Feeding France
New Sciences of Food
1760–1815
E. C. Spary
University printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom
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© E. C. Spary 2014
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This book is dedicated to my sons, Oliver and Simon
Illustrations
1.1 ‘Economie, Riz à la graisse’. From Bibliothèque Physico-économique 1790.2: 248. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 35
1.2 Nivert’s stove. From Bibliothèque Physico-économique 1784, plate II. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France. 41
1.3 The female economist: Marie-armande-Jeanne Gacon-Dufour in 1805. From Manuel de la ménagère, à la ville et à la campagne, et de la femme de basse-cour. paris: Buisson, year XIII/1805, I: frontispiece. British Library: shelfmark 1507/1646. 47
3.1 The horse’s intestine, showing the large surface area herbivores required to extract the sparse organic molecules from plants. Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon et al., Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particulière, avec la description du Cabinet du Roy, paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1751, IV: plate III, opp. p. 366 (copperplate engraving, F. Basan after De Sève). By kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library: classmark MG.7.4. 98
3.2 ‘Sculpture. Differentes Opérations pour le travail du Marbre’. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’alembert, eds., Recueil de planches, sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication. paris: Briasson, 1771, plate I, vignette (copperplate engraving, Benard after p. Falconet). The type of thing Diderot might have smashed to pieces in order to perform his experiment on the circulation of nutritive matter, this marble statue was evidently drawn in Falconet’s own workshop since his son, p. Falconet, was the artist for this Encyclopédie plate. By kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library: classmark 7900.a.37. 99
3.3 anon., Les Costumes François Representans Les differens Etats du Royaume, avec les habillemens propres à chaque Etat et accompanes de Reflections critiques et morales. paris: Le pere and avaulez, 1776, detail of plate V. British Library: shelfmark 185.f.3. 109
3.4 part of Geoffroy’s table of comparative nutritiveness of different meats. From Denis Diderot, 1751. Supplement to ‘alimens’. In Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’alembert, eds., Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers paris: Briasson et al., I: 268. By kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library: classmark 7900.a.13. 117
3.5 Weighing the eater: armand Séguin as the subject of Lavoisier’s digestive experiments in 1791. Marie-anne pierrette paulze, Mme Lavoisier, c. 1791. Brown pen and wash. © Wellcome Library, London. 120
4.1 Renaud d’Optin, advertisement for ‘Chocolat pectoral et Stomachique’, with corrections by the Société Royale de Médecine. Transcribed by the author from Bibliothèque Nationale de l’académie de Médecine, paris, fonds Société Royale de Médecine, MS 103, dossier 4, pièce 5 (26 October 1787). The deletions by the Société removed all reference to the curative powers of the product. 138
4.2 ‘Fabrique du Chocolat’. a chocolate manufactory. In JacquesFrançois Demachy, L’Art du distillateur liquoriste; contenant le bruleur d’eaux-de-vie, le fabriquant de liqueurs, le débitant, ou le cafetier-limonnadier. académie Royale des Sciences. [paris: n.p.], 1775, plate XIII (copperplate engraving, Goussier after Benard). Cacao beans were placed on a lightly warmed, concave marble table-top, and worked into a smooth paste with a rolling-pin. By kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library: classmark XXVII.49.15.
144
4.3 De Montot, Fecule, ou farine de santé, tirée du choix des pommes de terre (‘Health flour extracted from the best potatoes’). [1782?]. archives Historiques du Musée des arts et Métiers, ms. N 318. © Musée des arts et métiers-Cnam, paris/photo M. Favareille. 156
5.1 ‘Le Jardin des Tuilleries en face du palais du Louvre à paris’, c. 1780. Copperplate engraving, anon. © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Est. LI-72 (1) FOL. 168
5.2 ‘palais National. Jardin des Tuilleries’. planting plan for the cultivation of the Tuileries garden with potatoes, 1794. Bibliothèque Centrale du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, paris: ms. 308. 169
5.3 James Gillray, ‘French Liberty and British Slavery’, 1792. public domain. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/c/c3/French-Liberty-British-Slavery-Gillray.jpeg. 170
List of illustrations x
5.4 ‘Machine à transformer la pomme de terre en vermicelle’ [late eighteenth century]. archives Historiques du Musée des arts et Métiers, inventaire 13751.103. © Musée des arts et métiers-Cnam, paris/photo Dephti-Ouest.
5.5 ‘planche 1.ere’. pierre-adrien-Just Grenet’s potato processing workshop, c. 1794. Drawn and engraved by Gaitte. archives Nationales, paris, F10 244.
6.1 Hubin’s digester, from Denis papin, La Maniere d’amolir les Os, et de faire cuire toutes sortes de Viandes en fort peu de temps, & à peu de frais, paris: Charles Osmont, 1721, opp. p. 121. © Wellcome Library.
6.2 The Quériau-Ozy digester, from [François-Guillaume Quériat] Memoire sur l’usage oeconomique du Digesteur de Papin, Clermont-Ferrand: pierre Viallanes, 1761, opp. p. 13. © Wellcome Library.
6.3 ‘antediluvian animal substance’: the mastodon. From Georges Cuvier, ‘Sur le grand mastodonte’, Annales du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle 8 (1806). plate 53, opp. p. 312. © Linda Hall Library.
6.4 D’arcet’s steam gelatine extractor. From Jean-pierre-Joseph D’arcet, Mémoire sur les os provenant de la viande de boucherie, dans lequel on traite de la conservation de ces os, de l‘extraction de leur gélatine par le moyen de la vapeur, et des usages alimentaires de la dissolution gélatineuse qu’on en obtient. paris: Gaultier-Laguionie, 1829, plate 4 (adam after De Maléon). © Wellcome Library.
7.1 The emperor Domitian faced with a turbot. From Jean-Joseph Berchoux, La gastronomie, ou l’homme des champs à table paris: Giguet and Michaud, 1803: frontispiece. Note the many Republican visual references, such as the phrygian cap, the orator at the tribune and the neoclassical poses.
© Wellcome Library.
7.2 ‘Bibliothèque d’un Gourmand du XIX.e Siècle’. From [Grimod de La Reynière and Coste d’arnobat] 1803–1810: I, frontispiece (copperplate engraving by Delin after alexandre-Balthasar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière). By kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library: classmark W.5.76.
7.3 ‘portrait du Gourmand’, Musée Carnavalet, paris. © RMN-Grand palais/agence Bulloz.
8.1 ‘Confiseur, pastillage et Moulles pour les Glaces’. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’alembert, eds., Recueil de planches,
195
196
205
207
225
228
238
255
259
List of illustrations xi
sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication (Encyclopédie, XX). paris: Briasson, 1763, plate IV (copperplate engraving, Goussier after prevost). By kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library: classmark 7900.a.32. 296
8.2 ‘Le Ministre de l’Intérieur présente à l’Empéreur du Sucre de Betterave’, [1812?], [copperplate engraving, David after Monnet]. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Estampes, Collection Hennin, vol. CL, pièce 13195. 305
8.3 ‘Manufacture impériale de sucre de betteraves de Rambouillet’. archives Nationales, paris, O2 939. 310
8.4 ‘Vive le Roi!… ou les Spéculateurs [et] les politiques en défaut’, alexis-Joseph Millet, Spring 1814. While Royalists celebrate the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, an onlooker carrying a copy of Essai sur le Sucre de Betterave –a fictitious title – appears less happy about the news. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Collection de Vinck, vol. LXIX, pièce 9055.
