The Physiology of Taste (41 page)

I leave all this to the successor whom I have already mentioned at the beginning of the Meditation, and shall content myself with this foretaste, which is the right of anyone who first penetrates into new territory.

Intemperance has for a very long time caught the attention of observing people. Philosophers have praised its opposite, princes have made sumptuary laws, religion has preached against gourmandism; alas, we have swallowed not a bite the less, and the art of overeating grows more flourishing every day!

I shall perhaps be more fortunate than these other moralizers if I take a new tack, and expose the
physical inconveniences
of
obesity
; man’s interest in his own well-being (
SELF-PRESERVATION
) will possibly be more influential than morality, more persuasive than sermons, and more powerful than laws, and I feel that the fair sex, at least, is quite ready to open its eyes to the truth.

104: Obesity has a distressing influence on the two sexes in that it destroys both strength and beauty.

It destroys strength, since although it adds to the weight of the body which is to be moved it does not add to the muscular power; it is still further destructive since it hinders breathing, which makes impossible any labor demanding a prolonged use of muscular force.

Overweight destroys beauty by wrecking the basic harmonies of proportion, since all parts of the body do not grow heavier in an even way.

Furthermore obesity fills up those hollows which Nature formed to add highlights and shadows: thus, nothing is commoner than to see faces which once were very interesting and which fatness has made almost insignificant.

The head of our last government, Napoleon I, could not escape this law. He grew heavier during his last campaigns; he changed from pale to pasty, and his eyes lost much of their proud luster.

Obesity brings with it a distaste for dancing, for taking walks, and for horseback riding, and an inaptitude for all those occupations and amusements which demand a little agility or skill.

It also predisposes its victims to various illnesses, such as apoplexy, dropsy, and ulcers on the legs, and makes all other afflictions more difficult to cure.

105: I can remember only two really fat heroes, Marius and Jean Sobieski.
⁴

Marius, who was very short, became as wide as he was high, and it was perhaps these fantastic proportions which so terrified the Cimbrian appointed to assassinate him.

As for the Polish king, his obesity was almost the death of him: forced to flee before a troop of Turkish cavalry, his breath soon failed him, and he would undoubtedly have been massacred if some of his aides-de-camp had not supported his fainting form upright upon his horse, while others sacrificed themselves generously to hold off the enemy.

If I am not mistaken the Duke of Vendôme,
⁵
that worthy son of the great Henry, was also of a remarkable corpulence. He died in a roadside tavern, abandoned by everyone, still keeping enough of his faculties about him to see one of his intimates snatch out from under him the pillow on which he lay as he breathed his last.

Books are full of examples of monstrous obesity; I shall leave them there and instead give briefly a few which I myself have known.

Monsieur Rameau, a fellow student of mine who became mayor of La Chaleur in Burgundy, was only five feet two inches tall, and weighed five hundred pounds.

The Duke of Luynes, with whom I have often sat,
⁶
became enormous; overweight ruined his handsome figure, and he passed the last years of his life in an almost uninterrupted doze.

But the most extraordinary case of this kind that I ever saw was a resident of
NEW YORK
,
⁷
whom many Frenchmen still living in Paris may have seen on Broadway, seated in a huge armchair whose legs could have held up a church.

Edward, as he was called, was at least five feet ten inches high, French measurement, and since fat had swollen every part of him, he was a minimum of eight feet in circumference. His fingers were like those of the Roman emperor who wore his wife’s necklaces for rings; his arms and legs were tubular, as thick as a medium-sized man, and his feet were like an elephant’s, half
hidden by the hanging flesh of his limbs; the weight of fat had dragged down his lower eyelids, so that they were fixed in a stare; but what made him most hideous were three spheroid chins which hung on his chest for a foot or more, so that his face seemed like the capital of a wreathed pillar.

In this state Edward spent his life, seated near the window of a low room which opened onto the street, drinking from time to time a glass of ale from an immense pitcher of it which was always beside him.

Such an amazing figure could not help but be stared at, but as soon as he felt himself watched by the passersby Edward did not wait long to send them packing, by saying to them in a sepulchral voice, “
WHAT HAVE YOU TO STARE LIKE WILD CATS?
…
GO YOU WAY YOU LAZY BODY … BE GONE YOU FOR NOTHING DOGS
…”
⁸
(Qu’avez-vous a regarder d’un air effaré, comme des chats sauvages? … Passezvotre chemin, paresseux … Allez-vous-en, chiens de vauriens!) and other similarly charming phrases.

I used to chat with him occasionally, since I knew him well enough to greet him by name; he insisted that he was not at all bored or unhappy, and that if death would not come to disturb him he would be delighted to sit there and wait for the end of the world.

From all that I have discussed in this chapter it is plain that if obesity is not actually a disease, it is at least a most unpleasant state of ill health, and one into which we almost always fall because of our own fault.

We can also conclude that everyone must earnestly desire to avoid obesity, who is not already overweight, and that whoever is obese must try to escape from that state. It is to help these people that we shall now see what science, aided by common sense, can suggest as remedies.
⁹

1.
Brillat-Savarin underlined this last word of the line from Virgil’s
AENEID
, which he had changed to read, “There may arise some
heir
out of our bones,” instead of “avenger.”

2.
It is impossible to know how much of this self-description is taken seriously by the Professor, especially just after he has coined the impressive word
GASTROPHORIA
to mean “paunch-bellied”! But many otherwise humorous gentlemen fail ever to see anything amusing about their looks, and will glance at themselves in any mirror with more smugness than the world’s prettiest actress feels.

