The Physiology of Taste (38 page)

I should not allow myself to go any further, nor to break down the bars which I have fixed for my own good; however, out of a love for science, to which it can easily be seen I am not a stranger, I cannot help writing here two observations which I have noted with great care, and which can be known as all the more truthful
since several persons among my readers are still alive to testify to them.

There was, about 1790, in a village called Gevrin near Belley, an extremely crafty merchant; he was named Landot, and had squeezed out for himself a fairly pretty fortune.

He was, all of a sudden, struck by such a paralytic stroke that everyone believed him dying. The best doctors came to his aid, and he pulled out of it, but not without damage, for he left behind him almost all his intellectual faculties, and most important of all his memory. However, since he could still drag himself about, somehow, and was once more able to eat, he was allowed to keep the control of his properties.

When he was seen in this condition, the unfortunate people who had had dealings with him decided that it was time to take their revenge on him. On the pretext of coming to pay him a little visit, they flocked from every corner to suggest bargains, purchases, sales, exchanges, and other procedures of this kind which until then had been his stock in trade. But his adversaries soon found themselves mightily surprised, and realized that it was time to take a new view of their prey.

The cunning old fox had lost none of his commercial instincts, and the same man who often did not recognize his own servants, and even forgot his name, was always up to the minute on the price of all commodities, as well as the current value of every acre of meadow, vineyard, or woods within three leagues of him.

On these matters his judgment had stayed unclouded, and since he was less suspect as an invalid than before, the greater part of those who had hoped to best the sick merchant were caught in the traps which they themselves had set.

There was in Belley a certain Monsieur Chirol, who had served for a long time in the royal bodyguard, both under Louis XV and Louis XVI.

His intelligence was just sufficient for the high function to which he had devoted his life;
¹
but he possessed in an extravagant degree the sense of card playing, so that he not only knew all the old-fashioned games like Spanish ombre, piquet, and whist, but also was master of every subtlety of a new one after he had held three hands of it.

Well, this M. Chirol was hit like the old merchant by a stroke of paralysis, and so hard was the blow that he fell into a state of almost complete insensibility. Two faculties alone were left to him, those of digestion and of card playing.

Every day he went to the house where for more than twenty years he had kept his place at the card table, seated himself in a corner, and stayed there motionless and dozing, without paying attention to anything that went on around him.

The minute the time came to make up a game, he was asked to join it; he always accepted, and dragged himself toward the table; and there one would have sworn that the illness which had paralyzed the greater part of his faculties had not even touched his sense of play. And only a short time before his death he gave a superlative proof of the soundness of his reputation as a card player.

We were subjected, one time in Belley, to the visit of a Parisian banker whose name was, I believe, Delins. He brought proper letters of introduction; he was a stranger and he was from Paris: this was more than enough in a little town to make us all bustle to give him a pleasant stay.

M. Delins was both gourmand and card player. On the first count we kept him busy enough by holding him for five or six hours at a time at table; on the second he was harder to amuse: he was a great lover of piquet, and spoke easily of playing with six-franc counters, much higher stakes than any we had ever contemplated in Belley.

To overcome this social danger, the townspeople formed a league in which each one took or did not take shares, according to his presentiments: some said that Parisians know a fat lot more than the provincials, and others held, on the contrary, that all citizens of that great town have a certain amount of bluff in their make-up. However that may be, the league took shape; and to
whom did it confide the great task of defending the common weal? … ToM. Chirol.

When the Parisian banker saw this enormous pale bloodless form arrive, dragging one foot behind it, to seat itself across from him, he thought at first that it was a joke; but when he watched the ghost pick up the proper cards and deal them like a professional, he began to believe that at one time his adversary might have been worthy of him.

It did not take long to convince him that the gaming instinct still existed in the old man, for not only in this hand but in a great many more M. Delins was so beaten, skinned, and plucked that when he left he owed us more than six hundred francs, which were, of course, conscientiously divided among the members of the league.

Before he left Belley M. Delins called to thank us for the cordial welcome we had given him: in spite of it he could not help protesting against the decrepit state of the adversary we had presented to him, and he assured us that he would never be able to forgive himself for having taken such a thrashing from a corpse.

The summing up of these two observations is an easy one: it seems plain to me that the blow which, in both these cases, almost destroyed the brain, spared that part of it which had for so long been used in the schemes of commerce and card playing; and without doubt that portion of the organ resisted the shock either because continual exercise had made it more vigorous or because the same impressions, repeated over such a period of time, had left the most profound traces upon it.

90: Age has a marked influence on the nature of dreams.

In childhood one dreams of games, gardens, flowers, green fields and other lightsome subjects; later, of pleasures and loves, strife, marriages; later still, of established households, travels, and the favors of the highborn or their representatives; finally, of
business deals and worries, of fortunes, of past pleasures and of friends long dead.

91: Certain unusual phenomena sometimes accompany sleep and its dreams: a study of them would do much to advance our knowledge of the laws of human behavior,
²
and for this reason I shall put down here three observations taken from many which, during the course of a rather long life, I have had a chance to make about myself during the night’s silences.

One time I dreamed that I had discovered the secret of how to free myself from the laws of gravity, so that I could go up or down in the air with equal ease and as I wished, since it made no difference to my body.

