Part 43

Celebrated as the “petits soupers” of the French were during the last century, they were equalled in brilliancy, and perhaps surpassed in popularity, by those given in Paris by the Duchess of Kingston. The adventures of that very adventurous lady rendered her a favourite with our lively neighbours. When a rustic Devonshire beauty,--wayward, capricious, ignorant, and seductive, Elizabeth Chudleigh was suddenly transplanted to the court of the Princess of Wales, as maid of honour. She there captivated the youthful Duke of Hamilton, returned his affection, and accepted the offer of his hand. They loved intensely, quarrelled furiously, and were reconciled warmly; the enemies of both toiled incessantly to prevent the marriage, and each was daily told of the alleged infidelities of the other. One of these stories excited the ardent beauty to such rage that she dismissed her ducal lover, and in the whirlwind of her wrath gave her hand to Captain Hervey, brother of the Earl of Bristol. She married in haste, and repented quite as hastily. She hated her husband before they left the church together; and after six months of the most active domestic warfare, the ill-assorted pair separated by mutual consent. She went abroad to find solace for her disappointment, and was heartily welcomed at the courts of St. Petersburg, Prussia, and Saxony; she was the favoured guest of Catherine II., and of the great Frederic, at Berlin; and no electoral banquet took place at Dresden without being enlivened by her presence and her wit. When she accepted the invitation to resume her place at the English court, the reception she met with was enthusiastic: she played whist with the men, and she drove four-in-hand as if she had been the born daughter of a charioteer, brought up to her father’s business. Her accomplishments won the heart of the simplest of dukes and the gentlest of men, his grace of Kingston, and as an ecclesiastical court, in 1769, pronounced her marriage with Captain Hervey (now Earl of Bristol) null and void, she speedily espoused her ducal admirer, while her former husband bestowed an earl’s coronet on a second wife. The duke’s property was not entailed, and the duchess spent it with such reckless prodigality, that his grace was fairly frightened into consumption and death; and in 1773 she was a beautiful widow, with the large remnant of the duke’s fortune in her possession--as long as she did not marry again. Away she went to Rome, sailed up the Tiber in her own yacht, entertained the pope (Ganganelli) Clement XIV. at breakfast, dinner, and supper, and kept up such a state that the world had never beheld such extravagant splendour since the days of the most profuse and profligate of queens: the heirs of the duke, seeing their inheritance fast melting away, instituted against her the famous suit for bigamy, on the ground that the ecclesiastical court which broke her first marriage had no power to do so. To meet her accusers she hurried to England, where she considerably startled the modest among our grandmothers by her Sunday amusements, and the daily display afforded by the very lowest of dresses. But as she gave most splendid dinners she had no lack of friends, and few men could find it in their hearts to abandon a woman in distress, whose kitchen fires were never extinguished, who gave her guests green peas at Christmas, and whose commonest beverage was imperial tokay. The House of Lords judged her case, heard her defence, and pronounced her second marriage bigamy by overthrowing the decree of the ecclesiastical court with regard to her first union. To avoid the vulgar penalty she immediately fled, crossed the Channel in a storm, and proceeded to Munich, where she was royally entertained, especially as the law could not touch the property bequeathed her by the Duke of Kingston. The courtesy title of duchess was still allowed her, and the Elector of Bavaria added to it that of Countess of Warth. Great nobles gave entertainments in her honour, which lasted, for days, and ended with a ball, a banquet, and, instead of common-place fireworks, the storming of a town at midnight. Poor nobles vied with each other for her smiles and the life-interest of her possessions; but as she had once been nearly entrapped by a Greek Prince Warta, who turned out to be the son of an ass-driver in Trebizond, and who committed suicide in prison, she made and kept her resolution to be her own mistress for the future, and not that of either count or kaiser.