311
1 Industrial food sites of paris. Detail from ‘a Map of the City of paris’, I. Stockdale, 1800. The author, based on a map in the public domain (www.oldmapsofparis.com). 324
acknowledgements
Without many helpful discussions and the boundless generosity of colleagues and friends, this book would never have come to fruition. The Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Warwick, the contributors to Materials and Expertise in Early Modern Europe, and those involved in the project Situating Chemistry 1760–1840 provided essential sounding boards and were forums of debate and reflection. I had helpful and interesting exchanges with members of the group ‘Savoirs d’anticipation 18e–19e siècles’ in paris, and with many seminar and conference audiences. While I was visiting the archive of the Conservatoire National des arts et Métiers, Liliane pérez emerged, like Mephistopheles, from a back room and, with tremendous generosity, gave me a copy of her book L’invention technique au siècle des Lumières. I must also record my indebtedness to the digitised collection of technological works made available by the same institution at http://cnum.cnam.fr/RUB/fcata.html. alain Mercier, curator of the Conservatoire’s archive, drew my attention to Figure 5.4, and Marco Beretta generously shared his discovery of the long-lost image reproduced here as Figure 3.5.
Many other individual scholars were similarly generous. anne Secord, paul White and Tom Stammers read parts of the manuscript. Jennifer Davis Cline shared her unpublished work with me, while Seymour Mauskopf provided suggestions on the subject of proust and grape sugar. Harmke Kamminga, whose loss is regretted by all historians of food and the sciences, was supportive in the project’s early stages. Others offered invaluable advice or help, especially Giles MacDonogh, Dana Simmons, Morag Martin, Ralph Kingston, Juan pimentel Igea, Richard Whatmore, Daniela Sechel, Sévérine pilloud, Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, Kyri Claflin, Melissa Calaresu, Marie Thébaud-Sorger, philippe Steiner and Marcus popplow.
at different stages, this project received funding from the Maxplanck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, the Wellcome Trust and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Thanks to their support, I was
acknowledgements xiii
able to profit from the indispensable research assistance of Nathalie Queyroux and antoine Ermakoff. Valeriana pugliano translated sections of Kesselmayer’s doctoral dissertation for me. Staff of the British Library, Cambridge University Library,Wellcome Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de l’académie de Médecine, archives Historiques du Conservatoire des arts et Métiers, archives Nationales, Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Santé and Bibliothèque Centrale du Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle were unfailingly helpful.
Lastly, I must thank the editorial team at Cambridge University press, including Liz Friend-Smith, Maartje Scheltens and Michael Watson, as well as the series editors Colin Jones, Margot Finn and Robert Moeller for having faith in the project.
Introduction
When we say, in the ordinary way, that in the modern period science has become immensely powerful, we are not referring to theoretical developments within scientific institutions. We mean instead that our daily lives are nowadays shaped by scientific claims about the natural world, and the material manifestations of those claims, in ways inconceivable a few centuries ago. Everyday life has commanded little attention from historians of science, while within the historical mainstream, it tends to be viewed as a trivial topic, unworthy of sustained scholarly interest. Yet, from watches to central heating, from health foods to potatoes, many aspects of quotidian material culture as we know it today were developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by individuals laying claim to scientific knowledge. This book considers a crucial and much neglected aspect of that thorough-going scientific reform of everyday life: the attempt by scientific practitioners to explain and manage food consumption in the decades around 1800. It begins in a period when certain phenomena which are often taken as defining features of modern Western culture, such as a consumer society, large-scale manufacturing and public scientific authority, were either non-existent or very new; it ends at a time when many fundamental features of the bureaucratised, industrialised world we inhabit were already apparent, particularly in cities.
In A History of Private Life, a work that has become a landmark study within cultural history, the late Jean-Louis Flandrin took one particular publication as evidence for the claim that such a thing as ‘private life’ existed in the eighteenth century. This was Histoire de la vie privée des Français (‘History of the private life of the French’), written by PierreJean-Baptiste Legrand d’Aussy, ex-Jesuit, mediaevalist and man of letters, and published in 1783. Legrand d’Aussy remained outside the learned institutions of the Old Regime, only entering the history section of the Institut National des Sciences et Arts in 1795.1 Originally planned as part of a longer work on the history of private life, the three
1 Flandrin 1989; see also Csergo 1999a; Staum 1996: Chapter 8.
volumes he eventually published were all devoted to the question of food and diet. Much of the book addressed French eating habits prior to the eighteenth century. However, when he reached his own time, Legrand d’Aussy’s interest turned to the manufacture of the most up-to-date food products: goods such as luxury liqueurs, exotic drinks, vinegars and mustards, health foods and experimental breads, whose production and value was legitimated by appealing to scientific and medical principles. He was evidently personally familiar with the artisanal world of urban food entrepreneurs, for he mentioned conversation and correspondence with several famous manufacturers, such as the vinegar-maker Antoine-Claude Maille, whose company still thrives today.2 His account of the key transformations in eighteenth-century French food history embraced kneading machines, imitation Italian pasta, economic soup, gravy powders, sugar refineries, restaurants, and the latest flavours of icecreams, liqueurs or mustards. What he had to say about the reasons for including such information in his book is summarised in his comment on the fifty-five new types of vinegar contributed by Maille to French culinary resources. ‘I have entered into such detail’, he explained, ‘because one day it will be epoch-making for our Nephews, & because nowadays the objects about which you have just read have become, at the hands of their inventor, the subject of a very considerable trade.’3 For Legrand d’Aussy, it was these themes – invention, commerce and mechanisation –that were the key developments of his own century. They guaranteed that food had a history, that it too participated in the progress of knowledge towards modernity through reason. It is ironic, therefore, that precisely these aspects should have gone largely overlooked in later histories of French food in the eighteenth century. In discussing Legrand d’Aussy’s work, Flandrin made absolutely no mention of alimentary entrepreneurship, science or invention. Such themes are indeed absent from his entire œuvre, otherwise so comprehensive in its coverage of early modern eating practices, from table manners to dietetics. Precisely such omissions have allowed the early modern world to be portrayed as a utopian age of artisan-produced foods at odds with today’s mechanised, processed, standardised comestibles.
2 On Maille, see Watin-Augouard 2000; Martin 1996, 1999, 2009: 45–48; on liqueurs, see Spary 2012: Chapter 4.
3 Legrand d’Aussy 1783, II: 152. The few studies devoted to alimentary entrepreneurs in the eighteenth (as opposed to nineteenth) century are almost all of comparatively recent date. See Spang 2000; Martin 1996, 2003; Davis 2013; Coquery 2011. One earlier source, Forbes 1958, pays no attention to entrepreneurial culture, only to inventions; while the classic Franklin 1887–1902, XIII mentions numerous alimentary entrepreneurs but is predominantly anecdotal.
