The Physiology of Taste (44 page)

So it was that people afflicted by either private or public calamities abandoned themselves to sadness, and neglected to take any food, and it followed naturally that they came to look upon this voluntary abstinence as a religious act.

They believed that in tormenting their bodies when their souls
were in distress they could stir the pity of the gods; and this idea, which took hold of all races, gave birth to public mourning, to vows, prayers, sacrifices, mortifications, and fasting.

Finally Jesus Christ, come upon earth, sanctified voluntary abstinence, and every Christian sect has adopted it, with varying numbers of self-imposed vexations.

117: This custom of fasting, I am forced to admit, has fallen amazingly out of favor; and whether it be for the edification of the ungodly or for their conversion, I find pleasure in telling here how we used to observe it toward the middle of the eighteenth century.

On ordinary days we breakfasted before nine o’clock on bread, cheese, fruits, and sometimes cold meat or a pâté.

Between noon and one o’clock we dined on the traditional soup with boiled meat, more or less well supplemented according both to the circumstances and to our incomes.

Toward four o’clock we had a snack: this meal was light, and meant particularly for the children and those adults who prided themselves on observing the customs of their youth.

But there were also more elaborate celebrations at this time of day, beginning at five o’clock and lasting indefinitely; they were usually very gay, and ladies were marvelously fond of them; they were even held sometimes for women alone, and men were barred from them. I notice in my secret Memoirs that they were the scene of not a little scandalmongering and slanderous chit-chat.

Toward eight o’clock we had a meal consisting of an entrée, a roast, side dishes, salad, and dessert: the guests played a round of cards, and then went to their beds.

In Paris there were, as in our present time, suppers of a more elaborate kind, held after the theater and attended, according to the circumstances, by pretty women, fashionable actresses, elegant courtesans, aristocrats, bankers, rakes, and wits.

They recounted the latest scandal, and sang the newest song; they talked of politics, literature, and the theater, and above all they flirted.

Now let us see what our grandfathers did on fast-days.

They did not breakfast at all, and for this reason they were of course much hungrier than usual.

At the customary dinner hour they did as well as they could, but fish and vegetables are quickly digested; before five o’clock they were perishing with hunger; they looked at their watches, waited, and fumed helplessly in the very act of saving their own souls.

Toward eight o’clock there was served, not a good supper, but a collation,
¹
a term straight from the cloister, where monks toward the end of the day were allowed to enjoy a glass of wine after they had assembled to discuss the lives of the church fathers.

At the collation neither butter nor eggs, nor anything that had once lived and breathed, could be served. Our forefathers, as a result, had to satisfy themselves with salads, preserves, and fruit, dishes, alas, which are far from sustaining, especially for the lusty appetites of those days: but the faithful suffered patiently for the love of God, went to their beds, and began again the next day, as long as Lent lasted.

As for those more worldly souls who enjoyed the little suppers of which I have spoken, I have been assured that they never troubled themselves with fasting, either in the Lenten season or any other.

The greatest culinary accomplishment of those far days was a collation severely apostolic which still had about it the appearance of a decent meal.

Science managed to solve this problem, thanks to the religious tolerance felt toward fish cooked
au bleu
, vegetable broths, and pastries made with oil.

A strict observance of Lent created one pleasure, also, which is unknown to us today: the end of fasting, the
de-Lenting, at
the first meal on Easter.

If we look closely at the subject, we see that our pleasures are based on the difficulties, privations, and yearnings we suffer to attain them. All of this was apparent in the act which broke the Lenten abstinence: I have watched two of my great-uncles, both of them strong levelheaded men, almost swoon with delight at that moment on Easter Sunday when they watched the carving
of a ham or the first shattering of a meat pie’s crust. Today, enfeebled race that we have become, we could not withstand the shock of such powerful emotions!

118: I myself have seen the beginnings of laxness; it has crept upon us imperceptibly.

Young people up to a certain age were not forced to fast, in the old days; and pregnant women, or those who believed themselves to be so, were exempted from it because of their condition, and during Lent were served rich fare, and a nightly supper which was painfully tempting to the abstainers.

Gradually people began to convince themselves that fasting upset them, gave them headaches, kept them from sleeping. They managed to blame their abstinence for all those little miseries which afflict mankind in the Spring, such as skin eruptions, dizziness, nosebleeds, and other symptoms of purification which always indicate the reawakening of Nature. The result was that one man gave up fasting because he believed that he was ill, another because he had been so, and a third because he feared he might be, and inevitably the morning fasts and the evening collations grew rarer every day.

And that is not all: some of the winters were severe enough to arouse fears of a shortage of vegetables, and the lords of the Church themselves officially relaxed their strictures, when household providers began to complain of the high cost of meatless meals. Some of them even said that the pleasure of God could not consist in causing the ill health of his children, to which the more cynical added that Paradise could not be reached by starvation.

However, religious duty was still recognized, and for the most part any permission to break the rules of fasting was asked of the priests, who rarely refused to give it, always adding the provision that certain alms must be paid in place of the mortification of the flesh.

Finally there was the Revolution, so filling all our hearts with cares and fears and interests of another nature that there was no
longer either time or excuse to go running to the priests, some of whom were hunted as enemies of the State, which still did not prevent them from treating their brother prelates as
schismatics
.

To this reason for relaxation of the rules, which happily no longer exists, there was joined another equally powerful one. Our hours for meals have changed completely: we neither eat as often nor at the same times as did our ancestors, and fasting today would need a total reorganization.

This is so true that, although my friends are among the most sensible and settled of people, and are even fairly religious, I do not believe that in some twenty-five years I have been served ten meatless meals or a single collation,
except in my own home
.