This state was delightful to me, and probably many people have dreamed something like it; but the remarkable thing about it is that I remember explaining very clearly to myself (or so it seemed) the methods which had led me to this result, and that they seemed so simple that I was astonished that they had not already been discovered.
³

When I awoke, this explanation had vanished completely, but its result was still clear to me; and since that time I am utterly convinced that sooner or later a greater intelligence than mine will make this discovery. In any event, it was mine first!

92: Only a few months ago I experienced, in my sleep, a sensation of most extraordinary pleasure. It consisted of a kind of delicious shudder, in every particle that makes up my body. It was a form of prickling numbness, full of a rare charm, which, springing from my skin, penetrated to the very marrow of my bones, from my feet to the top of my head. I seemed to see a violet flame which flickered about my brow:

Lambere flamma comas, et circum tempora pasci.

I estimate that this condition, of which I was fully conscious physically, lasted at least thirty seconds, and I awoke from it filled with an astonishment which was not without a certain amount of terror.

From this experience, which is still very clear in my memory, and from many observations which have been made of persons in ecstatic or highly nervous states, I have come to the conclusion that the limits of human pleasure have never been either understood or set, and that we do not yet comprehend what point of bliss our own bodies can reach. I can only hope that within a few more centuries the future science of physiology will learn to control these extraordinary sensations, and will be able to produce them at will, just as sleep is now caused by opium; I can only hope that our great-great-nephews will find in them some compensations for the hideous suffering to which we are all at times subjected.
⁴

This idea finds some support in analogy, for I have already pointed out that the art of harmony, which today gives us such vivid, pure, and eagerly studied beauties, was totally unknown to the Romans: it is a discovery made at most five hundred years ago.

93: One night in the year VIII of the Republic (1800), I awakened, having gone to bed without any untoward incidents, about one o’clock, when generally I would have been in my first sleep. I found myself in a state of mental excitement which was completely extraordinary: my conceptions were vivid, my thoughts profound; the whole sphere of my intelligence seemed to have expanded. I was sitting up in bed, and my eyes seemed to see about me a pale, vague, misty light, which did not serve in any way to illuminate the objects in the room.

If I judged only by the torrent of ideas which flooded through me in rapid succession, I would have believed that this sensation lasted several hours; but, according to my clock, I am sure that
it was no more than thirty minutes. I was recalled from it by an outside incident over which I had no control, and was rudely brought back to earthly matters.

In a flash the sensation of light disappeared, and I felt myself sinking; the boundaries of my intelligence shrank; in a word, I was once again what I had been the evening before. But, since I had been completely awake during this experience, my memory still held on, although by now in muted colors, to a few of the ideas which had flooded my soul.

The first ones had time itself for their subject. It seemed to me that the past, the present, and the future were identical and meant the same thing, so that it was as easy to look ahead as it was to remember what had already happened. This is all that was left to me of the first intuition, which was partly obscured by the ones that followed it.

My attention was next drawn to the senses; I classified them in their order of perfection, and having come to believe that we must have as many of them within ourselves as outside, I set myself to look for them.

I had already found three, and almost four, when I fell back to earth again:

  (1)
Compassion
, which is a kind of constriction of the heart felt when we see another person’s suffering;

(2)
Predilection
, which is a sentiment of preference felt not only for an object itself, but for everything connected with this object or able to remind us of it;

(3)
Sympathy
, which is also a sentiment of preference felt by two objects drawn together by it.

  It might be believed that the last two sensations are one and the same, but the great difference between them is that
predilection
is not always reciprocal, whereas
sympathy
is necessarily so.

Finally, as I considered
compassion
, I was led to a conclusion which I feel is a very true one, and which I would not have thought of at another time: it is from this sensation that springs the beautiful commandment, first principle of all human law:

So strong, in truth, is the feeling which I still remember from the state I was in for that half-hour, that I would willingly give up the rest of my life, if it were possible, for one month of such an existence.

Writers will understand this much more easily than other people, for there are few of them who have not felt, in a much less powerful degree, of course, something like it.

An author, let us say, is warmly tucked into his bed, in a horizontal position, with his head well wrapped up; he thinks of the work he has in progress, his imagination takes fire, his ideas surge, phrases follow soon behind them, and since it is impossible to write lying flat,
⁵
he dresses, pulls off his nightcap, and seats himself at his desk.

And then, suddenly, he is not the same; his imagination grows dull, the thread of his thoughts is broken, and all the fine phrases have fled; he is forced to search painfully for what had come so easily to him, and more often than not he must put off to another and more fortunate day the work he has attempted.

All this can easily be blamed on the effect which the change of position and temperature must have on the brain: here is a good example of the influence of a physical state upon a moral one.

I have perhaps gone too far, because of my interest in this subject; but I have finally been led to think that the exaltation of Eastern priests is partly due to the fact that as Mohammedans they always have their heads warmly covered by their turbans, and that it must be to obtain quite opposite results that the law makers for our own monks have ordered that the tops of their heads be uncovered and shaved.
⁶

1.
This is one of the straight-faced remarks that make the Professor’s prose a continuous delight. Innocent on the surface, and even laudatory, it is a very amusing comment on the I.Q. of
the average professional guardsman, at least in Brillat-Savarin’s opinion.