Flandrin’s reading of Legrand d’Aussy may reflect the overwhelming hegemony of gastrohistoire in the historiography of French food. Properly speaking, gastrohistoire commences with the writings of early nineteenthcentury gastronomes such as Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod de La Reynière. Historians of French food still devote themselves to ransacking this literature for past culinary practices and recipes. Yet even as they memorialised a lost age of fine dining, the first gastronomic authors, writing in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, also commented upon the rise and growing political importance of scientific and industrial food production for French eaters circa 1800. One of the main purposes of this book is to construct that lost history of French food; to argue, as Claude Fischler has done for a later period, that gastronomy and industrialisation, connoisseurship and chemistry, proceeded in parallel –more, in dialogue with one another.4 Gastronomy has been celebrated as a peculiarly French form of resistance to the mass industrialisation of diet, and as the direct heir to Old Regime culinary traditions.5 The claim made by this book is that eighteenth-century cuisine in fact developed in two different directions after 1760: into a scientifically-informed and industrialised practice on the one hand, and an elitist connoisseurial handicraft on the other. Which of these trends most faithfully represents the lost alimentary past that some would seek to recapture? Though gastronomy is widely taken as accompanying the rise of a French middle class, the Royalist nostalgia evident in early gastronomic writings shares little common ground with the programmatic concerns and political affiliations of the economic authors discussed in this book, who also developed self-consciously middling agendas after 1800. To which programme of alimentary knowledge should we turn as definitive of modernity and the ‘rise of the middle class’?6 Perhaps, instead, we need to recognise that authoritative discourses about food embraced the emergence of both industrial foods and the gastronomic canon. Scientific and medical pronouncements about dietary requirements, healthy eating and nutrition can be understood as knowledge-claims emerging out of debates over the political implications of taste and nourishment as food production industrialised.7 The relationship between food production as innovation
4 Fischler 1993: 196–197.
5 Csergo 1997; Capatti 2007; see also Shapin 2003b; Pitte 2002.
6 On cuisine and gastronomy as exemplary of an emergent middle class or of modernity, see Ferguson 2001; Bourdieu 1994; Aron 1967.
7 The history of industrial foods has received most attention in the cases of Germany and Britain, though few studies address the period before 1840; see especially Teuteberg and Wiegelmann 1972; Teuteberg 1990; Burnett and Oddy 1994; Oddy and Miller 1976; Geissler and Oddy 1993; Fenton 2000; Mennell et al. 1992; Goody 1997. For a recent attempt to reconcile cuisine and science, which invokes eighteenth-century debates, see This 2002: 1–18.
and food writing as commemoration – between the alimentary future and the alimentary past – is thus a complex one.
Today’s cuisine is the heir to this dual tradition. One way of illustrating this is via the history of connoisseurship. Throughout the period covered by this book, entrepreneurs, consumers and government experts shared connoisseurial standards. Early gastronomic publications advertised food entrepreneurs from all over the First Empire, who met quality standards to which other producers might aspire. In celebrating regional excellence in this way, gastronomic authors helped to constitute alimentary patrimonialism, a key focus for today’s debate over French food.8 The ‘slow food’ movement and other pressure groups view regional specialities and local resources as a counter to the predominance of industrial foods in the Western diet.9 However, those regional foods that first entered the gastronomic canon did so precisely because they travelled from their place of production to their place of consumption – in the case of the first gastronomes, the city. After all, it was only by virtue of possessing a Parisian, and therefore urban, central and modern, vantage-point that gastronomes were in a position to compare alimentary products from all over the nation. The gastronomic project itself depended upon the very processes of centralisation and rationalisation that its nostalgic regionialism would seem to be attacking. Grimod de La Reynière himself acknowledged this in dubbing Paris ‘the Capital of the Gourmand Empire’.10 Gastronomy signalled the increasing tensions between regional autonomy and administrative centralisation during the First Empire.11
The very notion of provincial specialities was partly invented by gastronomic writers in order to resist contemporary programmes for the standardisation of nourishment, supported by centralising regimes on the basis of scientific advice. But most did not view industrial foods as objectionable in and of themselves. Gastronomic literature, in fact, is a valuable resource for constructing the early history of industrial foods in France.12 The writings of Grimod de La Reynière, in particular,
8 On alimentary patrimonialism and the construction of national and regional identity, see Trubek 2008; Meyzie 2007: esp. 350–366; Leynse 2006; Abramson 2003; Csergo 1997, 1999b
9 One ‘slow food’ manifesto explicitly names Grimod de La Reynière as an ancestor of this programme, opposed to globalisation and industrial mass-production of foods (Petrini 2001: 9, 15). See also, e.g., Pollan 2008; Mennell et al. 1992: Chapter 9; Jacobs and Scholliers 2003; Abramson 2003; Mintz 2006: 7; de Certeau et al. 1998: Chapter 11.
10 Quoted in Abramson 2003: 119; see also Croze-Magnan year XI1/1803. Coulon 1999: 316 asks ‘Which are the major sites at which the culinary city encounters the political city?’
11 On these tensions, see, e.g., Woolf 1991
12 Almanach des Gourmands year XI/1803: 159–211; Gourarier 1985c: 477; see also this volume, p. 000. On the relationship between industrial food production and local
constituted not only gastronomic literary entertainments, but also shopping guides to the specialist food products of Parisian entrepreneurs. As Garval notes, this was a case of ‘the “founding father of gastronomy” … praising the forerunner of canned peas’.13 The space devoted in Grimod’s publications to reviewing food products was a form of product placement, differing little in tone from pre-Revolutionary newspaper advertisements masquerading as letters to the editor.14 As the proprietor of a Lyon wholesale business selling fabrics, foodstuffs, books and fashion items in the Revolutionary period, Grimod was indeed complicit in the commercial world which he celebrated in writing. His Jury Dégustateur, which met weekly to evaluate food products sent in by entrepreneurs around the country, bore more than a passing resemblance to the panels of juries appointed to judge the products submitted to the new industrial exhibitions. Among the prepared foods it evaluated were liqueurs, pâtés, vinegars, chocolates, canned goods and preserved fruits. In this sense, the history of gastronomy is in fact continuous with the early history of industrial foods.15 Gastronomes and artisans themselves courted industrialisation, contributed to it, and profited by it. The industrialisation of foods was a continuum, not a radical transformation; the artisanal smallscale chocolate-maker and the large chocolate factory of today are the end result of different paths from the same origin.
One question to be asked, therefore, is why certain artisans came, in the early nineteenth century, to react against the embrace of mechanisation, large-scale production and the generation of standards of uniformity and quality which are the characterising feature of industrial food production. For today’s celebration of slow food is prone to silence on the question of how to create reliable standards of quality – indeed, how even to measure quality – in the absence of the mechanisation and rationalisation which first raised questions of comparability and replicability within the public domain. The uniformity of standards afforded by industrial production techniques was viewed by savants and gastronomes alike as a means of improving food quality. Past debates over issues such as quality or adulteration thus usefully highlight the fact that there were distinct constituencies of expertise and agency surrounding food. As John Coveney notes, histories of nutrition ‘typically … take as their starting points people and consumption, see Stanziani 2007a; Wilk 2006; Stanziani 2003; Garval 2001: 61–64; Csergo 1997: 188.
13 Garval 2001: 58.
14 It is highly probable that product descriptions in works like [Grimod de La Reynière and Coste d’Arnobat] 1803–1810 were based on advertising material submitted by the entrepreneurs themselves.
