The Physiology of Taste (11 page)

Later, Dr. Montègre brought into the clinics of Paris his philosopher’s spirit. He directed with skill the publication of
THE
HEALTH
GAZETTE
, and died when he was forty, in the West Indies, where he had gone to complete his projected works on yellow fever and the
vomito negro
.

At this moment (1825), Dr. Richerand stands on the top rung of the ladder of surgical medicine, and his
ELEMENTS
OF PHYSIOLOGY
has been translated into every tongue. He is invested with the highest possible confidence, named as he was at an early age professor in the Paris College of Medicine. No man has a more comforting manner than he, nor a gentler hand … nor a surer scalpel.

Dr. Récamier,
³
professor in the same school, sits at the side of his compatriot.

The present thus cared for, the future looks bright. Under the direction of such teachers, youths from the same countryside of Belley study to follow their distinguished examples.

Already the Drs. Janin and Manjot burn up the sidewalks of the capital. Dr. Manjot (39, Rue du Bac) devotes himself particularly to childhood illnesses; his theories are excellent, and before long he will surely become well known to the public because of them.

I hope that any courteous reader I may have will forgive the meanderings of this oldster, whose thirty-five years in Paris have not yet made him forget either his own country or his compatriots. It has been hard indeed for me to stay silent about many doctors whose names are still venerated in Belley, and who, although they did not have the chance to shine on the great stage of the capital, still had no less training, no less worth, than these others.

1.
This treatment is interesting if only for its simplicity, today when sesquipedalian sulfas rule our distintegration. It is comforting to remember that Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes used to carry a horse chestnut in one pocket and a potato in another to ward off rheumatism. That was in 1875 or thereabouts, but even today
thoughtful doctors say that Holmes knew as much as any physician needs to. The same may be true of La Chapelle.

2.
For more about this genial old fellow see “Sketch” in Meditation 14 and the story of the longest repast the Professor, who was a connoisseur of them, ever made in his life. In my opinion there are too few ancients like Dr. Dubois, or perhaps that is but a sentimentalized theory of mine which would totter if I had to spend my days with some lip-smacking patriarch. One normally tolerant woman I know found herself tight-mouthed and Puritanical when a local grocery store complained that her venerable uncle was pinching the salesgirls, and when she asked him why, he thought for a time and then said impersonally, “They are pinchable.” Perhaps she should have insinuated a few busts of Madame Récamier into her uncle’s surroundings …

3.
In the earliest edition I have, 1838, there is a footnote here which reads, “Godson of the author; he it was who cared for Brillat-Savarin during his last brief illness.” There is no sign of who added this note, but obviously it could not have been the Professor, who as far as is known wrote all the others in the book. Dr. Reécamier, probably a cousin of Brillat-Savarin as well as of the beautiful Juliette, had a simple case of pneumonia on his hands at the end of January, 1826. His old relative had gone rather grudgingly to the cold chapel of Saint-Dénis, on January 21, to a mass for the repose of the soul of Louis XVI to which he had been peremptorily invited by his superior, the president of the French bar. His serious view of his responsibilities as a judge outweighed the fact that he had a touch of
la grippe
, and he stood dutifully through the long prayers for the beheaded monarch, prayers which managed to kill off three of the wisest old men of Paris. All of them sickened quickly, and on February 2 Brillat-Savarin was the last of the trio to die. He had seemed, it was noted, to have a presentiment that his end was upon him, and he waited for it without regret or weakness, for he had long contemplated Death with the same philosophical detachment he felt toward Life. One of his admirers wrote, “He left the world like a satisfied diner leaving the banquet-room …”

IT
HAS
NOT
meant a great deal of work for me to prepare this book which I now offer to the public’s kindness. I had only to put in order the material I had spent so long in collecting: it was an entertaining task, and one which I did well to save for my old age.
¹

I soon saw, as I considered every aspect of the pleasures of the table, that something better than a cook book should be written about them; and there is a great deal to say about those functions which are so ever-present and so necessary, and which have such a direct influence on our health, our happiness, and even on our occupations.

Once I realized this basic fact, all the rest swung into focus. I looked about me. I made notes. Often, in the midst of the most luxurious festivities, the pleasure of observing my fellow banqueters saved me from my own possible boredom.

Of course, in order to carry out my plans, I needed to be doctor, chemist, physiologist, and even something of a scholar. But I became all these without the slightest pretensions to being a writer as well. I was carried along by a laudable curiosity, by a fear of lagging behind the times, and by a desire to be able to hold my own with the men of science with whom I have always loved to associate.
^*

I am above all a lover of doctors. It is almost a mania with me, and one of the happiest moments of my life was when, as a guest, I entered the amphitheater with the judges to listen to Dr. Cloquet’s presentation of his prize thesis, and heard a murmur
of curiosity run through the audience. The students had mistaken me for a distinguished foreign scientist, honoring the gathering with his presence!

There is another memory almost as dear to me, of the day when I demonstrated to the administrative board of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry my
IRRORATOR,
⁴
an instrument of my invention which is nothing more nor less than a compression pump for perfuming the air.

I had brought, in my pocket, one of the well-primed machines. I turned the cock. With a hissing whistle there rose, straight to the ceiling, an odorous vapor which rained down in tiny drops upon the scientists and their papers.

