Ah! I trust that it may be so for you; that the sweetness of your arrogant dreams of an unshared eternity be not wholly a delusion; that for you—although to us you do deny it—there may be found pity, atonement, compensation, in some great Hereafter.
"I have heard a very great many men and women call the crows carrion birds, and the jackals carrion beasts, with an infinite deal of disgust and much fine horror at what they were pleased to term 'feasting on corpses;' but I never yet heard any of them admit their own appetite for the rotten 'corpse' of a pheasant, or the putrid haunch of a deer, to be anything except the choice taste of an epicure!"
"But they do cook the corpses!" I remonstrated; whereupon she grinned with more meaning than ever.
"Exactly what I am saying, my dear. Their love of synonyms has made them forget that they are carnivori, because they talk so sweetly of the cuisine. A poor, blundering, honest, ignorant lion only kills and eats when the famine of his body forces him to obey that law of slaughter which is imposed on all created things, from the oyster to the man, by what we are told is the beautiful and beneficent economy of Creation. Of course, the lion is a brutal and bloodthirsty beast of prey, to be hunted down off the face of the earth as fast as may be. Whereas man—what does he do? He devours the livers of a dozen geese in one pâté; he has lobsters boiled alive, that the scarlet tint may look tempting to his palate; he has fish cut up or fried in all its living agonies, lest he should lose one nuance of its flavour; he has the calf and the lamb killed in their tender age, that he may eat dainty sweetbreads; he has quails and plovers slaughtered in the nesting-season, that he may taste a slice of their breasts; he crushes oysters in his teeth whilst life is in them; he has scores of birds and animals slain for one dinner, that he may have the numberless dishes which fashion exacts; and then—all the time talking softly of rissôle and mayonnaise, of consommé and entremet, of croquette and côtelette—the dear gourmet discourses on his charming science, and thanks God that he is not as the parded beasts that prey!"
"Well," said I, sulkily, for I am fond myself of a good vol-au-vent,—"well, you have said that eating is a law in the economies—or the waste—of creation. Is it not well to clothe a distasteful and barbaric necessity in a refining guise and under an elegant nomenclature?"
"Sophist!" said Fanfreluche, with much scorn, though she herself is as keen an epicure and as suave a sophist, for that matter, as I know,—"I never denied that it was well for men to cheat themselves, through the art of their cooks, into believing that they are not brutes and beasts of prey—it is well exceedingly—for their vanity. Life is sustained only by the destruction of life. Cookery, the divine, can turn this horrible fact into a poetic idealism; can twine the butcher's knife with lilies, and hide the carcass under roses. But I do assuredly think that, when they sit down every night with their menu of twenty services, they should not call the poor lion bad names for eating an antelope once a fortnight."
And, with the true consistency of preachers, Fanfreluche helped herself to a Madeira stewed kidney which stood amongst other delicacies on the deserted luncheon table.
"If this play should succeed it will be a triumph of true art," said another critical writer to Dudley Moore.