In France, where she ultimately resided, she purchased the estate of St. Assize au Port, which had formerly belonged to the Duke of Orleans, the father of “Egalité.” She paid down a million and a half of francs for it, and sold seven thousand francs’ worth of rabbits from it, during the first week of her residence there. A fricasee of the duchess’s rabbits was, for a long time, the chief dish at all the _guinguettes_ round Paris. Her own great suppers were famous for their refinement and luxury. She was a lover of good living, a GOURMET rather than a GOURMANDE; an epicure of taste, but not a glutton; and the gastronomic art never could boast of a more liberal patronage than that she bestowed upon it, especially in her Paris residence; where her table, her wit, her dinners, and her diamonds, made of her, for a time, the most remarkable personage in the capital. She died suddenly, of the rupture of a blood-vessel, in 1788, and was completely forgotten before that year had also expired.

I have mentioned that our eccentric countrywoman had purchased the property of the Duke of Orleans; and that reminds me how fatal the table, and particularly the supper-table, has been to the dukes of that house. Thus Philippe, the brother of Louis XIV., quarrelled with the latter touching the marriage which the king wished to conclude between one of his own natural daughters and the duke’s son. Orleans, fevered and flushed, went to sup “with the ladies of St. Cloud.” He had not long before eaten heavily and drunk deeply at dinner; and at this second meal he was fatally stricken with apoplexy. The king said he was sorry, and having thus far given way to his grief, he sat down with Madame de Maintenon to rehearse the overture of an opera. This duke’s son and successor gave suppers, at which his infamous daughter, the Duchess de Berri, presided, and admission to which was purchased by the candidate making simple denial of his belief in a God! The fate of both had something retributive in it. The Duchess de Berri, who had privately married a profligate and ugly officer of her guards, named De Riou, sought to overcome her father’s wrathful refusal to acknowledge the union, by giving him a splendid supper _al-fresco_ on the terrace of Meudon, on the 13th May, 1709. The evening proved cold and damp, and the duchess caught there a fever brought on by a chill, over-feeding, and deep drinking, of which she died. Fourteen years afterwards, the sire who, at sixteen, had all the experience in vice of a man of sixty, was dining with the Duchess of Phalaria, his last mistress, when he was taken ill. The physician who was summoned enjoined abstinence immediate and complete. “Wait till to-morrow,” said the duke, “I will enjoy myself to-night.” And accordingly, the exemplary pair supped together, and the lady was in the act of telling the duke one of her lively stories. As she went on, the glass slid from his hand, and his head sank upon her shoulder. She thought he was asleep, and went on with her story; but he to whom she was telling it was stone-dead. The son of the regent duke was in every respect unlike his father. He ate _his_ last supper with the Jansenist fathers of the Geneviève,--symbol of his general habits and the society he kept. _His_ son was the father of _Egalité_, and at the time of his death (1785) was popular with the lower classes at Paris for the nightly suppers which he distributed to them, and which consisted of bread and wine, with medicine for those who needed it. It was a distribution made not charitably, but politically. Of the last meal of Egalité, before he went to execution, I only know that it was a breakfast, and not a supper, and that he both ate and drank heartily. Misfortune quite as little disturbed the appetite of the Louis Philippe of our own days. During his flight from Paris he never forgot the hour of supper or dinner; and when “William Smith” landed at Newhaven, the first thing he asked for was--something to eat. I notice these table traits, simply because the Orleanist historians always speak contemptuously of Louis XVI. eating, with appetite, in open court during his trial. The stomach of Orleans was ever as ready as that of Bourbon.

The supper has been called the conversational meal, but to make it so in perfection it requires a thorough professor of the science of conversation--one who knows that its very spirit consists less in being a good talker himself than in flinging about suggestive matter to induce others to converse upon. The host who understands the science will so do this that his guests will be satisfied with themselves. Some French writer has said, in reference to this after-supper gossip, that it should be like a game at cards, at which each player does his best,--but I do not endorse this sentiment to its fullest extent, although I allow that there is something in it. The wise generally, and dyspeptics especially, will do well to avoid political subjects after supper; and perhaps there is no more comprehensive remark to be made on this matter than one advanced by a follower of La Bruyère, a minor moralist, who has said that “la confiance fournit plus à la conversation que l’esprit ou l’érudition.”

