The Physiology of Taste (28 page)

And sure enough, at the first spoonful of the spirits the corpse opened his eyes. His friends cried out, and began to rub his temples and gave him still a little more to drink, and at the end of a quarter of an hour he could, with a little help, stand up.

He was led thus to the oasis; the soldiers cared for him during that night, gave him a few dates to eat and fed him carefully, and the next day, mounted on an ass, he rode into Cairo with the other men.

53: A thing most worthy of note is that instinct, as general as it is imperious, which leads us to seek out strong drinks.

Wine, the most agreeable of beverages, whether we owe it to Noah who planted the first vine or Bacchus who pressed the first grapes, dates from the beginning of the world; and beer, which is credited to Osiris, goes back to those days beyond which nothing is certain.

All men, even the ones we have agreed to call savages, have been so tortured by this thirst for strong liquors, which they are
impelled to procure for themselves, that they have been pushed beyond their known capacities to satisfy it.

They have soured the milk of their domestic animals; they have extracted the juices of various fruits and roots where they have suspected there might be the elements of fermentation; and wherever men have gathered together they have been armed with strong drinks, which they employed during their feastings, their sacrificial ceremonies, their marriages, their funerals, and in fact whenever anything happened which had for them an air of celebration and of solemnity.

Wine was drunk and sung to for centuries before it was suspected that the spirit in it which gave it strength could be extracted; but the Arabs taught us the art of distiling, which they had invented in order to concentrate the odor of flowers, and above all that of roses, so celebrated in their writings; and then we began to think that it would be possible to uncover in wine the cause of that exaltation of flavor which gives to its taste such a special excitement; and, from one hesitant trial to another, alcohol was developed, and then spirits-of-wine, and then brandy.

Alcohol is the king of potables, and carries to the
nth
degree the excitation of our palates: its diverse preparations have opened up to us many new sources of pleasure;
*
it gives to certain medicaments
†
a strength which they would not have without it; it has even become in our hands a powerful weapon, for the nations of the New World have been almost as much conquered and destroyed by brandy as by firearms.

The method by which we discovered alcohol has led to other important results; for, since it consists in separating and stripping down to their essentials the parts which constitute a body and distinguish it from all others, it has served as a model for scholars devoting themselves to like research, who have disclosed to us completely unknown substances, such as quinine, morphine, strychnine and the like, already or still to be discovered.

However it may be, this thirst for a kind of liquid which
nature has sheathed in veils, this extraordinary need which acts on every race of mankind, in every climate and in every kind of human creature, is well worth the attention of the philosophical observer.

I have thought on it, as has many another, and I am tempted to put the desire for fermented liquors, which is unknown to animals, beside that fear of the future which is equally foreign to them, and to regard both these manifestations as distinctive attributes of man, that masterpiece of the last sublunary revolution.

54:
I SAID
:
the last sublunary revolution
, and this thought, expressed as it was, has led me far afield, very far indeed.

Indubitable signs teach us that this globe had already undergone several complete changes, which have been in effect
ends of the world
; and I do not know what instinct it is which warns us that there will be still more of them.

Often before now we have believed these revolutions ready to happen, and there are many people still living who once hurried to confess their sins because of the watery comet predicted by the good Jerome Lalande.

According to what has been written on the subject, we seem only too eager to surround such a catastrophe with avenging fury, with destructive angels and the sound of trumpets, and other no less horrifying accompaniments.

Alas, we do not need such histrionics to be destroyed; we are not worth such a funereal display, and if God wishes it he can change the whole surface of the globe without such exertion on his part.

Let us suppose, for instance, that one of those wandering stars, whose paths and purposes are unknown to any of us, and whose appearance is always accompanied by a legendary fear, let us suppose, I say, that such a comet flies near enough to the sun to be charged with a terrible excess of heat, and that it then comes near enough to us to cause a six-month period of a general temperature of about 170 degrees Fahrenheit (twice as hot as that of the comet of 1811).

At the end of this murderous period, all animal and vegetable life will have perished, and all sounds have died away; the earth will turn silently until other circumstances have developed other
germs of creation on it; and still the cause of our disaster will lie lost in the vast halls of outer space, and we shall have passed no nearer to it than a few million leagues.

This happening is as possible as any other, and it has always been for me a tempting thing to dream upon, and one I have never shunned.

It is a strange experience to follow, in spirit, this unearthly heat, to try to predict the effects of it and its development and the way it acts, and then to ask:

History can supply us with a few facts about the moral reactions; for the end of the world has already been predicted more than once, and even fixed on a certain date.

I really feel ashamed about not telling my readers how I myself have decided all these questions; but I do not wish to deprive them of the pleasure of doing it for themselves. It can eliminate a few insomniac hours for them, and even pave the way for some daytime
siestas
.

Real danger tears down all social ties. For instance, in the epidemic of yellow fever which struck Philadelphia in 1792 or thereabouts, husbands closed doors against the wives who shared their homes, children abandoned their fathers, and other such phenomena were common.

  Quod a nobis Deus avertat!

