, the father of “Egalité.” She paid down a million and a half of francs for it, and sold seven thousand francs’ worth of rabbits from it, during the first week of her residence there. A fricasee of the duchess’s rabbits was, for a long time, the chief dish at all the _guinguettes_ round Paris. Her own great suppers were famous for their refinement and luxury. She was a lover of good living, a GOURMET rather than a GOURMANDE; an epicure of taste, but not a glutton; and the gastronomic art never could boast of a more liberal patronage than that she bestowed upon it, especially in her Paris residence; where her table, her wit, her dinners, and her diamonds, made of her, for a time, the most remarkable personage in the capital. She died suddenly, of the rupture of a blood-vessel, in 1788, and was completely forgotten before that year had also expired.

I have mentioned that our eccentric countrywoman had purchased the property of the Duke of Orleans; and that reminds me how fatal the table, and particularly the supper-table, has been to the dukes of that house. Thus Philippe, the brother of Louis XIV., quarrelled with the latter touching the marriage which the king wished to conclude between one of his own natural daughters and the duke’s son. Orleans, fevered and flushed, went to sup “with the ladies of St. Cloud.” He had not long before eaten heavily and drunk deeply at dinner; and at this second meal he was fatally stricken with apoplexy. The king said he was sorry, and having thus far given way to his grief, he sat down with Madame de Maintenon to rehearse the overture of an opera. This duke’s son and successor gave suppers, at which his infamous daughter, the Duchess de Berri, presided, and admission to which was purchased by the candidate making simple denial of his belief in a God! The fate of both had something retributive in it. The Duchess de Berri, who had privately married a profligate and ugly officer of her guards, named De Riou, sought to overcome her father’s wrathful refusal to acknowledge the union, by giving him a splendid supper _al-fresco_ on the terrace of Meudon, on the 13th May, 1709. The evening proved cold and damp, and the duchess caught there a fever brought on by a chill, over-feeding, and deep drinking, of which she died. Fourteen years afterwards, the sire who, at sixteen, had all the experience in vice of a man of sixty, was dining with the Duchess of Phalaria, his last mistress, when he was taken ill. The physician who was summoned enjoined abstinence immediate and complete. “Wait till to-morrow,” said the duke, “I will enjoy myself to-night.” And accordingly, the exemplary pair supped together, and the lady was in the act of telling the duke one of her lively stories. As she went on, the glass slid from his hand, and his head sank upon her shoulder. She thought he was asleep, and went on with her story; but he to whom she was telling it was stone-dead. The son of the regent duke was in every respect unlike his father. He ate _his_ last supper with the Jansenist fathers of the Geneviève,--symbol of his general habits and the society he kept. _His_ son was the father of _Egalité_, and at the time of his death (1785) was popular with the lower classes at Paris for the nightly suppers which he distributed to them, and which consisted of bread and wine, with medicine for those who needed it. It was a distribution made not charitably, but politically. Of the last meal of Egalité, before he went to execution, I only know that it was a breakfast, and not a supper, and that he both ate and drank heartily. Misfortune quite as little disturbed the appetite of the Louis Philippe of our own days. During his flight from Paris he never forgot the hour of supper or dinner; and when “William Smith” landed at Newhaven, the first thing he asked for was--something to eat. I notice these table traits, simply because the Orleanist historians always speak contemptuously of Louis XVI. eating, with appetite, in open court during his trial. The stomach of Orleans was ever as ready as that of Bourbon.

The supper has been called the conversational meal, but to make it so in perfection it requires a thorough professor of the science of conversation--one who knows that its very spirit consists less in being a good talker himself than in flinging about suggestive matter to induce others to converse upon. The host who understands the science will so do this that his guests will be satisfied with themselves. Some French writer has said, in reference to this after-supper gossip, that it should be like a game at cards, at which each player does his best,--but I do not endorse this sentiment to its fullest extent, although I allow that there is something in it. The wise generally, and dyspeptics especially, will do well to avoid political subjects after supper; and perhaps there is no more comprehensive remark to be made on this matter than one advanced by a follower of La Bruyère, a minor moralist, who has said that “la confiance fournit plus à la conversation que l’esprit ou l’érudition.”

I recollect once seeing the dullest of evenings made suddenly bright by an apt query modestly put by one who needed not to inquire, but who quietly asked if anyone present could name the author of the line:--

“Fine by degrees, and beautifully less.”