I recollect once seeing the dullest of evenings made suddenly bright by an apt query modestly put by one who needed not to inquire, but who quietly asked if anyone present could name the author of the line:--

“Fine by degrees, and beautifully less.”

Many a wide guess was fired off prior to the successful naming. The general opinion was in favour of Pope, and Pope has indeed written a line very like it:--

“Fine by defect, and delicately weak.”

The falling upon such coincidences are the very explosives of after-supper discussions: thus, the very familiar line--

“Rides in the whirlwind, and directs the storm,”

may be the text for a pretty dispute. It occurs in Addison’s “Campaign,” and also in Pope’s “Dunciad.” The latter poet too has said--

“Ye little stars, hide your diminish’d rays;”

but Milton, before him, had written--

“At whose sight all the stars Hide their diminish’d heads.”

Schiller’s “Thekla” warbles melodiously her melancholy assurance--

“Ich habe gelibt und geliebet;”

and Byron’s “Sardanapalus,” equally used up, mutters with a faint sigh the same words--

“I have lived and loved.”

We all know who tells us that

“Gospel light first beam’d from Boleyn’s eyes;”

and Horace Walpole harped on the same tune, when he said--

“From Catherine’s wrongs a nation’s bliss was spread, And Luther’s light from Henry’s lawless bed.”

Gray and Moss, too, afford instances of like coincidences of sound or sentiment, or both. The first, in his “Elegy,” has--

“And leaves the world to darkness and to me.”

The second, in his “Beggar’s Petition,” sings to the same air--

“And left the world to wretchedness and me.”

I have noticed, in a former page, how Gray’s line of

“Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,”

must necessarily remind one of Shakspeare’s words, in the mouth of Brutus--

“Dear as the drops that visit this sad heart.”

Demosthenes has truly said--

Ἀνὴρ ὁ φεύγων καὶ πάλιν μαχήσεται,

so that Sir John Minnes is not even the original author of the Hudibrastically sounding assertion--

“He who fights and runs away, May live to fight another day.”

The lines in Hudibras are as the perfecting and comment on the above, remarking as they do--

“For he that runs may fight again, Which he can never do that’s slain.”

These coincidences are, no doubt, unintentional. For my own part, I do not believe that Shakspeare, when he spoke in Hamlet, of

“The undiscover’d country, from whose bourne No traveller returns,”

necessarily had in his mind the

“Qui nunc it per iter tenebricosum Illuc unde negant redire quemquam,”

of Catullus; although the latter lines were quoted by Seneca the philosopher, and were as familiar as household words among the verse-loving ancients. Dr. Johnson’s remark on the similarity between Caliban’s desire to sleep again, and the πάλιν ἤθελον καθεύδειν of Anacreon, may apply to nearly all the passages in our national poet which appear to have been derived from the ancients. If we judged them by any other rule than that the ideas presented themselves naturally to Shakspeare’s mind, without consideration whether any one before him had sung to the self-same tune, we might soon turn _his_, and indeed any poet’s works, into a thing of shreds and patches. For instance, again, when the young Dane describes Osric as “spacious in the possession of dirt,” we might accuse the author, yet wrongfully, perhaps, of having stolen the idea from the “multa dives tellure” of Horace. We might imagine that the “Id in summa fortuna æquius quod validius,” of Tacitus, gave birth to

“That in the captain’s but a choleric word, Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy,”

of Shakspeare, who would have been very much surprised had he been told as much. Again, Corneille, because he said,

“Qui commence bien ne fait rien s’il n’achève,”

is not to be accused of having written a pendant to the assertion of Flaccus--

“Dimidium facti qui cœpit habet.”

Neither has Beaumarchais rifled Otway, because “Désirer du bien à une femme est ce vouloir du mal à son mari,” has a close resemblance to--

“I hope a man may wish his friend’s wife well, And no harm done.”

