ROASTING FLYING GEESE.
During the great famine in Rome and southern Italy in Nero's time, when the country was filled with the victorious Roman legions who had returned from foreign parts, the people observed countless numbers of wild geese flying about at very high elevations, but they could not be caught until one of the Roman generals, suspecting that the geese, like the people, must be hungry, experimented by shooting arrows baited with worms up among them.
The geese swallowed the bait, arrows and all, with great avidity, thus showing that they would swallow anything; but how to catch them was the question, until one of the wise men of the emperor's household, remembering the stories told by Tacitus of geese being cooked by heat from Mount Vesuvius, consulted Nero's head cook, the great chef Claudius Flavius, and he devised a practical means of having them drawn before cooking by scattering a large quantity of teazels and chestnut burrs on the sides of Vesuvius.
The geese in countless numbers at once gulped these down, and in the course of twenty-four hours their whole internal economy, including crop and gizzard, being absolutely clean, he then had an enormous quantity of Roman chestnuts (same as the Italian nuts of the present time) scattered around the crater of the volcano; and the birds feeding on them and then flying about in the hot air were beautifully roasted while well stuffed with the finest chestnut dressing, so that they could be fed to the famine-stricken people.
And what is still more remarkable, it was found that the livers of the geese were encysted in a sack of fat, producing substantially pâté de foie gras, and when the Gauls who captured Rome in the sixth century returned home they took some of this toothsome food along, and from that day till this it has been prepared in Strassburg and vicinity in large quantities.—Rome Correspondence of New York Sun.
Doomed to Live.
By HONORÉ DE BALZAC.
The great fame of Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) will of course always rest upon the wonderful series of novels which he linked together in the scores of volumes which make up his "Human Comedy." In this, with a genius which rivals that of Shakespeare, he attempted to give a complete picture of human society on all its sides—"to do for human nature what has been done for zoology"—to demonstrate that society is a unity in its composition diversified by evolution in different directions. He called himself "the secretary of society," and sought to write a history of manners, in which he should shrink from nothing, and should range from virtue and religion to the most frightful forms of vice and passion.
Balzac's "Human Comedy," which Zola compared to a palace reared by giants, is so often praised as to make one sometimes lose sight of Balzac's supreme art in the composition of short stories. Some of these, however, are classics in themselves, and show the power of a master exercised in his idle moments. The example here republished is an excellent illustration of his ability to produce within a small compass those effects of breathless interest, suspense, and horror which he exhibits on a gigantic scale in his novels.