Then I saw, to my inexpressible delight, the most learned heads in all Paris bow under my
IRRORATION
, and I complimented myself wholeheartedly when I noticed that the most thoroughly besprinkled were also the most pleased …

Sometimes as I have considered the solemn meditations into which the breadth of my subject has drawn me, I have sincerely feared becoming boresome, for I myself have yawned, now and then, over other men’s works.

I have done everything in my power to avoid this danger: I have barely touched on the many subjects which might have become dull; I have sown my book with anecdotes, some of them personal; I have left out various unusual and fantastic details which an unprejudiced critic could rightly have frowned upon; I have tried to keep interest awake by making clear to the average mind certain facts which until now have been intelligible only to the most erudite. If, in spite of all these efforts, I have not presented to my readers some easily digested science, I shall still comfort myself with the reassurance that the majority will forgive me, suspecting my good intentions.

I could be accused, I know, of letting my pen run away with me occasionally, and of garrulity in my storytelling. But is it my fault that I am old? Is it my fault that, like Ulysses, I have known the manners and the towns of many nations? Can I be blamed for writing a little of my own life story? The reader must at least be grateful to me for sparing him my
Political Memoirs
, which might as well be published as any other man’s,
since for thirty-six years I have watched the drama of history from a front seat.

Above all I beg not to be thought of as a compiler. If I had been reduced to that, I would have pushed aside my pen long since, and not been any the unhappier for it!

I say, like Juvenal:

Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam!
and those who know will easily see that since I am accustomed in equal parts to the uproar of society and the silence of my workroom, I have done well to profit by both these extremes.

Finally, I have given myself much private satisfaction in this book. I have mentioned several of my friends, who hardly expected such a thing; I have called up some pleasant memories, and clarified others that were on the point of fading; as the saying goes,
I have taken my coffee
: humored myself.

There may perhaps be one reader, less amiable than the rest, who will complain, “What I really wanted to know was … What is he thinking of, to say that … etc., etc.?” But I am sure that all the others will call him to order, and that an imposing majority will accept with kind understanding these well-intentioned outpourings.

There is still something I must say about my style, for
The style’s the man himself
, according to Buffon.

But do not think that I am going to claim an indulgence which is never granted to those who most need it. I shall make a simple statement, that is all.

By rights I should write wondrously well, for Voltaire, Jean-Jacques, Fénélon, Buffon, and later Cochin and d’Aquesseau have been my favorite authors: I know them by heart.

But perhaps the gods have ordered otherwise; and if they have, here is the reason why:

I know, more or less well, five living languages,
⁵
a fact which has given me an enormous stock of words of every hue and connotation.

When I need a certain expression, and I do not find it anywhere in my French pigeon-hole, I take it from a neighboring one, and therein for the reader lies the necessity either to translate me or to guess my meaning. He has no other choice!

I could easily do otherwise, but I am kept from it by a belief in my own theory to which I cling invincibly.

I am completely persuaded that the French language, my own, is comparatively thin. And what can be done to strengthen it? Borrow or steal!

I do both, since such borrowings are not subject to repayment, and the theft of words is not punishable by law.

The reader will have a faint idea of my daring when I tell him that I call a man who does any kind of errand for me a
VOLANTE
(from the Spanish), and that I was once determined to make a French word from the English verb
to sip
, which means
boire à petites reprises
, until I unburied the old
siroter
, which used to have much the same meaning.

I well know that the classicists will call up the names of Bossuet and Fénélon to shame me, of Racine and Boileau and Pascal and others of the time of Louis XIV. I can already hear them, making a frightful fuss about it!

To all of which I reply calmly that I am far from denying the merits of any of those writers, whether I named them or merely implied their existence. But what does that prove? Nothing at all, unless it is that although they did the best they could with an inadequate tool, they would have done incomparably better with a superior one. It is the same as saying that Tartini would have played even better on the violin if his bow had been as long as Baillot’s.

I am, apparently, on the side of the neologists and even of the romanticists; the latter discover hidden treasures in our language, and the former are like mariners who sail to far lands to seek out what we need.

Northern people, especially in England, have an immense advantage over us in this respect: there, genius is never hampered in its expression, but creates or borrows freely as it wills. One result is that our translators, especially of works of great depth and vitality, never make more than pale and twisted copies of the originals.
^*

I once heard at the Institute a most expert discourse on the danger of neologism, the need to protect our language from inventions and to preserve it as it was when the writers of the Golden Age marked out its heights and depths.

As a chemist would, I passed this opinion through the crucible of my logic. Here is what was left in the ashes:
We have done so well that there is no way to do better, nor to do otherwise
.

However, I have lived long enough to know that each generation says the same thing, and is inevitably laughed at by the men who live in the next one.

Besides, how can words rest unchanged when morals and ideas show a continuous flux? Even if we do what our forefathers did, we cannot do it in the same way: there are whole pages in some of the old French texts that could never be translated into either Latin or Greek.

Every tongue has had its birth, its apogee, its fading, and not a single one, from Sesostris to Philip Augustus, exists now except in the monuments of its antiquity. It will happen thus to French: in 2825
A.D
. I shall be read only with a dictionary, if at all …

I once had a furious argument about this with the agreeable M. Andrieux, of the Academy.

I made my attack in good form. I charged vigorously. And I would have taken him, if he had not made an immediate retreat before which I did not place too much of an obstacle, since I had suddenly recalled, fortunately for him, that he was one of the editors of the new Dictionary!

I shall end now, with an observation so important that I have saved it for the last one.