If mere close resemblance establish a charge of plagiarism, then Chaucer, when in speaking of maidens dark or fair he said--

“Blake or white, I toke no kepe,”

stole the thought from the ancient Irish bard, who said--

“Bohumilun a coolen dhuv no baun;”

a line which Chaucer could not have read, though his own is a literal translation of it. Examples like these I might go on citing _ad infinitum_. As Rosalind says, I could quote you so eight years together, dinners, and suppers, and sleeping hours excepted. But I will conclude with one more case in point between a well-known English author and the French dramatist Molière. Thus writes the one--

“What woful stuff this madrigal would be, In some starved, hackney’d sonneteer, or me! But let a lord once own the happy lines, How the wit brightens and the style refines!”

And thus sung the other--

“Tous les discours sont des sottises, Partout, d’un homme sans éclat. Ce seraient paroles exquises, Si cé’tait un grand qui parla.”

If this be digressing, it is because after-supper conversation _does_ take a discursive character. In the last century, in Paris, the majestic nonentities were invited to dinner; the talkers, be they who they might, to supper. “La Robe dîne; Finance soupe,” was another of these distinctions; and it was found that the supper was by far the most agreeable meal of the day. The celebrated Duchess of Kingston was especially celebrated for her Paris suppers. They were infinitely more splendid than her English breakfasts, so pleasantly sneered at by Horace Walpole. The wits assembled round her in gay clusters, and they and the poets cudgelled their brains to prove one another plagiarists; while the peers stood by, and marvelled at the extent and elasticity of the human understanding. Nothing could well surpass the hilarity and magnificence of these entertainments, where the philosophers were voted as dull as the nobles, and no aristocracy was acknowledged but the aristocracy of intellect. Another lady, remarkable for the elegance of the little suppers over which she presided, was Madame Tronchin: but the Reign of Terror came on, and her friends and relatives were daily dragged from her to the guillotine; and Madame Tronchin, who had a most feeling heart, used to say, that she never could have gone through such horrors had it not been for her little cup of café à la crême. The courtiers used to joke in like fashion, at the suppers of Versailles, at national disgrace. When the Count d’Artois returned from the siege of Gibraltar, to which he had gone with much boasting, and began to talk of his batteries, the courtiers used to smile, and to whisper to one another that he meant his “batterie de cuisine.”

With regard to the dietetics of supper, it may be taken for granted that late, heavy meals are dangerous, and to be avoided. Chymification and sleep may go on tolerably well together after it; but when the time comes for chylification and sanguification, feverish wakefulness will accompany the process. Dyspeptic patients, however, are authorized to take a light supper before going to bed. It is said that the idle man is the devil’s man; and it may also be said of the stomach, that if it has nothing to do it will be doing mischief. It is especially so with persons of weak digestion; for whom an egg, lightly boiled, or dry toast and a little white-wine negus, is a supper _selon l’ordinance_. But a wise man will hardly want a guide in this matter. Breakfast may be the meal of friendship; dinner, of etiquette; and supper, the feast of wit;--but, generally speaking, he will show most wit who takes the least supper. Common sense should teach him the exact measure of his capacity.

A whale swallows at a gulp more shrimps than would be required to make sauce for the universe. That gentle songster, the canary, is like the celebrated contralto songstress, who eats daily half a peck of saffron salad;--the bird consumes nearly his own bulk weight of food. But he is delicate compared with the caterpillar, which consumes five hundred times its own weight before it lies down, to rise a butterfly. As for the hyæna, he is popularly said, when hungry, and other food not presenting itself, to eat himself; and probably, like Dr. Kitchener, he carries his own sauce-box about with him! But the stomach of man is not made to perform such feats as those accomplished by the whale, the canary, or the caterpillar. He is especially to remember, that though an animal, he is not a beast.

