The Physiology of Taste (42 page)

“Oh Heavens!” all you readers of both sexes will cry out, “oh Heavens above! But what a wretch the Professor is! Here in a single word he forbids us everything we most love, those little white rolls from Limet, and Achard’s cakes, and those cookies from …, and a hundred other things made with flour and butter, with flour and sugar, with flour and sugar and eggs! He doesn’t
even leave us potatoes, or macaroni! Who would have thought this of a lover of good food who seemed so pleasant?”

“What’s this I hear?” I exclaim, putting on my severest face, which I do perhaps once a year. “Very well then; eat! Get fat! Become ugly, and thick, and asthmatic, and finally die in your own melted grease: I shall be there to watch it, and you may as well understand now that in my next edition … But what do I see? A single phrase has convinced you. It has terrified you, and you beseech me to hold back my lightning … Be reassured; I shall map out a diet for you, and prove to you that there are still a few pleasures left for you here on this earth where we live to eat.

“You love bread: very well then, you can eat it made of rye:
³
the estimable Cadet-de-Vaux
⁴
has preached its virtues for a long time; it is less nourishing and most important of all it is less pleasant, which perforce makes it easier to carry out the prescription! The first thing to do, you know, is to flee temptation. Remember that: it is a question of your morale.

“You love soup, so have it made
à la julienne
, with green vegetables, cabbages, and root vegetables; I must forbid you to drink it made with bread, starchy pastes, or flour.

“At the first part of the meal almost everything is proper for you to eat, with a very few exceptions such as rice with poultry and the crusts of hot pasties. Enjoy it all, but with discretion, so that later you will not find yourselves satisfying a nonexistent hunger.

“The second half of the meal will appear then, demanding a philosophical attitude on your part. Shun anything made with flour, no matter in what form it hides; do you not still have the roast, the salad, the leafy vegetables? And since you must give up a few sugary dishes, choose instead a chocolate custard or the jellies made with wine, with orange juice, and so on.

“Now comes dessert. It is a new danger for you: but if up until now you have behaved yourselves, your common sense will indeed have the upper hand. Keep away from the ends of the table (it is there that the cakes are richest);
⁵
ignore the biscuits and the macaroons; you still have every kind of fruit, fresh or preserved, and a dozen other things which you will know how to select if you have paid any attention to my precepts.

“After dinner I order you to drink some coffee, I permit you to have a liqueur, and I advise you to take tea and punch now and then when it is offered.

“For breakfast, you may have rye bread as always, and chocolate rather than coffee. However, I do permit rather strong
café au lait
. Absolutely no eggs. The rest you may choose for yourselves. But it is impossible to breakfast too early. When you wait too long, dinner time is there before your digestion has completed itself; you eat none the less for this; and such gobbling without appetite is one of the most important causes of obesity, since it happens so often.”

108: Until this point I have outlined for you, like a tender and rather easy-going father, the limits of a diet which can hold back the obesity which threatens you: let us now add a few precepts against this enemy.

Every summer you must drink thirty bottles of Seltzer water, a big glass in the morning, two before luncheon, and two more on going to bed. In general drink white wines, light and acidulous ones like those of Anjou. Shun beer as if it were the plague, and eat often of radishes, fresh artichokes with a simple dressing, asparagus, celery, and cardoons. Among meats choose veal and poultry: eat only the crust of bread; whenever you are in doubt be advised by a doctor who agrees with my principles; and no matter when you may start to follow them you will soon find yourselves fresh, attractive, nimble, in good health, and ready for anything.

After having thus established yourselves, you must be shown the pitfalls, for fear of your outdoing yourselves in a spurt of zealous enthusiasm against obesity.

The special danger which you must guard against is the habitual use of acids, which are sometimes prescribed by the ignorant and which experience has always proved to have bad results.

109: There is current among the ladies a dreadful theory, which annually causes the deaths of many young people, that acids, and above all vinegars, are preventives of obesity.

Doubtless the continued use of acids causes a loss of weight, but only as it destroys freshness, health, and life itself; and even though lemonade be the sweetest of these acids, there are few stomachs which can long resist its attack.

The truth of what I am now saying could not possibly be made too public; there are few of my readers who could not furnish their own examples to strengthen my case, and among all such stories I prefer the following, which is in a way an intimate one.

In 1776 I was living in Dijon; I was studying law at the university there, and also taking a course in chemistry under M. Guyton de Morveau, then advocate-general, and one in practical domestic medicine under M. Maret, permanent secretary of the Academy and father of the Duke of Bassano.

I had a strong feeling of friendship for one of the loveliest people I can ever remember knowing. I say
feeling of friendship
, which is at once strictly true and very surprising, since I was at that time amply provided to cope with more demanding relationships.

This friendship, then, which must be taken for what it was and not for what it might have become,
⁶
had for its characteristic an intimacy which became, from its first moment, so confidential as to seem quite natural to us, with endless whisperings which did not alarm the guardian mother in the least, because they had about them a kind of innocence left over from childhood itself. Louise was a very pretty girl, I must add, and above all possessed in perfect proportions that classical plumpness which has always charmed man’s eyes and added richness to his arts.

Although I was only her friend, I was far from blind to the attractions which she let be seen or merely suspected, and perhaps they may have increased somehow the chaste sentiment which I felt for her, albeit unconsciously on my part. However that may be, one night when I had looked at Louise somewhat
more attentively than usual, I said to her, “My dear friend, you are not well! It seems to me that you have grown thinner!”

