Partake of earthly nourishment.
“‘May Heav’n its mercy show to all;
Yes, e’en to thee may Heav’n show it!’
“Such is the story of a heart
That once inspired a youthful Poet.”
The above story of the Castellan de Coucy is considered to be one of Uhland’s most remarkable poems, as much from its general sweetness, unhappily lost in translation, as from the wit with which he continually keeps before the reader the one word which forms the principal feature in the little romance. The tale is, however, by no means new. There are few nations whose story-tellers do not celebrate a lady who was forced by a jealous husband to eat the heart of her lover. It is common to England, Ireland, and Scotland. In France, the story exists nearly as Uhland has told it. In Germany, it is to be met with in various forms. In one of these, the lady is shown to have been more kind and less faithful than the Ritter’s wife of Fayal. But above all it is, as the mad prince says, “extant, and written in very choice Italian,” by the at once seductive and repulsive Boccaccio. It is one of the least filthy of a set of stories, told with a beauty of style, a choice of language, a lightness and a grace, which make you forget the matter and risk your morals, for the sake of improving your Italian. In Boccaccio’s narrative, the lady is of course very guilty; and the husband also, of course, murders the lover in as brutal and unknightly a fashion as can well be imagined. Nothing else could be expected from that unequalled story-teller, (unequalled as much for the charm of his manner, as for the general uncleanness of his details,) who but seldom has a good word to say for woman, or an honest testimony to give of man. Human nature presented nothing beautiful or estimable to him; and yet it is undeniable that he had an acute perception of beauty and honour. The characters he describes are scurvy, vicious, heartless, debauched wretches; but he dresses them up in such dashing bravery of attire, and endows them with such divinity of beauty, and he writes of their whereabout with such witchery of pen, that his poor, weak, ensnared readers have nothing for it but to go on in alternate extremes of admiring and condemning. To revert to the German prose story of the Heart, I may say that it is merely a bad translation from the “Decameron,” telling in a very matter-of-fact way the history of a Lady von Roussillon, “welches ihres geliebte Herz zu essen erhält, und sich den Tod gibt.”
This strange banquet is not to be set down as positively apocryphal, merely because it has fallen into the possession of the rhymers and romancers. The old German barons were rather inclined to a barbarous species of kitchen—something crude and cannibal of character—if we may so far credit the extravagances of legend as to believe that they are founded on fact. But we need not go to Germany and fairy periods for illustrations of extraordinary banquets, or individual dieting.
Among eccentric gastronomists, I do not recollect one more remarkable than Mrs. Jeffreys, the sister of Wilkes. At Bath, she slept throughout the year beneath an open window, and the snow sometimes lent her bed an additional counterpane. She never allowed a fire to be kindled in this room, the chief adornment of which was a dozen clocks, no two of which struck the hour at the same moment. She breakfasted frugally enough on chocolate and dry toast, but proceeded daily in a sedan-chair, with a bottle of Madeira at her side, to a boarding-house to dine. She invariably sat between two gentlemen, “men having more sinew in mind and body than women,” and with these she shared her “London Particular.” Warner, in his “Literary Recollections,” says that some mighty joint that was especially well-covered with fat, was always prepared for her. She was served with slices of this fat, which she swallowed alternately with pieces of chalk, procured for her especial enjoyment. Neutralizing the subacid of the fat with the alkaline principle of the chalk, she “amalgamated, diluted, and assimilated the delicious compound with half-a-dozen glasses of her delicious wine.” The diet agreed well with the old lady, and she maintained that such a test authorized use.
We may contrast with the lady who loved lumps of chalk, the people of a less civilized time and place, who had a weakness for a species of animal food, which is not to be found written down in the menus of modern dinners. Keating, in his “Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St Peter’s River,” gives some curious details, which may be not inappropriately touched upon here, referring as they do to a nation of dog-eaters. The custom at first sight strikes us as rather revolting; but the animal in question, to say nothing of our stealthy friend the cat, is eaten every day in “ragoûts,” that smoke on the boards of the cheap gargottes of Paris and the banlieux. After all, custom and prejudice have much to do with the subject. “What do you do with your dead?” once asked a member of a distant Asiatic tribe of a Roman. “We bury them,” answered the latter. “Gracious heaven!” exclaimed the “untutored Indian,” with disgust, “what filthy and fiendish impiety!” “Why so?” inquired the other. “What do you and your people with your dead?” “We treat them,” replied the Indian proudly, “with the decent forms that best become the dead; we eat them!” To this day the nobles of Thibet are honoured after death with a very valuable and enviable privilege. They are reverentially offered to a body of hounds, maintained for the especial purpose of devouring the defunct aristocracy. What remains at the end of the process is cared for, like the ashes which were taken of old from beneath the pile on which a loved corpse had lain. This exclusive honour is never vouchsafed to the commonalty; it is the particular vested right of greatness; and had Hamlet known of it when he traced great Cæsar’s clay stopping a bung-hole, it would have afforded him another illustration of the base uses to which mortality may return. Let us return to the dog-eaters. Mr. Keating shall tell what he saw among them, in his own words: Sua narret Ulysses.