15 See Rival 1983: 88–91; Garval 2001: 59, 65–67; Rambourg 2005: 167–168; BrillatSavarin 1801
events in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’.16 The rise of scientific definitions of nourishment at this particular time was neither inevitable nor self-evident. Rather, it accompanied the emergence of a new group of authoritative public food experts. Prior to 1750, French physicians issued dietetic recommendations which might find their way into print, but their elite clients were expected to be self-determining in matters of medical treatment, food and lifestyle.17 By the 1810s, a group of alimentary experts, acknowledged as such by the public, but, more crucially, also by successive governments, offered public advice on all questions about the production, circulation and management of food in society. Many of these experts were chemists.18 Physicians continued to provide dietetic advice for private clients, but chemists now penetrated every domain in which food became a matter of public interest, from advising on the nourishing powers of institutional diet to offering their services in industrial food manufacture, from pronouncing upon the benefits and dangers of new foods to inventing such foods themselves, from questions of food preservation to debates over adulteration. In government, in print, in city workshops and manufactories, this new group of authoritative practitioners was highly active during the course of the nineteenth century, as industrial chemistry became the principal science of materials and the most important source of transformation of everyday life.19 Rather than taking sides in the debate over industrial versus patrimonial foods, therefore, this book asks which aspects of food culture and consumption were conquered by chemical experts, how their public authority was constituted, and where and why it failed. As Stanziani and others have shown for the nineteenth century, disputes over food quality rapidly became disputes over the public authority of participant groups.20 Modern wines, to take one example, are products of a programme of chemical reforms pursued in the name of economy, science and improvement from the 1760s onwards. One such process is Chaptalisation, the addition of sugar to unfermented grape must in order to increase the alcohol content of the resulting wine. Today this practice is deemed
16 Coveney 2006: xiii. On quality, see Abad 2006; Sleeswijk 2004
17 Jewson 1976; Coleman 1974
18 On chemistry as public culture, see especially Bensaude-Vincent 2007; BensaudeVincent and Blondel 2007; on chemists as public experts, see especially Collins 1993; Atkins et al. 2007: part B; Simon 2002; Teuteberg 1994; Stanziani 2007a. My own use of the term ‘expert’ throughout this book refers to those appointed by institutions or governments to make public statements about the natural or social world. For further discussion, see p. 000, this volume.
19 Belhoste 2003: 98 dubs chemistry around 1800 ‘the first industrial science in the modern sense’.
20 See especially Stanziani 2003, 2005, 2007a; Ashworth 2010; Sleeswijk 2004
perfectly legitimate, even within the mythology of French wine production, the domain where connoisseurship, craftsmanship and regionalism are perhaps most frequently invoked in conjunction. The practice of adding sugar to must was of long standing, and was not invented by the chemist Chaptal. But, as J. B. Gough argues, endorsement by institutional chemists gave it ‘a respectability not accorded most other forms of adulteration’.21 Its acceptability as an intervention in food production occurred at a key juncture in the industrialisation of wine, just before chemists came to view cane and grape sugar as chemically distinct, as discussed at the end of this book. During that period, Chaptalisation was represented by chemists not as a process of adulteration, but as a scientific compensation for nature’s shortcomings in providing inadequate sugar to the grape: in other words, as one of many instances where chemical expertise could enhance daily life. As one contemporary put it:
It is a mistake to believe that, as long as good proportions are observed, the sugar and brandy added to weak wines will produce a compound which is different from those wines which nature might have rendered just as sweet or spirituous. One need only give these added principles the time to combine, and the properties of these wines will be the same as those of good analogous wines to which nature has given everything that makes them generous wines: the bouquet and the goût de terroir are the only things that the chemist imitates imperfectly.22
Chemists’ interventions in wine production could be defended by presenting them as identical to natural phenomena. There are two assertions implicit in this manoeuvre: firstly, that chemists possess expertise which qualifies them to make claims about the identity of two food substances; secondly, that chemists are also, and simultaneously, competent to pronounce on the question of quality – even if they cannot always reproduce it perfectly. Chemists not only copy nature, they improve upon it.
Just such chemical claims were consistently challenged from the eighteenth century onwards, however. The formalisation of standards of connoisseurship and patrimonialism allowed chemists’ claims to possess particular skills uniquely qualifying them to intervene in food production to be challenged.23 Take the 1847 satire on a merchant who, having taken up different trades with little success, ended by opening a wine-shop: ‘Sadly, I did not know how to handle this liquid … I
21 Gough 1998; see also Mazliak 2011: Chapter 7. On wine as the chief counterexample to the view that industrialisation has destroyed connoisseurship, see Pitte 2002, epilogue; on the changing definitions of adulteration in wine production, see Stanziani 2005: Chapter 4.
22 Cadet de Vaux 1814: 225; Chaptal year X/1801; Journal d’économie rurale 6 (1804): 22–24; Plack 2009: 141–142. On terroir, see Trubek 2008
23 Shapin 2003b, 2005
would have had to abandon my new establishment, had not an intelligent assistant come to my aid and taught me the useful art of making wine out of water and chemicals.’24 The emulative, synthetic project upon which the claims to social utility and epistemological expertise of chemists and food entrepreneurs rested was neither politically neutral, nor a secure resource for self-presentation. Rather, it could become the object of ridicule and satire, for example in gastronomic literature. The main difference between the gastronomes and economic chemists discussed in this book was not disagreement over the proper means of food production. Rather, it was that gastronomes were men of letters who had to make their way in the unstable and transforming literary market of the post-Revolutionary years.25 Chemists were more likely to benefit from direct state support throughout the period, even if at times that support took a covert form. That close relationship was one of the reasons why, over these decades, chemists were able to enter the public domain, as well as the world of large-scale manufacturing, in the guise of experts.
One central question this book sets out to resolve is how such alimentary experts emerged and who they were. For we know very little about such figures prior to the mid nineteenth century, by which time their authoritative position vis-à-vis government, society and commerce was already well established.26 Why did Western cultures come to rely on such individuals? How did they achieve positions where they commanded public authority? As Frank Fischer observes, ‘Expert knowledge is indeed one of the most distinctive features of modern society; it is tightly woven into the very fabric of our existence.’27 Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller have developed Michel Foucault’s account of governmentality to argue for the importance of experts as mediating figures standing between governments and those who are governed, the brokers between centralising bureaucracy and individual action.28 This valuable argument nonetheless relies upon the assumption that expert status is stable, whereas one concern of Feeding France is to explore its historical construction. To lay claim to authority over the nature and proper use of food was controversial in the eighteenth century, and continues to be so today. This book explores the problems and constraints of expert action
24 Quoted in Sibalis 1988: 718. See also Sleeswijk 2004.
25 See, in particular, Hesse 2003.
26 On the European chemical industry, see especially Fox and Nieto-Galan 1999; NietoGalan 2001; Klein 2005a, 2005b, 2007, 2012b; Klein and Spary 2010; Brock 1992; Clow and Clow 1952
27 Fischer 1990: 13; Broman 1998: 124–129; Smith and Phillips 2000
28 Miller and Rose 2008: 35; see also Saar 2011; Lemke 2011; Skornicki 2011: 213–220.
within the public domain by considering expert endorsements of health foods in late eighteenth-century Paris, asking what role public scientific experts played in the development of a consumer society and the beginnings of industrialisation.29
Economic expertise
The decades between 1760 and 1815 spanned the active working lives of a group of practitioners who associated with one another in major metropolitan institutions before, during and after the Revolution, and whose programme of enquiry and experimentation I characterise as ‘economic’ throughout this volume. The economic chemists, agronomists and philanthropists addressed here form a constituency distinct from the physiocratic school, a loose-knit group of political economists and reformers in the middle decades of the eighteenth century with ties to the minister Anne-Jacques-Robert Turgot. It was this group whose members were termed ‘économistes’ in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. As Catherine Larrère notes, ‘there has been a tendency to make the term “physiocracy” synonymous with the economic and social thought of the pre-Revolutionary period’.30 The uses of the term économie and its cognates, whether in government, commerce, private life or the sciences, were, however, much broader, and the physiocrats’ fall in no way terminated public discussion of matters economic. A continuous stream of ‘economic’ commodities, projects and inventions featured in newspapers such as the Avantcoureur, Affiches and Mercure after 1750, and several specialist economic periodicals flourished.31 Numerous eighteenth-century French authors and entrepreneurs, few of whom had direct ties to physiocrats, but many of whom had commercial interests, pursued this broader programme of économie, proposing reforms and inventions suitable both for private households and for governments.
