THE DINNER AT THE VILLEBOIS' HOUSE
Ce qu'il y a de plus beau dans la vie c'est les illusions de la vie.
Balzac, Physiologie du Marriage, Med. iv.
Since Eve ate apples much depends on dinner.
Byron, Don Juan, Cant. viii.
Wine whets the wit, improves its native force,
And gives a pleasant flavour to discourse.
Pomfret (The Choice.)
"Allons, allons," said Madame Villebois, "we can discuss all about dress while we are having our dinner, although I really think that people in these days give too much attention to both dress and eating."
"Ah, no, madame, permit me to disagree," said Marcel, smiling. "It seems to me that this is becoming the age of small things. The modern man can now without discomfort carry his dinner in a sandwich-case, and the modern woman considers her luggage complete if she is carrying her latest dress creation in her handbag."
"Dinner is the greatest peacemaker of civilisation yet invented," said Villebois; "together with a good glass of red wine it makes us, for the time being, friends with all the world. The busy man may consider it a trifle, but to my mind it is only the trifles after all which count. Nations, for instance, never go to war about important matters. What was the cause of the Franco-German war? Merely an absurd argument about the candidates for the Spanish throne, a matter that few cared two sous about. Is not the entire human race (according to the authority of the Holy Church) doomed to everlasting perdition simply because a woman ate an apple, or something which she was told not to—goodness only knows how many centuries ago? Did not England become a Protestant country simply because the Pope refused to allow Henry the Eighth to divorce his wife Katherine?"
"But I can give you a better instance," said Riche. "If we are to believe Dr. Ross, the decline and fall of the glorious Greek nation was due to the merest trifle in the world—a tiny insect—the Anopheles, a malaria-carrying mosquito."
"Really, is that a fact?" interposed Marcel, "but talking of trifles, what do you think of Napoleon having to abdicate simply because his cook roasted a fowl in too great a hurry, and so caused him to have an attack of indigestion, whereby he lost the great battle of the Nations at Leipzig."
"This sounds like trifling with our common-sense," said Pierre to Renée in the hope of attracting her attention away from Marcel.