Many a wide guess was fired off prior to the successful naming. The general opinion was in favour of Pope, and Pope has indeed written a line very like it:--

“Fine by defect, and delicately weak.”

The falling upon such coincidences are the very explosives of after-supper discussions: thus, the very familiar line--

“Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm,”

may be the text for a pretty dispute. It occurs in Addison’s “Campaign,” and also in Pope’s “Dunciad.” The latter poet too has said--

“Ye little stars, hide your diminish’d rays;”

but Milton, before him, had written--

“At whose sight all the stars
Hide their diminish’d heads.”

Schiller’s “Thekla” warbles melodiously her melancholy assurance--

“Ich habe gelibt und geliebet;”

and Byron’s “Sardanapalus,” equally used up, mutters with a faint sigh the same words--

“I have lived and loved.”

We all know who tells us that

“Gospel light first beam’d from Boleyn’s eyes;”

and Horace Walpole harped on the same tune, when he said--

“From Catherine’s wrongs a nation’s bliss was spread,
And Luther’s light from Henry’s lawless bed.”

Gray and Moss, too, afford instances of like coincidences of sound or sentiment, or both. The first, in his “Elegy,” has--

“And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”

The second, in his “Beggar’s Petition,” sings to the same air--

“And left the world to wretchedness and me.”

I have noticed, in a former page, how Gray’s line of

“Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,”

must necessarily remind one of Shakspeare’s words, in the mouth of Brutus--

“Dear as the drops that visit this sad heart.”

Demosthenes has truly said--

Ἀνὴρ ὁ φεύγων καὶ πάλιν μαχήσεται,

so that Sir John Minnes is not even the original author of the Hudibrastically sounding assertion--

“He who fights and runs away,
May live to fight another day.”

The lines in Hudibras are as the perfecting and comment on the above, remarking as they do--

“For he that runs may fight again,
Which he can never do that’s slain.”

These coincidences are, no doubt, unintentional. For my own part, I do not believe that Shakspeare, when he spoke in Hamlet, of

“The undiscover’d country, from whose bourne
No traveller returns,”

necessarily had in his mind the

“Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum
Illuc unde negant redire quemquam,”

of Catullus; although the latter lines were quoted by Seneca the philosopher, and were as familiar as household words among the verse-loving ancients. Dr. Johnson’s remark on the similarity between Caliban’s desire to sleep again, and the πάλιν ἤθελον καθεύδειν of Anacreon, may apply to nearly all the passages in our national poet which appear to have been derived from the ancients. If we judged them by any other rule than that the ideas presented themselves naturally to Shakspeare’s mind, without consideration whether any one before him had sung to the self-same tune, we might soon turn _his_, and indeed any poet’s works, into a thing of shreds and patches. For instance, again, when the young Dane describes Osric as “spacious in the possession of dirt,” we might accuse the author, yet wrongfully, perhaps, of having stolen the idea from the “multa dives tellure” of Horace. We might imagine that the “Id in summa fortuna æquius quod validius,” of Tacitus, gave birth to

“That in the captain’s but a choleric word,
Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy,”

of Shakspeare, who would have been very much surprised had he been told as much. Again, Corneille, because he said,

“Qui commence bien ne fait rien s’il n’achève,”

is not to be accused of having written a pendant to the assertion of Flaccus--

“Dimidium facti qui cœpit habet.”

Neither has Beaumarchais rifled Otway, because “Désirer du bien à une femme est ce vouloir du mal à son mari,” has a close resemblance to--

“I hope a man may wish his friend’s wife well,
And no harm done.”

If mere close resemblance establish a charge of plagiarism, then Chaucer, when in speaking of maidens dark or fair he said--

“Blake or white, I toke no kepe,”

stole the thought from the ancient Irish bard, who said--

“Bohumilun a coolen dhuv no baun;”

a line which Chaucer could not have read, though his own is a literal translation of it. Examples like these I might go on citing _ad infinitum_. As Rosalind says, I could quote you so eight years together, dinners, and suppers, and sleeping hours excepted. But I will conclude with one more case in point between a well-known English author and the French dramatist Molière. Thus writes the one--

“What woful stuff this madrigal would be,
In some starved, hackney’d sonneteer, or me!
But let a lord once own the happy lines,
How the wit brightens and the style refines!”