Where the history of political economy has concentrated upon free trade initiatives pursued by physiocrats and laissez-faire economists such as Vincent de Gournay, this wider economic project addressed the maximisation of resources: both the initial exploitation of new resources and
29 An issue explored in a range of recent literature, including Bret 2002; Rabier 2007a; Engstrom et al. 2005a; Ash 2010.
30 Larrère 1992: 5; Perrot 1992. See also Weulersse 1950, 1959, 1968, 1985; FoxGenovese 1976; Meek 1962; Livesey 2001; Salvat 2003; Shovlin 2006a; Skornicki 2011; Vardi 2012.
31 On economic and commercial publications, see Coquery 2011: part 1; Shovlin 2006b; Théré 1998; Steiner 1996; Perrot 1984, 1992: 64–95; Skornicki 2011: 63–74. Théré shows that economic literature increased sevenfold between 1750 and 1789.
the better management of old ones.32 Waste and unused resources were the two main political vices against which such authors railed, in language that was at once moralising and rationalising. Économie was to be exercised over issues ranging from self-conduct (the management of personal and household finances) to farming (the improvement of soils and the profitability of estates) to politics (the management and increase of state finances). It is this continuity which explains the patriotic agenda of economic writings from the 1750s onwards.33 The collective practice of économie enabled patriarchal households to reform the nation as a whole. But économie was also a set of virtues and/or skills which turned individuals into good citizens. Reformers urged economic priorities and lifestyles among a literate public that was just starting to become familiar with the neologism ‘consumer’.34 Économie thus construed meant far more than thrift, and encompassed far more than political economy. At issue here was the early modern version of œconomy as a system of circulating resources or principles, also invoked by French medical chemists accounting for nutritive matter.35
To many contemporaries, the physiocrats appeared to address only one facet of this larger enterprise for resource management, a programme at once moral, political and scientific. Writing in 1794, the pharmacist and journalist Antoine-Alexis Cadet de Vaux divided économie into several branches: ‘animal, rural, domestic, public’.36 Similarly, for JacquesPhilippe-Martin Cels, a tax official who advised successive regimes on agronomic issues throughout the Revolutionary decade, économie had four branches, which, taken together, constituted a science of society: public, commercial, industrial and rural. The last of these, he said, translated into English as ‘husbandry’, and included ‘all that falls within the scope of household or estate management; it is the science which covers all the knowledge a Cultivator and the father of a family should possess;
32 Perrot 1992: 67 dates familiarity with the expression ‘économie politique’ to JeanJacques Rousseau’s eponymous Encyclopédie article of 1758; see also Spary 2003. On new forms of political economy appearing from the 1770s onwards, see Skornicki 2011: esp. Chapter 2; Shovlin 2006a: esp. Chapter 4; Whatmore 2000; Staum 1987. On laissezfaire, see especially Meyssonnier 1989, 1995; on economy as resource management, see Meyer and Popplow 2004; Popplow 2010.
33 Shovlin 2006a; Skornicki 2011: 116–142; see, similarly, Kwass 2000: Chapter 5 on financial literature.
34 As, for example, in the short-lived Feuille du Marchand et du Consommateur, which reported on deliveries of fresh foods to the city of Paris (Avantcoureur 1765: 288–289). No copies of this newspaper are apparently extant.
35 Here I follow Schabas and De Marchi 2003 in their call to study œconomy as a conceptual whole. See also Chapter 3, this volume.
36 ANP, F11 435–436: Antoine-Alexis Cadet de Vaux, ‘Rapport au Comité de Salut public’, Frimaire year III/November-December 1794; F12 2247, Cadet de Vaux dossier: Letter, Cadet de Vaux to the head of the ministry’s manufactures division, Franconville, 13 July 1812. For similar comments by André Morellet, see Salvat 2003.
it is the science that Society is seeking to spread’.37 Though classifications varied, these Republican authors agreed that économie was a scientific enterprise, that it was far broader than the doctrines of the physiocrats, and that it extended into private as well as public life. Even Jean-Baptiste Say, designating political economy as an autonomous science, would invoke this earlier moral and rational framing of économie, particularly in regard to consumption: ‘What ought to characterise the procedures of every creature endowed with foresight and reason, is, in every circumstance, not to make any consumption without a reasonable goal: such is the counsel given by économie.’38
This economic programme, which prescribed rational action as the way to reform the individual, household and state, was espoused by many late Old Regime savants. The political, moral and prescriptive dimensions of économie as a practice of everyday life forged a continuity between individual lifestyles and governmentality which meant that économie became a fruitful programme for scientific reformers mediating between consumers and governments. Though indebted to physiocratic writings, and possessing personal connections in a few cases, the economic savants discussed here constituted a discrete network of practitioners, operating in particular sites of sociability, and utilising distinct methods of enquiry.39 As Cadet de Vaux observed, the physiocrats had never concerned themselves ‘with the économie which nourishes, and prevents famine and shortage’. This direct involvement with the matter, substance and significance of food was an important departure from physiocracy. Where physiocrats offered theories and calculations, agronomists, chemists and physicians conducted experiments in laboratories, fields, manufactories and institutions in order to support their claims about the most economic ways of managing resources, from food and heat to labour and raw materials. They viewed themselves as contributing to rural, domestic and natural œconomy, the last of these including the circulation of principles through the natural world as well as the study of plant and animal physiology. Underpinning this version of économie were natural sciences such as chemistry, botany, agronomy and medicine, rather than political economy. In this sense, we can see the ‘économie which nourishes’ as having disciplinary ties distinct from those of physiocracy.40
37 Cels year IX/1801: 171.
38 Say 1814, II: 208; see also Whatmore 2000 and my discussion below, pp. 000–000.
39 Weulersse (1950: Chapter 2, 1959: Chapter 2, 1985: Chapter 2) linked the rise of agronomy to physiocracy, but offered few direct connections. Physiocracy and agronomy might best be viewed as parallel economic projects, as Bourde 1967 argued; see also Boulaine 1992
40 On the close relationship between the natural sciences and œconomy in the early modern period, see Schabas 2005; Schabas and De Marchi 2003; Citton 2000: 47–49; Spary 1996.