1.
There is a book by C. F. Ramuz,
PRESENCE DE LA MORT
, called in English
THE END OF ALL MEN
, which is more like this Meditation than anything I know of. There are many such books, of course: speculations on the end of the world are irresistible, and most of the speculators manage to put pen to paper, always with a horrendous and sadistic chill of discovery, as if the discussion of mass catastrophe makes easier in some way the realization that they, too, will die. Brillat-Savarin’s orderly chapter, which has about it an impersonal rhythm, a kind of jauntily philosophical brutality, must surely have slept somewhere in the stern brain of Ramuz, for he wrote it again in his
END OF ALL MEN
, and there seems nothing strange about finding the two men so alike.

The French judge in 1825 and the Swiss author a hundred years later, the one writing with easy graceful restraint and the other with obscure passionate harshness: they have discussed in their own ways the possible death of life, and have arrived, in a miracle of time and space, a kind of artistic collusion, at the same place. The Frenchman asks the questions; the Swiss answers them: the dialogue is good.

“Meditation 10” should always be printed as a foreword to Ramuz’ book. Or perhaps
THE END OF ALL MEN
should in some way be used as a footnote here in
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE
!

55:
I HAVE THUMBED
every dictionary for the word
gourmandism
, without ever being satisfied with the definitions I have found. There is a perpetual confusion of
gourmandism
in its proper connotation with
gluttony
and
voracity
: from which I have concluded that lexicographers, no matter how knowing otherwise, are not numbered among those agreeable scholars who can munch pleasurably at a partridge wing
au suprême
and then top it off, little finger quirked, with a glass of Lafitte or Clos Vougeot.

They have completely, utterly forgotten that social gourmand-ism which unites an Attic elegance with Roman luxury and French subtlety, the kind which chooses wisely, asks for an exacting and knowing preparation, savors with vigor, and sums up the whole with profundity: it is a rare quality, which might easily be named a virtue, and which is at least one of our surest sources of pure pleasure.

Let us make a few definitions, for a clearer understanding of this subject.

Gourmandism is an impassioned, considered, and habitual preference for whatever pleases the taste.

It is the enemy of overindulgence; any man who eats too much or grows drunk risks being expelled from its army of disciples.

Gourmandism includes the love of delicacies, which is nothing more than a ramification of this passion for light elegant dishes of little real sustenance, such as jams, pastries, and so on. This is a modification introduced into the scheme of things for the benefit of the ladies, and of such men as are like them.

No matter how gourmandism is considered, it deserves praise and encouragement.

Physically, it is the result as well as the proof of the perfect state of health of our digestive organs.

Morally, it is an implicit obedience of the rules of the Creator, who, having ordered us to eat in order to live, invites us to do so with appetite, encourages us with flavor, and rewards us with pleasure.

Gourmandism, considered as a part of political economy, is a common tie which binds nations together by the reciprocal exchange of objects which are part of their daily food.

It is something which makes wines, brandies, sugars, spices, vinegars and pickles, and provisions of every kind, travel from one end of the world to the other.

It gives a corresponding price to mediocre or good or excellent supplies, whether these qualities come to them artificially or by nature.

It sustains the hopes and ambitions and performances of that mass of fishermen, hunters, gardeners and such, who each day fill the most luxurious pantries with the results of their labors and their discoveries.

It is, finally, the means of livelihood of an industrious multitude of cooks, bakers, candymakers and other preparers of food with varying titles who, in their own ways, employ still more workers of every kind to help them, all of which causes a flow of capital whose movement and volume could not be estimated by the keenest of calculators.

And note well that any industry which has gourmandism for its object is but the more fortunate since it both has the fattest fortunes behind it and depends on the commonest daily human needs.

In the social state to which we have come today, it is hard to imagine a nation which would live solely on bread and vegetables. This nation, if it existed, would inevitably be conquered by a meat-eating enemy, as with the Hindus, who have fallen time
after time before any armies that wished to attack them; or on the other hand it would be subjugated by the cooking of its neighbors, like the Boeotians of long ago, who became gourmands after the battle of Leuctra.

56: Gourmandism offers great resources to the government: it adds to taxes, to duties, and to indirect fiscal returns. Everything that we swallow must be paid for, and there is not a single treasury which does not owe part of its real strength to our gourmandizing.

What shall we say of the hundreds of cooks who, for several centuries now, leave France every year to exploit the appetites of other lands? Most of them are successful men, and bring back to their own country the fruits of their labors, in obedience to an instinct which never dies in a true Frenchman’s heart. This importation of wealth is more than might be guessed, and its bearers will influence posterity.

What could be fairer, if nations honored their great men, than a temple with altars raised to gourmandism by the natives of our own France?

57: In 1815, the treaty of the month of November imposed on France the condition of paying seven hundred and fifty million francs in three years to the Allies.

To this duty was added the one of making good the reclamations of inhabitants of the different countries, whose united rulers had set forth the amounts, coming altogether to more than three hundred million.

And finally to all this must be added the requisitions of every possible kind made by the enemy generals, who heaped wagons with goods which they headed for the frontiers, and which the public was later forced to pay for; all this came to more than fifteen hundred millions.