And thus sung the other--

“Tous les discours sont des sottises,
Partout, d’un homme sans éclat.
Ce seraient paroles exquises,
Si cé’tait un grand qui parla.”

If this be digressing, it is because after-supper conversation _does_ take a discursive character. In the last century, in Paris, the majestic nonentities were invited to dinner; the talkers, be they who they might, to supper. “La Robe dîne; Finance soupe,” was another of these distinctions; and it was found that the supper was by far the most agreeable meal of the day. The celebrated Duchess of Kingston was especially celebrated for her Paris suppers. They were infinitely more splendid than her English breakfasts, so pleasantly sneered at by Horace Walpole. The wits assembled round her in gay clusters, and they and the poets cudgelled their brains to prove one another plagiarists; while the peers stood by, and marvelled at the extent and elasticity of the human understanding. Nothing could well surpass the hilarity and magnificence of these entertainments, where the philosophers were voted as dull as the nobles, and no aristocracy was acknowledged but the aristocracy of intellect. Another lady, remarkable for the elegance of the little suppers over which she presided, was Madame Tronchin: but the Reign of Terror came on, and her friends and relatives were daily dragged from her to the guillotine; and Madame Tronchin, who had a most feeling heart, used to say, that she never could have gone through such horrors had it not been for her little cup of café à la crême. The courtiers used to joke in like fashion, at the suppers of Versailles, at national disgrace. When the Count d’Artois returned from the siege of Gibraltar, to which he had gone with much boasting, and began to talk of his batteries, the courtiers used to smile, and to whisper to one another that he meant his “batterie de cuisine.”

With regard to the dietetics of supper, it may be taken for granted that late, heavy meals are dangerous, and to be avoided. Chymification and sleep may go on tolerably well together after it; but when the time comes for chylification and sanguification, feverish wakefulness will accompany the process. Dyspeptic patients, however, are authorized to take a light supper before going to bed. It is said that the idle man is the devil’s man; and it may also be said of the stomach, that if it has nothing to do it will be doing mischief. It is especially so with persons of weak digestion; for whom an egg, lightly boiled, or dry toast and a little white-wine negus, is a supper _selon l’ordinance_. But a wise man will hardly want a guide in this matter. Breakfast may be the meal of friendship; dinner, of etiquette; and supper, the feast of wit;--but, generally speaking, he will show most wit who takes the least supper. Common sense should teach him the exact measure of his capacity.

A whale swallows at a gulp more shrimps than would be required to make sauce for the universe. That gentle songster, the canary, is like the celebrated contralto songstress, who eats daily half a peck of saffron salad;--the bird consumes nearly his own bulk weight of food. But he is delicate compared with the caterpillar, which consumes five hundred times its own weight before it lies down, to rise a butterfly. As for the hyæna, he is popularly said, when hungry, and other food not presenting itself, to eat himself; and probably, like Dr. Kitchener, he carries his own sauce-box about with him! But the stomach of man is not made to perform such feats as those accomplished by the whale, the canary, or the caterpillar. He is especially to remember, that though an animal, he is not a beast.

Man, it must be remembered, began with refinement. He was made perfect, upright, and to him was given “every herb bearing seed, which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree, yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” Here food is used as the symbol of celestial blessings; as in the passage, “He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat, and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied them.” With the fall, civilization and innocence also fell, and barbarism was the offspring of disobedience. There was a time when men had sunk so low that they were like the Troglodytes described by Pomponius Mela--“Troglodytæ nullarum opum domini, strident magis quam loquuntur, specus subeunt, alunturque serpentibus”--they had no property, shrieked rather than spoke, lived in caves, and devoured serpents for food. The fine wheat and the honey from the rock was not theirs. The Fenns, painted by Tacitus, were only a shade less barbarous: “Mira feritas,” says the graphic Caius Cornelius, “fœda paupertas; non arma, non equi, non penates; victui herba, vestui pelles, cubili humus”--wonderful for their wildness, their poverty filthy; they had neither horses, nor gods; the grass was their food, skins their raiment, and the ground their couch. The Helvetii were _progressistas_ in the race for the prize of civilization; and, when planning an emigration project, they took two years to thoroughly perfect the plan, laying up stores of provisions the while. Whoever Ceres may have really been, it is clear that in her is to be recognised the benefactress of mankind:--

“Prima Ceres unco glebam dimovit aratro,
Prima dedit fruges, alimentaque mitia terris,
Prima dedit leges;”

she who taught them the uses of the plough, of agriculture, and of fixed laws, and who gave them what God had intended for civilized and innocent man, “the finest wheat,”--she must have been the renovator of the earth, and of beauty upon it. Man, like the rudest saints of the desert--so near may savagery be to undisciplined sanctity--had been “feeding on ashes but now the finest wheat was again there to give him strength and delight,”--wheat, where golden grain had, perhaps, first yielded its abundance beneath the shade of the primeval tree of knowledge.