Such involvement by scientific practitioners reflected a general concern with economic issues in European learned societies at this time. The good management of natural resources was widely described as a duty of European elites, prompted by Providence or nature.41 This broader concern with resource management flourished from the 1760s onwards in print and institutional culture. Economic living experiments, inventions and improvements proliferated throughout the period covered by this book. In the final decades of the Old Regime, numerous improvers and philanthropists advised the Crown concerning the reform of agriculture, the mechanical arts and poor relief. Members of Crown-funded scientific institutions, including the Académie Royale des Sciences and the Société Royale d’Agriculture, were commanded by ministers to study and improve manufacturing processes ranging from saltpetre production and baking to glass-blowing and distilling. Some of these experts would move on to advisory positions under the Revolutionary and Napoleonic governments.42
The broad approach to économie adopted in Feeding France makes it possible to offer a more comprehensive picture of the people, institutions and practices often omitted from traditional histories of political economy, as well as to resituate the work of some well-known figures, such as Lavoisier. Économie created a common ground linking reformers usually addressed within separate disciplinary histories. It particularly attracted agronomists, chemists and philanthropists, who foregathered in scientific and improving institutions. During the Old Regime, these included the Société Royale d’Agriculture, founded in 1761; the principal scientific institution of the capital, the Académie Royale des Sciences, founded in 1666; and the Société Royale de Médecine, founded in 1776 and chartered in 1778.43 Economic foods and devices regularly featured among the inventions trialled in such Crown-supported, metropolitan institutions. The Académie’s Republican successor, the Institut National des Sciences et Arts, founded in 1795, allowed still greater scope for economic projects through its broader rubric of activities, which for the first time included rural economy.44 Another important setting
41 Spary 2003, 2009. For similar economic programmes in scientific institutions around Europe, see, e.g., Maerker 2010; Müller-Wille 2003; Drayton 2000; Koerner 1999; Jackson 1994; Wise 1990. Economic societies were common in Continental Europe. The English equivalents were societies of arts, such as the Lunar Society of Birmingham, the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Institution. See Stapelbroek and Marjanen 2012; Buschmann and Hildebrandt forthcoming; Popplow 2010; Fox 2009; Graf 1993; Allan and Abbott 1992; Lowood 1991; Berman 1978; Aguilar Piñal 1972; Hahn 1963; Schofield 1963; Hudson and Luckhurst 1954.
42 See Klein 2012a; Gillispie 1980, 2004; Horn 2006; Shovlin 2006a: 83–92; Bret 2000; Hahn 1971; Bourde 1967
43 On all of these, see Gillispie 1980 44 Hahn 1971; Staum 1996
for encounters between improvers was the Société de Philanthropie, founded in 1780. Dominated by wealthy landowners and scientific experts, this society entered the doldrums during the Revolution, but later revived when wealthy and powerful representatives of old noble families, such as Pastoret, Béthune-Charost, Montmorency, Choiseul and La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, filtered back into public life. Here agronomists and chemists like Cadet de Vaux and Parmentier (respectively, president and vice-president of the renascent Société) encountered financiers, landowners and entrepreneurs like Benjamin Delessert – promoter of beet sugar as a substitute for cane, and founder of Paris’s poor soup programme. In a departure from earlier models of charitable aid to the poor, the philanthropists treated improvement as a secular, rational and economic programme.45 The natural sciences played a prominent role in the pursuit of temporal happiness via the application of reason to everyday life. Critics, however, would not infrequently portray économie as a thinly disguised enterprise for cost-cutting and miserliness with either private or public resources.
Post-Revolutionary organisations often continued Old Regime projects of economic chemistry and agronomy. The Paris pharmacy society, founded in 1796 as the Société libre des pharmaciens, and renamed the Société de pharmacie in 1803, began publishing a specialist journal, the Bulletin de Pharmacie, in 1809. Many of its members rallied around Parmentier as a figurehead.46 Perhaps the most central of all of these institutions which allowed traffic between the worlds of high finance, statecraft, philanthropy, invention, science and social reform was the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale. Founded in 1802, under the Interior ministry of Jean-Antoine Chaptal, with the help of the Idéologue Degérando, it had a heavy presence of economic chemists and agronomists, including Cadet de Vaux, Vauquelin and Parmentier; of prominent Institut members such as Ampère, Guyton de Morveau and d’Arcet; and of government representatives or administrators such as Costaz, Dupont de Nemours and François de Neufchâteau.47 Many figures in this book moved readily between these institutional settings, yet the numerous connections between them have rarely been noted, in part because of the tendency of historians of science to write within disciplinary confines. This book explores the close links between the chemists,
45 Shovlin 2006a: 208–211; Duprat 1993: part II; Vaquier 1957–1958: 449; Société Philanthropique 1817: 61–83. Although Duprat 1993: 23–29 distinguishes large landowners from urban savants in the pre-Revolutionary Société de Philanthropie, the same groups also associated at the Société Royale d’Agriculture.
46 Warolin 1996; Syndicat des Fabricants de sucre 1993; Simon 2005
47 Benoit et al. 2006; Margairaz 2005: Chapters 6 and 15.
agronomists and philanthropists who sought to make France more economic between 1760 and 1815, exploring some of the social and political projects on which they collectively embarked.
A case in point is Lavoisier, well known for his chemical experimentation at the Académie Royale des Sciences, less so for his agronomic activities and political economic writings, hardly at all for his investigation of digestion or his experimentation on poor soup, carried out at Turgot’s behest during the 1770s. Best known as a member of the Académie Royale des Sciences, Lavoisier was also active in the Société Royale d’Agriculture. Along with Dupont de Nemours and the economic chemist Jean Darcet, he joined an agricultural advisory board established by the minister Charles Gravier de Vergennes in 1785. At the Société Royale de Médecine, he collaborated with medical chemists from the late 1770s onwards, and as a member of the Société de Philanthropie, he encountered economic pharmacists such as Cadet de Vaux and Parmentier during the 1780s. His work, considered as a whole, shares many of the agendas and priorities of these economic authors. Yet only one of his publications is widely viewed as specifically economic: De la richesse territoriale du Royaume de France, an unfinished attempt to construct an overview of national consumption.48 Lavoisier’s multiple institutional and disciplinary ties may seem unusual to those accustomed to viewing him as the leader of the Chemical Revolution or as a pure research chemist. Yet he was not in any way exceptional in moving between chemistry, agronomy, philanthropy and political economy. The younger and far less famous Louis-Nicolas Vauquelin combined very similar interests. Apprenticed to AntoineFrançois Fourcroy’s cousin, the guild apothecary Chéradame, Vauquelin lived in Fourcroy’s household, frequenting both the Société libre des pharmaciens and the Société d’Encouragement. His work spanned a continuum between science, commerce and government. In the 1790s, he co-founded the chemicals manufactory of Fourcroy, Dessères and Vauquelin in Paris’s rue du Vieux-Colombier.49 He advised a succession of regimes on chemical and agronomic matters, and reared a new generation of eminent chemists, including Louis-Jacques Thenard, who in his turn acted as a chemical adviser to ministers of the Interior during the First Empire, and collaborated for many years with the equally famous Joseph Gay-Lussac.50 Other chemists trained by Vauquelin founded
48 Cf. Poirier 1996; Donovan 1993; Lavoisier 1988; Perrot 1988: 16–53; Pigeonneau and de Foville 1882; Duprat 1993; this volume, p. 000.
49 Kersaint 1959, 1966
50 Bulletin de la Société d’Encouragement 5 (1806): 105–106; Bouvet 1958; Biographie universelle 1998, XLIII: 37–40.
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“But you would have answered it if it had rung?”
“No—I was at Marty’s.”
“Not at nine o’clock. I dropped in just now to see Abe on business, and he said you didn’t turn up till twenty-five minutes past ten, because of some mistake in a message. If you were at home and didn’t hear the ’phone bell yourself, you shouldn’t be so quick to blame Annie. I believe in being justwith servants, Deb. Or weren’t you at home?”
