“These mushrooms! I thought they were—well, yes, they are mushrooms!”
“Yes, and a l’Italienne, too.”
“Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, a la milanaise. I abominate them!”
“What kind is it you like, then?”
“Fungi trifolati.”
Let us observe—to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects, giving them all the termination us, so that a Silbermanus is the same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a butterfly’s legs with pincers—that we still want a nomenclature for the chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to produce precisely similar dishes. It would be diplomatically agreed that French should be the language of the kitchen, as Latin has been adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it were desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen Latin.
“My dear,” resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face of his chaste Caroline, “in France the dish in question is called Mushrooms a l’Italienne, a la provencale, a la bordelaise. The mushrooms are minced, fried in oil with a few ingredients whose names I have forgotten. You add a taste of garlic, I believe—”
Talk about calamities, of petty troubles! This, do you see, is, to a woman’s heart, what the pain of an extracted tooth is to a child of eight. Ab uno disce omnes: which means, “There’s one of them: find the rest in your memory.” For we have taken this culinary description as a prototype of the vexations which afflict loving but indifferently loved women.
SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE.
A woman full of faith in the man she loves is a romancer’s fancy. This feminine personage no more exists than does a rich dowry. A woman’s confidence glows perhaps for a few moments, at the dawn of love, and disappears in a trice like a shooting star.