The era of wheat, of the ploughshare, and of iron, was the era of the second civilization. Man was no longer generally a wild savage, or a cunning hunter. God again vouchsafed to him “the finest of the wheat;” and, as civilization progressed, so also was widened the circle of supply, upon which indeed much of civilization depends.

The subject of “Man and his Food,” with regard to the future, has been ably discussed by Dr. Leonard Withington, of Newbury, Massachusetts. He has moved the question, whether we have reached the terminus of all our stores or not? He holds, that the forest, the field, the river, and the sea may yield contributions to our table, in addition to the known abundance for which our as abundant gratitude is now due. We have not reached the line of our last inventions; and, doubtless, new articles are to be discovered, which will have an equal influence on virtue and happiness. “Boundless nature,” says Dr. Withington, “lies before us, and undeveloped skill is wrapt up in the human breast. The exuberance of our system is not exhausted,--her beasts, her birds, her fishes, her plants, her growing trees and her copious grasses, her pastures, her valleys, her lofty mountains and her rolling streams, are all spread out to the hungry world. Nature is an image of God, and she echoes, though she does not originate the words, ‘In my Father’s house is bread enough, and to spare. Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it; thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water; thou preparedst them corn when thou hadst so provided for it. Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly; thou settlest the furrows thereof; thou makest it soft with showers; thou blessest the springing thereof.’”

Dr. Cumming holds, not only that death is the most unnatural of conditions, but that when the era of heavenly, everlasting life shall be established, the heaven of man will be here upon earth. So Dr. Withington thinks that the earth will not only be made more heavenly beautiful than it now is, before the period of the new paradise, but more abundant also. “The manna,” he says, “which is hereafter to be provided, will not be rained down from heaven, but will spring up from the earth.” And there is common sense in this last assertion, for in it is implied that abundance will come by the proper application of knowledge and labour, without which the earth, ever wise and prudent, will yield but little. The increasing populations of that earth have two objects before them which are of no small importance, and which are thus defined by Dr. Withington:--“One is, to impart from the open field of nature all those good and wholesome things which our Father has laid up for us; and secondly, to train our taste and habits for the using of those things which are nutritive and sweet, and which may have the best influence on our moral character and social happiness.” The training should begin from early childhood,--and early childhood requires delicate training.

An American writer on dietetics is half afraid that people will smile if he, in connexion with the subject, introduces dainty children; and yet, as he justly remarks, “there is a mystery about this subject, on which we may well bestow a passing thought.” There are children in all the various classes of life who are “very difficult about their food.” “These little connoisseurs,” says Dr. Withington, “cannot eat with the rest of the family, and the mother and the son are often at issue in an interminable controversy. The mother often says it is all whim and caprice; and some severe matrons tell their children that they shall not eat a morsel until the given lump is devoured. But the son would say, if he could quote Shakspeare, ‘You cram these things into mine ear against the stomach of my sense. I know I don’t love it. I can’t eat it; it is not fit to be eaten.’” The doctor proceeds to inquire if this turn of the appetite be a matter of caprice or necessity. He examines whether the mother, or the boy be right. He acknowledges the antiquity of a controversy which has been carried on for ages, and he has no doubt “that Eve had it with Cain and Abel, the first supper she gave them after they were weaned. We offer it,” he adds, “as a profound conjecture, that Cain was a dainty boy, and probably doubled up his fist at his mother.” With regard to the controversy itself, he appears to think that it has much of the quality of that which marked the dispute about the colour of the chameleon, and that “both parties are partly wrong.” It is likely, as he remarks, that much depends on the training and volition, and also on original nature and temperament. “There are some things we were never made for, and they were never made for us. There are some kinds of food which, though they may suit the race, were never made for the _individual_. But this blinded appetite, partly natural, partly artificial, follows through life.” And this is leaving the controversy very much where the worthy doctor found it.