She lost her bearings. “Oh ... I don’t know....”
The phrase irritated him—reminded him of a previous occasion when she had used it ... a dialogue on their wedding night.... If Deb were altogether to be trusted ... he was not the man to ask questions when once he trusted his wife. But Deb—Deb had not been like other girls. So Deb was not like other wives. And now, the minute he left her
Stale type of suspicious husband, Samson glowered, pulled his moustache, meditated, decided to pass over the incident, changed his mind—and broke out:
“Look here, Deborah—I’m sick of all this shifting about. It all goes back further than last night. I’m going to get to the bottom of the matter. You’ve got to give me a plain answer to a plain question. Why did you tell me a year before I married you, that you weren’t a good girl?”
Beat back through all that undergrowth? back and back—tangled motive, and reaction, and example, the example of Jenny Carew, once—but that was all over ... a word read at a critical moment ... moods, and the love of whirlwind disguises ... mischief—boredom.... Yes, yes, further back still ... influence, of course—the influence of Cliffe Kennedy, of Gillian.... Well, but that was recent—and behind that? The undergrowth thicker, thickening ... her innate recoil from stinginess; the girl who will not give.... To and fro her mind rushed and stumbled with a snapping of twigs in the undergrowth ... trying, obediently trying, to find out whyhad she told that silly senseless lie
... the Phillips family—fear of being sucked into respectability—fear of the fate of the wanton—fear of wasting, of not being wanted.... Aunt Stella.... And the scene with Ferdie.... If they did not believe her good, she would at least be bad.... That look in Blair’s eyes when he thought—no, that was afterwards.... Women, everywhere women ... and chastity which was endless vigil.... Richard crying with his head in her lap.... So she married Samson, yes, and meant to be decent to him—if she could not be bad, she would as least be good—good—good.... So she married Samson, now confronting her in the attitude of fanatic orthodoxy, waiting to “get to the bottom of it”—of what? Of all her life, and the lives stretching behind her, and the Cosmos that had shaped her—the entire matted web of cause and effect? All this? How could she hope to drag his understanding in her wake? His understanding that was such a thoroughly awkward shape—unpliable, granite-hewn, rigid corners and lumps, bits of lichen in all the crannies.... Why, she could not even push through the labyrinth herself, with all her squirrel facility....
“Give me plain answer—”
Plainanswer? And suddenly Deb realised the impossibility of even trying; she was too weary; weary of muddle, weary of herself. There was no plain answer to anything—in her language; no answer that was not plain—in Samson’s. So again she just said, replying to his question: “I—don’t—know.”
“But you must know.”
“I mean—you wouldn’t understand, even if I told you.”
“There ought not to be anything to tell. A good wife has nothing to tell her husband....”
Deb laughed ironically—“Well, and I’ve nothing to tell you, so it’s all right.”
“And we had such a jolly talk and laughed—and sat side by side and no harm at all,” she whispered to her memory of the half-hour on the balcony with Blair. “And I meant to be so nice to Samson ever afterwards.”... But how would Samson interpret a confession that she
had not heard him telephoning, because she was at that moment visiting Blair Stevenson? It would be rather fun to hear him thunder the inevitable accusations. And yet—and yet—Deb was conscious that she had rather outgrown this sort of cheap fun—outgrown masquerade—outgrown rebellion. She wanted her child, Samson’s child, to be born in this harbourage of comfort and tenderness and soft wrappings and people to make things easy yes, even the Phillips family. After all, it would be a Phillips’ infant; and they were kind—always kind. She could not face the shawl-and-cold-stone-step business, with a baby to be born in December. Deb looked at Samson, her eyes very dark and grave.... Should she propitiate him? If this time—then for always. Can you do it, Deb? Kick away indecision and folly and petulance, little passions and the big passion?... “Suppose I went to Blair altogether, as he has asked me to come?”... And for the kiddie—what? No Man’s Land again, a thousand times worse than her own experience of the betweenregion; the outer edge of things; no established identity.... What was the old game they used to play at Daisybanks? She and Richard and the Rothenburg children?—Touch Wood ... Touch Wood ... and (triumphantly) “Home!”... But oh, the awful dogged exhaustion of being chased without a blessed knowledge of “home” to be gained at a dash.
Deb made up her mind.
Then she crossed the room to her husband, and put both her arms round his neck—he was looking more than ever like Oliver Cromwell, with his features set into those harsh lines—and propitiated him. Whispered futile childish explanations of her conduct the night before ... dawdling about in her room till late— knew she was naughty to dawdle—didn’t care!—heard the ’phone bell and was too lazy to go down to answer it.... “Didn’t know it was you, Samson ... please! Thought it was Marty being cross at the other end ’cos I was keeping them all waiting.... Sorry! very sorry.... Oh, do pull out those furrows on each side of your mouth—one could grow potatoes in them.... Samson, don’t you believe me?” Head snuggling and rubbing his cheek——
It was so much less bother this way—the way of least resistance. And anyhow, she had started all wrong, years ago, from the very beginning. Let others beat out the pioneer track—hers to make “home” for the little daughter. “Touch Wood,” “Touch Wood”—and already Samson was smiling at her, fondling her ear.... He did not quite believe her; he would recur to his suspicions later on; but for the moment Deb’s sweet ways had placated him. He thought: “She is growing ever so much more tractable, with happiness....”
CHAPTER III
I
“I’ve come to say good-bye,” David Redbury explained jubilantly to La llorraine; “the Jewish regiment sails to-morrow, and I’ve dragged this fellow out to see me through my farewell visits,” indicating Richard, who leant in the doorway of the drawing-room with “buckup-and-get-it-over” expressed in every reluctant line of his figure.
“He’s steadier than I am, you know, and one is liable to make such wild strange promises on these occasions. Supposing, for instance, Madame, that I were to send for you the minute the war is over, and I pitch my tent by the shores of Jordan ... would you come?”
“I say to you, my dee-urr,” and the prima-donna, in an incongruously correct sports-shirt, collar and tie, smiled whimsically over her owlish spectacles at his gallantry; “I say to you vot I zay to zat ozzer little fellow I see last night at the Tube corner—ah, he was a beauty, that one, with the skin of a peach ... and he watch me a little, I, in my black gown and my black hat, very tall, very femmedu monde—you see it? And he say to himself—‘It is for the first time I adventure—perhaps one wiz experience?—I learn somsing—Better so. Vot should I with a pretty flapper, and she so innocent and I so ignorant—Awful! A desperate affair.’ So I watch him make that reflection. And presently he move closer sideways, and he make his little proposition.... And I put my two hands on his shoulders, surprising him. And I say: ‘My boy you are moch too young—and I am moch too old ... is it not so?’”
Her deep, hearty laugh rang infectiously. Even Richard joined in, and Manon, albeit not quite sure whether the mother of Mrs Dolph Carew ought not to recoil with more dignity from these trifling incidentals of dusk and Tube corners. As for David, he vowed she was adorable.
“Ah, but the Comtesse—there is one! Vonderful! You vait and see her? Yes? She lonch with me to-day—her birthday.... I tell you, a great affair. We all lunch together? And you, who lof that Continent of ours, you shall eat——” She whispered to David, her arm encircling his khaki; his thin face vivid with appreciative reminiscence, as she reeled off the names of what Richard emphatically, but in silence, registered as “foreign muck.”
