"Don't let a goose's liver run away with you, my dear Garguillus! A cook, a poet? You will offend the divine muses, our protectresses!"
"I affirm! and I shall always maintain! that cooking is an art as lofty as any other. It's time to fling prejudices to the winds, Lampridius!"
Garguillus, the head of the Imperial chancery, was a man of enormous body, extremely fat, his triple chin scrupulously shaved and perfumed, and his grey hair closely cropped. His face was intelligent and noble; for many years he had been considered the indispensable guest at every supper of Athenian men of letters. Garguillus loved only two things in the world, a good table and a good style. Gastronomy and literature blended for him into a double bliss.
"Suppose now I take an oyster," he was declaring while his delicate fingers, loaded with amethysts and rubies, brought the mollusc towards his mouth; "I take an oyster, and I swallow it"—and in fact he swallowed it, shutting his eyes, with a sucking and clucking noise of his upper lip, which was curiously greedy, and even rapacious, in its appearance. It was prominent, trussed into a point, oddly twisted, and vaguely resembled a small elephant's trunk. When repeating a sonorous verse of Anacreon or Moschus he would move about this upper lip with as much sensuousness as when tasting at supper some sauce of nightingales' tongues.
"I swallow it, and I am immediately aware," went on Garguillus solemnly—"I am immediately aware that the oyster comes from the coast of Britain and not from the south or from Tarentum. Would you like me to prove it? Shall I close my eyes and say from what sea the fish comes?"
"But what in the world has that to do with poetry?" asked Mamertinus impatiently. He could not bear that any but himself should receive general attention.
"Imagine for yourselves, my dear friends," continued the gastronomist imperturbably, "that for years I have not been to the shores of the ocean, which I love and am always regretting. I assure you that a good oyster has such a fresh and salty relish of the sea, that to swallow it is immediately to be a thousand miles hence on the immense seashore. I close my eyes, I see the waves, I see the rocks, I feel the breeze of 'foggy ocean,' as Homer calls it!... No! tell me frankly what verse of the Odyssey can wake in me as clearly the sense of sea poetry as the smell of a fresh oyster? Or when I divide a peach and inhale the odour of its juice, why, tell me, are the perfume of the violet and the rose more essentially poetical? Poets describe form, colour, sound. Why can taste be not perfect as these? All is stupid prejudice, my dear fellows! Taste is an immense and hitherto unexplored boon from the gods. The assemblage of tastes forms a harmony as fine as any orchestration of sounds. I affirm, therefore, that there is a tenth muse, the muse of Gastronomy!"
"Let oysters and peaches be admitted. But what harmony, what beauty can you discover in a goose liver dressed with saffron sauce?"
"You are ready to allow, Lampridius, that there is beauty not only in the idylls of Theocritus, but even in the coarsest comedies of Plautus?"
"I admit that."