Man, it must be remembered, began with refinement. He was made perfect, upright, and to him was given “every herb bearing seed, which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree in which is the fruit of a tree, yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” Here food is used as the symbol of celestial blessings; as in the passage, “He should have fed them also with the finest of the wheat, and with honey out of the rock should I have satisfied them.” With the fall, civilization and innocence also fell, and barbarism was the offspring of disobedience. There was a time when men had sunk so low that they were like the Troglodytes described by Pomponius Mela--“Troglodytæ nullarum opum domini, strident magis quam loquuntur, specus subeunt, alunturque serpentibus”--they had no property, shrieked rather than spoke, lived in caves, and devoured serpents for food. The fine wheat and the honey from the rock was not theirs. The Fenns, painted by Tacitus, were only a shade less barbarous: “Mira feritas,” says the graphic Caius Cornelius, “fœda paupertas; non arma, non equi, non penates; victui herba, vestui pelles, cubili humus”--wonderful for their wildness, their poverty filthy; they had neither horses, nor gods; the grass was their food, skins their raiment, and the ground their couch. The Helvetii were _progressistas_ in the race for the prize of civilization; and, when planning an emigration project, they took two years to thoroughly perfect the plan, laying up stores of provisions the while. Whoever Ceres may have really been, it is clear that in her is to be recognised the benefactress of mankind:--

“Prima Ceres unco glebam dimovit aratro, Prima dedit fruges, alimentaque mitia terris, Prima dedit leges;”

she who taught them the uses of the plough, of agriculture, and of fixed laws, and who gave them what God had intended for civilized and innocent man, “the finest wheat,”--she must have been the renovator of the earth, and of beauty upon it. Man, like the rudest saints of the desert--so near may savagery be to undisciplined sanctity--had been “feeding on ashes but now the finest wheat was again there to give him strength and delight,”--wheat, where golden grain had, perhaps, first yielded its abundance beneath the shade of the primeval tree of knowledge.

The era of wheat, of the ploughshare, and of iron, was the era of the second civilization. Man was no longer generally a wild savage, or a cunning hunter. God again vouchsafed to him “the finest of the wheat;” and, as civilization progressed, so also was widened the circle of supply, upon which indeed much of civilization depends.

The subject of “Man and his Food,” with regard to the future, has been ably discussed by Dr. Leonard Withington, of Newbury, Massachusetts. He has moved the question, whether we have reached the terminus of all our stores or not? He holds, that the forest, the field, the river, and the sea may yield contributions to our table, in addition to the known abundance for which our as abundant gratitude is now due. We have not reached the line of our last inventions; and, doubtless, new articles are to be discovered, which will have an equal influence on virtue and happiness. “Boundless nature,” says Dr. Withington, “lies before us, and undeveloped skill is wrapt up in the human breast. The exuberance of our system is not exhausted,--her beasts, her birds, her fishes, her plants, her growing trees and her copious grasses, her pastures, her valleys, her lofty mountains and her rolling streams, are all spread out to the hungry world. Nature is an image of God, and she echoes, though she does not originate the words, ‘In my Father’s house is bread enough, and to spare. Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it; thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water; thou preparedst them corn when thou hadst so provided for it. Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly; thou settlest the furrows thereof; thou makest it soft with showers; thou blessest the springing thereof.’”

Dr. Cumming holds, not only that death is the most unnatural of conditions, but that when the era of heavenly, everlasting life shall be established, the heaven of man will be here upon earth. So Dr. Withington thinks that the earth will not only be made more heavenly beautiful than it now is, before the period of the new paradise, but more abundant also. “The manna,” he says, “which is hereafter to be provided, will not be rained down from heaven, but will spring up from the earth.” And there is common sense in this last assertion, for in it is implied that abundance will come by the proper application of knowledge and labour, without which the earth, ever wise and prudent, will yield but little. The increasing populations of that earth have two objects before them which are of no small importance, and which are thus defined by Dr. Withington:--“One is, to impart from the open field of nature all those good and wholesome things which our Father has laid up for us; and secondly, to train our taste and habits for the using of those things which are nutritive and sweet, and which may have the best influence on our moral character and social happiness.” The training should begin from early childhood,--and early childhood requires delicate training.