3.
Any delicate creamy dessert which is poured into a casserole lined with buttered bread or wafers and let chill can be called a charlotte. A good recipe to point the Professor’s moral is the following, from a nineteenth-century cookbook: For a half-hour work into a creamy paste one pound of blanched shaved almonds, one pound of fine sugar, and one pound of sweet fresh butter. Make a thick cream with 18 eggs, three pints of cream, one-half pound of vanilla-flavored sugar, and the necessary fine flour. Let it cool, and slowly mix into it the almond butter. Pour into a well-buttered charlotte mold lined with thin wafers, let chill twelve hours, turn out, and serve.

4.
Caius Marius (150–86
B.C.)
was longtime leader of the democratic party in Rome. Sobieski (1624–1696) led a victorious army against the Turks at Vienna, in 1683.

5.
Louis-Joseph, duc de Vendôme (1654–1712), was not the son but the grandson, by a bastard father, of Henry IV. He can be called worthy on the strength of his fine leadership, it is true, but otherwise his character was depraved and unadmirable.

6.
Louis-Joseph-Charles-Amable, duc de Luynes (1748–1807), was one of the very few aristocrats who did not flee France during the first Revolution. He was a Member of the Constituent Assembly with Brillat-Savarin.

7.
If it were not for this preamble, preface, and/or introduction, here would be the shortest marginal gloss in all the book: “Sic!”

8.
This is perhaps the worst example of Brillat-Savarin’s self-assumed role of purveyor of Yankee idiom, and in spite of the fact that several editions show the same embarrassing faults it seems most charitable, at least to one as prejudiced as I, to assume that somewhere a printer was at his most shaky.

9.
“Agayns glotonye the remedie is abstinence.” Chaucer.

106:
I SHALL BEGIN WITH
a story which proves that it takes real courage either to lose weight or to keep from gaining it.

M. Louis Greffulhe, who was later honored by His Majesty with the title of count, came to see me one morning, and told me he understood that I was interested in the subject of obesity, and that since he was in grave danger of it he wished my advice.

“Sir,” I said to him, “since I am not a graduate doctor, I would be within my rights to refuse to counsel you. However, I am at your command, but on a single condition, that you will give me your word of honor to follow, for one month, and with the greatest fidelity, the rules of conduct which I shall prescribe for you.”

M. Greffulhe made the promise I demanded. We shook hands on it, and the very next day I delivered to him my
fetva,
¹
the first order of which was for him to weigh himself at the beginning and end of the treatment, so that we might have a mathematical basis on which to judge the results.

One month later M. Greffulhe returned to see me, and spoke to me in much the following terms:

“Sir, I have followed your prescription as faithfully as if my life depended on it, and I have verified the fact that my weight has gone down by some three pounds, or even a little more. But, in order to achieve this, I have been forced to submit all my tastes
and all my habits to such a violent assault, and in a word I have suffered so much, that while I offer you all my thanks for your excellent advice, I must renounce what good it might do for me, and abandon myself in the future to whatever Providence has in store.”

After this decision, which I did not hear without real distress, the inevitable occurred: M. Greffulhe became more and more obese, was the victim of all the inconveniences of extreme corpulence, and, when he was barely forty years old, died as the result of an asthmatic condition to which he had become subject.

107: Any cure of obesity
²
must begin with the three following and absolute precepts: discretion in eating, moderation in sleeping, and exercise on foot or on horseback.

Such are the first commandments which science makes to us: nevertheless I place little faith in them, for I know both men and things, and any such prescription which is not followed to the letter is fairly futile.

Now in the first place it needs great strength of character for a man to get up from the table while he is still hungry; as long as appetite lasts, one mouthful leads to another with irresistible attraction; and in general he eats as long as he feels the need to, in defiance of doctors and sometimes even in imitation of them.

As for the second prohibition, it is a painful insult to fat people to tell them to get up early in the morning: they will assure you that it is bad for their health; that when they arise too soon they are worthless for the rest of the day; the women will complain of having circles under their eyes; all are quite willing to stay up late at night, but they insist on sleeping late the next morning; and there you have one more prescription to be neatly avoided.

Thirdly, horseback riding is a costly remedy, which is appropriate neither to all fortunes nor to all occupations.

Suggest to a charming fat lady that she mount a horse, and she will consent with great pleasure, but on three conditions: first, she must have a steed which is at one and the same time handsome, lively, and gentle; second, she must have a riding habit
which is new and tailored in the latest style; third, she must have to accompany her a groom who is agreeable and good-looking. It is rather rare to fill all three of these requirements, so she does not ride at all.

Exercise on foot gives rise to even more objections: it is horribly tiring, and the perspiration it brings out places one in grave danger of false pleurisy; dust ruins the stockings, stones wear out the soles of dainty slippers, and the whole business is hopelessly boring. Finally if, after these various attempts, a tiny headache is felt, or an almost invisible spot shows itself on the skin, the whole system of exercise is blamed and abandoned, and the doctor fumes helplessly.

Therefore, while it is admitted that anyone who wishes to reduce his weight should eat moderately, sleep but little, and exercise as much as possible, another method must be sought to attain the same end. There is, indeed, one infallible system for keeping weight from becoming excessive, or for lessening it if it has already reached this point. This system, which is founded on the most solid precepts of both physics and chemistry, consists of a diet adapted to whatever effect is desired.

Of all medical prescriptions, diet is the most important, for it acts without cease day and night, waking and sleeping; it works anew at every meal, so that finally it influences each part of the individual. Now, an antifat diet is based on the commonest and most active cause of obesity, since, as it has already been clearly shown, it is only because of grains and starches that fatty congestion can occur, as much in man as in the animals; in regard to these latter, this effect is demonstrated every day under our very eyes, and plays a large part in the commerce of fattened beasts for our markets, and it can be deduced, as an exact consequence, that a more or less rigid abstinence from everything that is starchy or floury will lead to the lessening of weight.