I have spoken of the aids which the French nobility have given to table enjoyment. To them may be added the innovation introduced by Talleyrand, of offering Parmesan with soup, and presenting after it a glass of dry Madeira. Talleyrand had one thing in common with St. Peter,—he was hungry at the hour of mid-day, the dinner-time of the Jews; and he would have also come under the anathema in Ecclesiastes which is levelled against the Princes who eat in the morning.
Plato was rather shocked at those people of Italy who made two substantial meals daily; and Seneca was satisfied with one meal,—a dinner of bread and figs. The Roman Priests of Mars dined jollily and sumptuously in a secret room of the temple, and they would not be disturbed. They were like Baillie de Suffren, who, being waited on in India by a deputation, just as he was sitting down to dine, sent out word that his religion would not allow of his interrupting his repast; and the delegates retired, profoundly struck by the strictness of his conscience. The original dinner hour of the mediæval ages was, as I have elsewhere stated, ten o’clock, the dixième heure; hence the name. It was not till the reign of Louis XIV. that so late an hour as noon was fixed for the repast. It is clear, however, that we have not so much changed the hours as changed the names of our meals. A French historian shows us how a Dauphin of France dined (at ten o’clock) in the fifteenth century:—
“As an every-day fare, the Dauphin took for his dinner rice pottage, with leeks or cabbage, a piece of beef, another of salt pork, a dish of six hens or twelve pullets, divided in two, a piece of roast pork, cheese, and fruit.” The supper was nearly as plentiful; but, on particular days, the bill of fare was varied. It is added, that the Barons of the Court had always the half of the quantity of the Dauphin; the Knights, the quarter; and the Equerries and Chaplains, the eighth. “Take pride from Priests, and nothing remains,” once remarked an Encyclopædist to Voltaire. “Umph!” said Voltaire; “do you, then, reckon gluttony for nothing?” Gluttony, at least, does not seem to have characterized the Dauphin’s Chaplains, in the fifteenth century, seeing that they took an eighth where a Baron had half.
But there was a late Prince of Bourbon, who dined after a more singular fashion than that of the Dauphins, his ancestors. I allude to the Prince mentioned by Maurepas, and whose imagination was so sick, that he fancied himself a hare, and would not allow a bell to be rung, lest it should terrify him into the woods, where he might be shot by his own game-keepers, and afterwards served up at his own table. At another time, he had a fancy that he would look well dished up; and, dreaming himself a cauliflower, he stuck his feet in the mould of his kitchen-garden, and called upon his people to come and water him! At length, he pronounced himself dead, and refused to dine at all, as an insult to his spiritual entity. He would have died, had he not been visited by two friends, who introduced themselves as his late father, and the deceased Maréchal de Luxembourg; and who solemnly invited him to descend with them to the shades, and dine with the ghost of Maréchal Turenne. The melancholy Prince accepted with alacrity, and went down with them to a cellar already prepared for the banquet of the departed; and he not only made a hearty meal, but, as long as his fancy made of himself a ghost, he insisted every day on dining with congenial shadows in the coal-cellar! In spite of this monomaniacal fantasy, he was excessively shrewd in all matters of business, especially where his own interests were concerned.
Thus much—briefly and imperfectly, I fear—for Dinner Traits. In the next chapter we will put something on them. And as we have been drawing examples from folly, let us end this section by adding a maxim full of wisdom. “Be not made a beggar,” says Ecclesiasticus, “by banqueting upon borrowing, when thou hast nothing in thy purse.” If this maxim were generally adopted, there might be fewer dinners given, but there would be more dinners paid for. But some people are like the ancient Belgians, who borrowed, and, indeed, lent, upon promises of repayment in the world to come! Many a dinner-giver belongs to the class of the borrowing Belgians of antiquity. After all, there was, perhaps, more intended honesty in the compact than we can distinguish. A compact far less honest was made some years ago by an Irish Baronet, who had given so many dinners for which he had not paid, that he was compelled to pledge his plate in order to raise means to satisfy the most pressing of his creditors. Some time subsequently, he induced the pawnbroker to lend him the plate for one evening, on hire; the pawnbroker’s men were to wait at the dinner in livery, and convey the silver back as soon as the repast was concluded. The dinner was given and enjoyed, and the company made the attendants drunk, helped the Baronet to pack up his forks, spoons, ladles, and épergnes, with which he set off for Paris, where some of them afterwards visited him at the little dinners he used to give in the Rue de Bourbon, and laughed over the matter as a very capital jest.
I will only add here the record of the fact, that sitting at table to drink, after dinner was over, was introduced by Margaret Atheling, the Saxon Queen of Scotland. She was shocked to see the Scottish gentlemen rise from table before grace could be said by her Chaplain, Turgot; and she offered a cup of choice wine to all who would remain. Thence the fashion of hard drinking following the “thanksgiving.”
THE MATERIALS FOR DINING.
“All flesh is grass;” and grass has been the foundation of all feasts, in a double sense. It was not only a part of the early repast, in some shape or another, by derivation rather than immediately, but it formed the most ancient seats occupied by primitive and pastoral guests in very remote times. Dr. Johnson approved of asparagus being called “grass.” Romulus thought grass a sacred emblem, or he would not have suddenly converted his twelve lay foster-brothers into a priesthood to look after it. When Baber had defeated the Afghans of Kohat, they approached him in despair, and, according to their custom when in extremities, with grass between their teeth, to signify, as the imperial autobiographer says, “We are your oxen.” Baber treated them worse than oxen; for the amiable savage says, “All that were taken alive were beheaded by my order, and at the next halting-place we erected a minaret of their skulls.” And the conqueror dined pleasantly in front of the monument.
My friend, Captain Lionel da Costa, tells me, that on accompanying (en amateur) a French force on a razzia against an Arab tribe in Algeria, he witnessed the employment of grass as an emblem of defiance rather than of submission. The French officers had assembled the Arab Chiefs, and, telling them that the foreigners had filled up their wells, carried off their cattle, and burned their dwellings, exhorted them to submission, asking them what they would do further against a country so powerful as France? The Arabs, as if impelled simultaneously, stooped to the earth, plucked some scant blades of grass there growing, and began chewing the same in angry silence: this was all their reply, and by it they intimated that they would eat what the earth gave, like the beasts that are upon it, rather than surrender. Their enemies could not refrain from admiring and feeding such adversaries; their mute eloquence was worth more than any thing uttered to tyrants by Power’s statue of the Greek Slave, which, according to Mrs. Elizabeth Browning, “thunders white silence,”—a silence that must have been akin to that in the French Tragedy, “silence qui se fit entendre!”
Soup, as I have remarked, is not a bad preparation for the stomach. Some one calls it the “preface of a dinner,” adding, however, that a good work needs no preface. Soup is of very ancient date. Rebecca and Jacob ate of a pottage, in which the meat was cut into small bits before the muscular fibres had cooled and become hardened, and stewed in milk, thickened with meal and herbs. The famous French gastronomist, the Marquis de Cussy, was orthodox in his gastronomy, fed well, but heeded the church. His favourite soup in Lent was an onion soup, composed of a score of small bulbs, well cleaned, sliced, and put into a stew-pan, with a lump of fresh butter and a little sugar. They were turned over the fire till they became of a fine golden colour, when they were moistened with broth, and the necessary quantity of bread added. Before the soup was served, its excellence was perfected by the addition of two small glasses of very old Cognac brandy. This Lent fare was, however, only the preface to salmon and asparagus, with which the orthodox epicure mortified his appetite.