“Not at all,” she replied with a smile that had something melancholy about it. “I feel perfectly well, and if by chance I have lost a little weight, I really would not miss it.”

“Lose weight!” I said heatedly. “You have no need either to lose or to gain any! Stay the way you are, sweet enough to nibble!” and still more phrases of the same kind, which a twenty-year-old friend seems always to have in abundance.

After this conversation I watched the young girl with an interest mixed with worry, and soon I saw her face grow pale, her cheeks become hollow, and her charms dwindle…. Oh, what a fragile fleeting thing is beauty! Finally one night I met her at a ball, to which she had gone as usual; I made her promise that she would sit out two quadrilles; then, profiting by this stolen time, I got her to admit that, bored by the jokes of some of her friends that in another two years she would be as broad as St. Christopher, and helped by the advice of still others, she had decided to grow thinner and with this end in view had drunk a glass of vinegar every morning for one month. She added that until that moment she had told nobody of her program.

I shuddered at this confession; I understood the dangerous import of it, and the next day told the whole story to Louise’s mother, who was no less alarmed than I; we met, we consulted, we prescribed. Useless attempts! Her life forces had been irremediably undermined; and from the moment the danger was suspected, there was no hope left for us.

Thus, victim of stupid advice, the lovely Louise, reduced to the shocking state caused always by consumption, went to sleep for all eternity when she was but barely eighteen years old.

She died casting saddened glances toward a future which would never exist for her; and the idea that she had, no matter how unwittingly, helped cause her own death, made it even quicker and more painful.

She was the first person I ever saw die, for she breathed her last breath in my arms, just as I lifted her up, at her request, to watch the dawn. About eight hours after her death her desolate mother begged me to go with her to pay a last visit to the mortal
remains of her daughter, and we saw with astonishment that her whole face had taken on a look of radiance, almost of ecstasy, which had never before been there. It filled me with amazement: the mother drew from it a consoling augury. But it was not an unusual case: Lavater mentions it in his
TREATISE ON PHYSIOGNOMY.
⁷

110: Any antifat diet should be accompanied by a precaution which I had forgotten, and which I should have mentioned at the very beginning: it consists of wearing day and night a belt which supports the belly at the same time that it moderately confines it.

In order to understand the rightness of this, it must be remembered that the spinal column, which forms one of the sides of the intestinal cavity, is firm and inflexible; from this it follows that any excess of weight which the intestines acquire, from the instant when obesity pulls them from the proper vertical position, drags on the various envelopes which make up the walls of the belly; these, able to stretch themselves almost indefinitely,
*
could easily not have resilience enough to retract when the weight diminished, if they were not given some mechanical help like the belt, which by obtaining purchase on the dorsal column itself becomes its antagonist and reestablishes the proper balance. Thus this belt produces the double effect of hindering the paunch from giving way on the outside to the inner pressure of the intestines, and of lending it the necessary strength to contract again when this pressure diminishes. It must never be removed; otherwise the good done in daytime will be destroyed by the relaxation of sleep; but it is almost unnoticeable, and its wearers soon grow used to it.

The belt, which also acts as a warning sentinel by feeling uncomfortable when one has eaten too much, must be made with
a certain care; its tightness must be both moderate and unchangeable, or in other words it must be so constructed that it grows smaller as the weight grows less.

Nobody is condemned to wear it for the rest of his life; it can be left off without harm once the desired weight has been reached and has been held static for several weeks. Naturally a sensible diet must continue to be followed. It is at least six years now that I have not worn mine.

111: There is one substance which I believe to be actively antifat; several observations have led me to think so; however, I admit there is still room for doubt, and invite the graduate doctors to experiment further.

This substance is quinine.

Ten or twelve of my acquaintances have suffered long intermittent fevers; some of them were cured by old household remedies, powders, and so on, and others by the continued use of quinine, which never fails in its effectiveness.

All the people in the first category who were fat have regained their original corpulence; all those of the second have stayed free of their excess weight: this gives me the right to believe that it is the quinine which produced the latter result, since the only difference in the cases was the method of curing them.

Rational theory does not contradict this: on one hand the quinine, stimulating all the vital processes, can easily produce in the circulation an activity which excites and evaporates those gases otherwise destined to form fat; on the other hand it has been proved that quinine contains tannin, which can close up the cells meant, in ordinary cases, to receive fatty accumulations. It is even probable that these two effects act together and support one another.

It is according to these facts, whose truth anyone will admit, that I feel justified in advising the use of quinine to all those who wish to rid themselves of an excess of weight which has become unpleasant. Therefore,
dummodo annuerint in omni medicationis genere doctissimi Facultatis professores
, I believe that after the first
month of a sensible diet, anyone who wishes to grow thinner will do well to take for the following month, every other day at seven in the morning, a glass of dry white wine in which has been dissolved about a teaspoonful of good red quinine, and that excellent results will follow. Such, then, are the means which I propose to combat an incommodity as unfortunate as it is general. I have adapted them to human weaknesses, and modified them to the social conditions under which we exist.

I have leaned heavily on the experimental truth that the severer a diet may be, the less effect it will have, since it will perforce be followed haphazardly or not at all.

Great efforts are rare; and any preacher who wishes to be followed must propose to his disciples what is easy for them, and even, if possible, what is agreeable and pleasant.