Many men might find themselves mightily embarrassed in such circumstances; but I know that Saint Paul foresaw it
²
and I take shelter under his wing.

Moreover, it would be grossly foolish to believe that intemperance has increased in this new order of things.

The number of our daily meals has grown less by almost half. Drunkenness has vanished, to reappear only among the lowest levels of society on certain feast days. There are no more orgies: a depraved sot would be ostracized anywhere. More than a third of the Parisians eat no more than a light collation in the morning, and if certain of them delight in a subtle and refined gourmandizing, I can hardly see how they should be reproached for it, since we have already proved that everyone profits from such a pleasure and that none can be impoverished by it.

Let us not end this chapter without calling attention to the new direction which the tastes of the common people have taken.

Every day thousands of men spend their evenings in the theaters or the cafés, who forty years ago would have gone to the taverns.

No doubt this new habit adds little to our national income, but it is highly advantageous from a moral point of view. At the theater a man’s ideals are uplifted; at the café he instructs himself as he reads the daily papers; and certainly he has escaped, in both places, the brawls and illnesses and general coarsening of spirit which are the inevitable result of frequenting public houses.

1.
This word was in high favor, at the beginning of the twentieth century, among such small-town society reporters as worked on my father’s paper. “A dainty collation was served,” they would state simply, suggesting in the readers’ minds a table prettily strung with garden flowers and smilax, and covered with decorated paper cups of nutmeats, and plates of homemade cakes like Lady Baltimore and angel food … “A great big beautiful birthday cake was the pièce-de-résistance of the collation,” the aged and indomitable Minnie Brownson wrote at least once a week for thirty years, in my father’s daily
NEWS
.

2.
This probably refers to Paul’s remark, in his Epistle to Titus, “Unto the pure all things are pure.”

119:
BY EXHAUSTION IS
understood a state of weakness, of languor, and of depression brought about by preceding circumstances which make more difficult the natural bodily functions. There are three such kinds of fatigue, not counting the one which results from hunger.

These three are caused by muscular fatigue, by mental labors, and by amorous excesses.

A common remedy for all three types is the immediate cessation of whatever action has brought on the condition, which if not truly an illness is very near to one.

120: After this first indispensable prescription, gastronomy stands ready as always to offer its help.

To a man overcome by too prolonged muscular exercise it suggests a good soup, plenty of wine, well-cooked meat, and sleep.

For a scholar who has let himself be carried away by the charms of his subject a brisk walk in the fresh air is best, to revive his mind, and then a bath to soothe his tired body, and finally repose, after a little meal of poultry and leafy vegetables.

Finally we shall learn, in the following observation, what gastronomy can do for anyone who has forgotten that sensuality has its limits and physical pleasure its dangers.

121: I went once to pay a visit to one of my best friends (M. Rubat). I was told that he was ill, and true enough I found him in his dressing room, crouched weakly over his fire.

His looks horrified me: his face was white, his eyes burned, and his lower lip hung down so that all the teeth showed in his bottom jaw, in a way that had something hideous about it.

I inquired anxiously into the cause of this violent change. He hesitated, I insisted, and then after some resistance he said, blushing, “My dear chap, you know that my wife is jealous of me, and that this mania of hers has given me plenty of bad moments. For the past several days she has been in a really dreadful state on account of it, and it is because I tried to prove to her that she’d lost none of my love and that nobody shared my conjugal respects with her that I got myself into this condition.”

“Have you forgotten, then,” I asked him, “that you are forty-five years old, and that jealousy itself is an incurable illness? Don’t you know that
furens quid femina possit
?” I threw a few other equally unflattering remarks at him, for I was really angry. “Look,” I went on, “not only that, but your pulse is weak and thin and slow. What are you going to do about it?”

“The doctor just left,” he told me. “He decided I had a nervous fever, and prescribed a bleeding for which he is at this very moment sending me a surgeon.”

“A surgeon!” I cried. “Watch out, or you’re a dead man! Get rid of him as if he were a murderer, and tell him that I have taken complete responsibility for you, body and soul. And by the way, does your doctor know the real cause of your exhaustion?”

“Alas, no! A foolish embarrassment kept me from telling him the whole truth about it.”

“Well, we must ask him to come back. I’m going to make you a potion adapted to your condition, and while you wait for it, take this.” I gave him a glass of heavily sugared water,
¹
which he gulped down with the confidence of Alexander and the blind faith of a charcoal burner.
²

Then I left him, and hurried home to concoct, prepare, and elaborate a superrestorative, whose recipe will be found in my Varieties,
*
with various shortcuts I made, for in such a case as my friend’s a few hours of delay can cause hopeless setbacks.

I returned to his house as soon as possible, armed with my
pick-me-up, and found him already looking better; the color was coming back to his cheeks, and his eyes were less brilliant, but his lip still hung down like some shocking deformity.

The doctor was not long in arriving. I told him of what I had done, and the sick man confessed to him. His professional brow wrinkled sternly at first, but soon, as he looked at both of us somewhat ironically, he said to my friend, “You ought not to be surprised that I did not suspect an illness which really does not become either your age or your build, and on your part you have been indeed too modest in hiding the cause for it, which can only do honor to your powers. I am still angry with you for having risked my prescribing what might have been a death sentence for you. Nevertheless,” he added with a bow to me which I returned with compound interest, “my colleague here has pointed out the right path for you. Take his broth, no matter what he may call it, and if the fever goes down, as I think it will, breakfast tomorrow on a cup of chocolate into which you have beaten the yolks of two fresh eggs.”