I do not know what Baron Liebig would say to this in his learned articles on the "Nutritive Value of Certain Kinds of Food," but the French children seem to be the healthiest in the world,—a tribute to chocolate of the highest. "By their fruits shall ye know them."
In the times of the Medici, and the St. Bartholomew Massacre, the French and Italian nobles had a curious custom of always carrying about with them, in the pockets of their silk doublets, costly little boxes full of bonbons. Henry IV., Marie de Medici, and all their friends and foes, carried about with them little gold and Limoges enamelled boxes, very pretty and desirable articles of vertu now; and doubtless there was one full of red and white comfits in the pocket of Mary Queen of Scots, when she fell dead, poor, ill-used, beautiful woman, at the foot of the block, at Fotheringay. Doubtless there was one in the pouch of the grisly Duc de Guise, with his close-cropped bullet head, and long, spidery legs, when he fell, done to death by treacherous Catherine de Medici, dead and bleeding on the polished floor of Blois! It was a childish custom, and proved that the age had a sweet tooth; but it might have been useful for diplomatic purposes, and highly conducive to flirting. As a Lord Chief Justice once said that "snuff and snuff-boxes help to develop character," so the bonbonnière helps to emphasize manners; and I am always pleased when an old or new friend opens for me a little silver box and offers me a sugared violet, or a rose leaf conserved in sugar, although I can eat neither of them.
A witty writer says that dessert should be "the girandole, or cunning tableau of the dinner." It should "surprise, astonish, dazzle, and enchant." We may almost decide upon the taste of an age as we read of its desserts. The tasteless luxury and coarse pleasures of the reign of Charles II.,—that society where Rochester fluttered and Buckingham flaunted,—how it is all described in one dessert! At a dinner given the father (of a great many) of his subjects by Lady Dormer, was built a large gilded ship of confectionery. Its masts, cabins, portholes, and lofty poop all smart and glittering, its rigging all taut, its bunting flying, its figure-head bright as gold leaf could make it. Its guns were charged with actual powder. Its cargo was two turreted pies, one full of birds and the other of frogs. When borne in by the gay pages, to the sound of music, the guns were discharged, the ladies screamed and fainted, so as to "require to be held up and consoled by the gallants, who offered them sips of Tokay." Poor little things! Such was the Court of Charles.
Then, to sweeten the smell of powder, the ladies threw at each other egg-shells filled with fragrant waters; and "all danger being over," they opened the pies. Out of one skipped live frogs; out of the other flew live birds who put out the lights; so, what with the screams, the darkness, the frogs, and the smell of powder, we get an idea of sports at Whitehall, where blackbrowed, swarthy-visaged Charles presided, on which grave Clarendon condescended to smile, and which the gentle Evelyn and Waller were condemned to approve.
We have not entirely refrained from such sugar emblems at our own great feasts; but fortunately, they have rather gone out, excepting for some emblem-haunted dinners where we do have sugared Monitors, and chocolate torpedos. I have seen the lovely Venus of Milo in frozen cream, which gave a wit the opportunity of saying that the home for such a goddess should be the temple of Isis; and Bartholdi's immortal Liberty lends herself to chocolate and nougat now and then, but very rarely at private dinners.
The fashion of our day, with its low dishes for the sweets, is so much better, that we cannot help congratulating ourselves that we do not live even in the days of the first George, when, as one witty author again says, "the House of Brunswick brought over sound protestantism, but German taste." Horace Walpole, great about trifles, incomparable decider of the width of a shoe-buckle, keen despiser of all meannesses but his own, neat and fastidious tripper along a flowery path over this vulgar planet, derided the new fashion in desserts. The ambitious confectioners, he says, "aspired to positive statuary, spindle-legged Venus, dummy Mars, all made of sugar;" and he mentions a confectioner of Lord Albemarle's who loudly complained that his lordship would not break up the ceiling of his dining-room to admit the heads, spear-points and upraised thunderbolts of a middle dish of Olympian deities eighteen feet high, all made of sugar.
The dishes known in France as Les Quatres Mendiants, one of nuts, one of figs or dried fruit, one of raisins, and another of oranges, still to be seen on old-fashioned dinner-tables, was, I supposed, so called because it is seldom touched,—in fact, goes a-begging.
But I have found this pretty little legend, which proves that it was far more poetical in origin. The name in French for aromatic vinegar is also connected with it. It is called "The Vinegar of the Four Thieves." So runs the legend: "Once four thieves of Marseilles, rubbing themselves with this vinegar during the plague, defied infection and robbed the dead." Who were these wretches? All that we know of them is that they dined beneath a tree on stolen walnuts and grapes, and imagined the repast a feast. We can picture them, Holbein men with slashed sleeves, as old soldiers of Francis I. who had wrestled with the Swiss. We can imagine them as beaten about by Burgundian peasants; and we know that they were grim, brown, scarred rascals, cutting purses, snatching silken cloaks,—sturdy, resolute, heartless, merry, desperate, God-forsaken scoundrels, living only for the moment. We can imagine Callot etching their rags, or Rembrandt putting in their dark shadows and high lights. We can see Salvator Rosa admiring them as they sleep under the green oak-tree, their heads on a dead deer, and the high rock above. Or we may get old Teniers to draw them for us, gambling with torn and greasy cards for a gold crucifix or a brass pot, or revelling at the village inn, swaggering, swearing, drunk, or tipsy, playing at shuffle-board. The only point in their history worth recording is that they were destined to be asked to every dinner party for four hundred years!—simply preceding the bonbons, as we see by the following verses:—
"Once on a time, in the brave Henry's age,
Four beggars dining underneath a tree