Finally, let them who fancy that man was made merely to enjoy, learn truth from contemplating the portrait of one whose sole philosophy was gastronomic enjoyment. If ever there was a man who had a gay celebrity, and who taught in the porch, that life was only life at the tables in the “salon,” it was the editor of the “Almanack des Gourmands.” He taught not that _bibere est vivere_, but that _bibere_ was only the half of _vivere_, and that to _live_ was emphatically to eat and drink. He was a practical philosopher, it should be observed, and here is the portrait of the man, at the end of his philosophical practice:--“The author of the Almanack is still in the land of the living. He eats, digests, and sleeps, in the charming valley of Longpons.... But how is he changed! At eight o’clock, he rings for his servants, scolds them, cries _Extravagantes!_ calls for his _soupe aux ficules_, and swallows it. Digestion now commences: the labour of the stomach reacts upon the brain, the gloomy ideas of the fasting man disappear, calmness resumes her sway, he no longer wishes to die. He speaks, converses tranquilly, asks for Paris news; and inquires for the old gourmands still living. When digestion is finished, he becomes silent, and sleeps for some hours. On awaking, complaints recommence; he weeps, he sighs, he becomes angry, he wishes to die, he calls eagerly for death. The hour for dinner comes; he sits himself down to table, dinner is served, he eats abundantly of every dish, although he says he has no want of anything, as his last hour is approaching. At dessert, his face becomes animated; his eyes, sunk in their orbits, sparkle brightly. ‘How is Marquis de Coussy, dear doctor?’ he exclaims: ‘how long will he last? They say he has a terrible disease. Doubtless they have not put him on regimen. You would never have suffered that, for one must eat to live,--ah!’ At length, he rises from table. Behold him in an immense arm-chair. He crosses his legs, supports his stumps upon his knees (for he has no hands, but something resembling the flap of a goose), and continues his conversation, which always runs on eating. ‘The rains have been abundant,’ he cries, ‘we shall have plenty of mushrooms this autumn. What a pity, dear doctor, that I cannot accompany you in your walks to St. Geneviève! How fine our vines are! what a delicious perfume!’ And then he falls asleep, and dreams of what he will eat on the following day!”

Fancy, if the theory of guardian angels be a beautiful truth, what the winged watcher of this animal, staggering over the supper of life, must feel at contemplating the ward committed to his care. For our own profit such examples may be employed, as the ancients showed their slaves drunk in presence of their sons, that the latter might be disgusted with inebriety. And this tail-piece should be engraved at the end of every work professing to teach that there is even in this world, a paradise for _gourmands_. The old heathen Socrates knew better, when he said, “Beware of such food as persuades a man, though he be not hungry, to eat; and those liquors that will prevail with a man to drink them when he is not thirsty.” In the same spirit, the pious Dodsley taught, that health sat on the brow of him only who had temperance for a companion--temperance, which Sir William Temple styled as “that virtue without pride and fortune without envy, which gives health of body and tranquillity of mind, the best guardian of youth, and support of old age.” So Jeremy Collier says, “Temperance keeps the senses clear and unembarrassed, and makes them seize the object with more keenness and satisfaction. It appears with life in the face, and decorum in the person; it gives you the command of your head, secures your health, and preserves you in a condition for business.” What comment can I add to texts of such philosophy, but to bid wise men welcome to the feast of reason, where

“May good digestion wait on appetite,
And health on both!”

THE END.

R. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Henry Holden Frankum, Esq.

[2] “’Twixt the gloaming and the murk,
When the kye comes hame.”--HOGG.

[3] Φιλομμειδὴς Ἀφροδίτη. Iliad, iii. 414.

[4] After “Cupiditate et Amore,” Livy ungallantly adds, “quæ maxime ad muliebre ingenium efficaces preces sunt.”

[5] Lady Morgan, I think, calls dancing, “the Poetry of Motion.”

[6] “Qu’est-ce que la danse? le sourire des jambes. Qu’est-ce que le sourire? la danse du visage.”--_Bibliophile Jacob._

[7] The theatre at Boulogne stands on the site of the old convent garden belonging to the Cordeliers, the sea formerly flowed close to the spot. When Henry VIII. took Boulogne, he converted the convent into a marine arsenal.

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

Italics are represented thus _italic_.