I have now before my writing-desk the long wedding-table set out; and I am sorry that no painting of it occurs on any of the vases buried at Herculaneum, as it would have been dug out with the rest, and an exact copy of it given in the Herculanean illustrations, so that I could have inserted the copy in place of anything else. Few have a higher opinion of the powers of my pen than I have myself; but I see quite well that it is neither in my power nor in my pen’s to half portray, and that in a feeble style, how the guests—there were almost as many there as there were chairs—enjoyed themselves at the dinner; how, moreover, there was not one single rogue among them (for the bridegroom’s guardian, Heimlicher von Blaise, had sent an excuse, saying he was very sick indeed); how the landlord of the house, a jovial, consumptive Saxon, did something towards expediting his departure from this life by his powdering and his drinking; how they banged the glasses with the forks, and the table with the marrowbones, that the former might be filled and the latter emptied; how in all the house not a soul, not even the shoemaker or the bookbinder, did a stroke of any other work but eating, and how even the old woman Sabel (Sabine) who squatted under the mouse-coloured town gate, shut up her stall on this one day before the closing of the gate; how not only was there one course served up, but a second, a “Doppelgänger.” To anyone, indeed, who has dined at great men’s tables, and there remarked how fine dishes, if there are two courses, have got to be marshalled according to the laws of rank, it will not appear unheard of or over splendid that Siebenkæs (the hairdresser’s wife had done the cooking on this occasion) provided for the first course.
1. In the centre the soup-tub, or broth fishpond, wherein people could enjoy the sport of crayfish-catching with their spoons, although the crayfish, like the beavers, had in this water no more than Robespierre had in the convent—that is to say, merely the tail.
2. In the first quarter of the globe a beautiful beef torso, or cube of meat, as pedestal of the entire culinary work of art.
3. In the second, a fricassée, being a complete pattern-card of the butcher’s shop, sweetly treated.
4. In the third, a Behemoth of pond-carps, which might have swallowed the prophet Jonah, but which underwent his fate itself.
5. In the fourth, a baked hen-house of a pie, to which the birds had sent their best members, as a community does to parliament.
I cannot deny myself and my fair readers the pleasure of just slightly sketching for them a little “cookery-piece” of the second course.
1. In the middle stood, as a basket of garden-flowers might, a pile of cress-salad. 2. Then the four corners were occupied by the four syllogistic figures, or the four faculties. In the first corner of the table was, as first syllogistic figure and faculty, a hare, who, as antipode of a barefooted friar, had kept on his natural fur boots in the pan, and who, as Leibgeber justly remarked, had come from the field with his legs safe and sound in spite of the enemy’s fire, more fortunate, in this respect, than many a soldier. The second syllogistic figure consisted of a calf’s tongue, which was black, not from arguing, but from being smoked. The third, crisped colewort, but without the stalks: this, ordinarily the food of the two preceding faculties, was on this occasion eaten along with them; thus is it that in this world one goes up and another down. The concluding figure was made up of the three figures of the bridal pair and an eventual baby baked in butter; these three glorified bodies, which, like “the three children,” had come forth unscathed from the fiery furnace, and had raisins for souls, were eaten up bodily, skin and bones, by those cannibals the guests, with the exception of an arm or so of the infant, which, like the bird Phœnix, was personified ere it existed.
This picture draws me on. But it ought to be coloured, and as regards the luxury of the feast, it would not be passing it over too lightly were I to compare it to a Saxon electoral banquet, by reference to which I might illustrate it. It is true, the electors of that country require a good deal (and on that account they used to be weighed every year); and I am quite aware that at the beginning of the 16th century, a Saxon treasurer made the following entry in his accounts:—“This day was our gracious sovereign at the wine, with his court, for which I have had to disburse the sum of fifteen gulden (25s.). That’s what I call banquetting!” But what would the Saxon treasurer have written? how he would have lifted his hands up with amazement if he had read in my very first chapter that a poor’s advocate had gone and spent three gulden and seven groschen more than his royal master!
As is the case with many natural springs, the fountains of mirth, which welled but slowly in the daytime, jetted up higher in the hearts of the guests as the evening came on. The two advocates indeed told the company that, as they remembered from their college days, though the privilege formerly possessed by every German of drinking his fill had been but too much curtailed by emperors and parliaments, and the imperial decrees of 1512, 1531, 1548, and 1577 permitted no drunkenness, yet they did not prohibit Kuhschnappel from exercising the right common to all imperial states, of abrogating imperial statutes in cases where local laws exist within their own boundaries. The Schulrath alone could not quite see (and he shook his head about it internally to himself twenty times) how two scholars, two lawyers at all events, could go on gravely joking with a set of such unlearned plebeians and empty heads as were here supported upon elbows;—joking with them, and actually conversing about the utter rubbish which they talked. More than once he spliced on threads of scholarly speech, concerning the newest, most highly elaborated school addresses, as well as sundry critiques on the same, but the advocates would have nothing to do with his threads, but made the bookbinder speak the apprentice speech he made at his admission to the rank of master, to which the shoemaker, of his own motion, stitched and cobbled on one which he had made on a similar occasion.