The Comtesse arrived, and La llorraine, shedding all bourgeoise preoccupation with the menu, welcomed her as an exiled ambassadress welcomes exiled royalty.
The two ladies kissed a great many times, with rapid interchange of cheeks, and uttering short staccato exclamations; and then held each other a short way off for mutual and admiring survey.
The Comtesse was large, and wore a black picture hat on her crude vermilion chevelure; a mustard-coloured coat and skirt, and a pink ninon blouse crossed by a spray of limp cotton poppies that looked as though they had passed their lives pressed close to a stiff shirt-front. She exhausted so much space in her vicinity, magnetically as well as materially, that her fellow-beings were wont to move some distance away to avoid being absorbed by suction.
“My dee-urr,” said La llorraine solemnly. “Never—never—never haf I seen you looking so well as in thatblouse....”
She introduced David and Richard with a great deal of ceremonial; and the Comtesse put her hand to her heart and gasped that they both reminded her of Antoine, mon fils. “That one, in particular,” indicating David, “is his living image. I vow, he might be his brother.”
“I rejoice that is not the case, Madame, since it would deny the possibility of any more gallant relationship between you and me.”
“Mon Dieu—quel garçon!” the Comtesse delightedly flicked him across the cheek. And Richard marvelled at his friend’s fluent impudence. But this was the atmosphere in which David revelled.
The company sat down to lunch, and La llorraine apologized with sad dignity for her so humble apartment and for inadequacy of service. Generously the Comtesse reassured her that where loyalty and ancient friendship existed, the third footman might quite well be lacking. Then reverting to the question of the blouse—
“I am broken-heart,” the Comtesse announced dramatically; “I can wear it not. It is over—done—finish. Behold! I throw it away!”
“Tell me,” La llorraine spoke in deep sympathy, but restraining the outflung hand from more positive operation in the direction of the ninon blouse—“what is it, then, has happened?”
“It shows the camisole—you see—it show it everywhere. Elsewhere but in this country what do I care? But my durrling, I have a lowndress”—and the Comtesse dropped her voice to a curdling whisper—“a lowndress?—No. She is a vipère....”
“Ha!” The other prima donna sprang to her feet, galvanized into opposition melodrama by the word “laundress”—“You say lowndress?—Look hee-urr!”—Oblivious of Manon, David, and Richard, she wrenched open her blouse, as Cleopatra might have done to reveal the bite of the asp. The Comtesse leant forward: “And look!” She was holding out her blouse tautly from her bosom, leaving a gap, down which La llorraine peered.... “Ah-h-h ... yes, it is so ... they are in a conspiracy I say it! ... they destroy—they have no reverence for lace—for embroidery—for the terruly artistic lingerie!—to zem it is all calico wiz—what is it the jeunefillewear in this England?—calico wiz edging advertised ‘durable!’” Scorn quivered to a climax, and slowly subdued; La llorraine and the Comtesse sank back into their separate chairs, and looked about them, gently smiling.
“This sauce is of an excellence,” said the Comtesse.
“Oh, my dee-urr,” La llorraine deprecated.
“My pauvre Antoine desires in his last letter to be remembered to you and to Mademoiselle votre fille,” the Comtesse recollected, sinking into melancholy over the message to Manon; Antoine, it
might be gleaned by the exchange of looks between the two elder ladies, cherished a hopeless but entirely respectful passion for the erstwhile ingénue. He was nineteen, decadent and penniless ... nevertheless, La llorraine had long regarded him as a factor in her “plans” for the safe bestowal of her daughter into matrimony; plans only relegated into hasty obscurity by Dolph’s sudden accession to his uncle’s wealth.
“I have brought his letter.” His mother read aloud a few sentences that breathed such fervent affection for herself, and such rapt adoration for la patrie, that Richard turned crimson at the young Frenchman’s lack of churlish restraint, and David, catching sight of his agony, chuckled evilly.... “What’s the matter, Marcus?”
Manon subtly gave the mother of Antoine to understand that she would not object at any opportunity that offered, to renew her acquaintance with the young man, from a purely matronly standpoint ... “perhaps I may be of use to him....”
The mother of Antoine, with equal subtlety, gave Manon to understand that the young man realized he would find her more accessible—and of more use to him—now than as a strictly chaperoned ingénue; and would therefore pay his respects to her on his very first leave, if, of course, agreeable to Monsieur Dolph Carew....
And La llorraine twinklingly sanctioned this appointment. Had not Manon skilfully piloted herself into a marriage, at an early age? thereby proving herself far more discreet and competent than any of these English girls, sailing chartless through their late twenties. Manon could be trusted to handle such agreeable little interludes in matrimony as Antoine might provide. “It is only natural zat my child should now vant that good time,” reflected La llorraine, in exact reversal of the argument of Ferdinand Marcus—but virtue before marriage, and a good time after, was Continental fashion.
A small joint of veal appeared on the table. Veal was scarce at this time, and the hostess received as no more than her due the
anticipatory smiles of the Comtesse. “But what success,” she murmured. The first slice was carved ... and tragedy fell like a dark mantle upon the scene.
“It is almost raw,” exclaimed Manon, shaping prevalent conviction at last into speech.
“I know it,” said her mother in a tone ominously quiet.
“But what matter!” cried the Comtesse hectically.
La llorraine stood looking down upon the pink flesh among the gravy. She held the carvers in her hands, which suddenly she upraised in denunciation towards the ceiling.
“That woman! That char-r-r! I swear it—we part, she and I—but at once. In this house she shall not eat again. Heart-breaking; unthinkable. I have been good to her.... Ven her fourth durrty baby had ze pebbles—Bah, one does not speak of these trifles! I ask her in return: Prepare me this little loin of veal with care. Let it be just brown ... with stuffing—so!—the stuffing I made with my own hands. My dee-urr, should I be ashamed of it! I who thought to make you pleasure.... You who spoke to me of how difficult to buy veal.... Ah! I remember—and I bring it home zis morning, I smile, I am a little triumphant why not? it is after all an occasion, that you come to eat here in my poor apartments—I desire to do you honour —And thatwoman—she spoil it all. She shall fly. Raw meat! My deeurr, it is an insult to you, my guest....”
The Comtesse strove to calm her, to rally her from ferocious gloom.
“Durr-ling, see—eet is not so bad. I eat some ... wiz pleasure. True that I cannot bear the meat underdone, I shudder at it—but your thought of me was everything. It brings the tears. See, I eat some more of it.... We haf had to put up with moch, by this c-r-ruel war. Sit down then, chère llorraine, and to-day in a week you shall déjeuner with me in my little flat—my chef, Ludovici, shall be specially instructed—he fails me never, Ludovici—so devoted is he. Chérie, you should keep men, rather than these char-rr-women. I
say it to you. It is shame to spoil good veal.... But,” after a pause, and with forced sprightly enthusiasm, “how excellent are the potatoes!”
“It is from your noble heart that you speak,” cried La llorraine. And embraced her friend.
II“Aren’t they luscious?” David chuckled, as he and Richard walked down Edgware Road.
“’Um. You like these rum people, don’t you? It struck me the two old women kicked up a lot of silly fuss about the veal, that’s all.”
“And what sort of people does your Unappreciative Highness consider an improvement on La llorraine and the Comtesse?”
“The sensible sort—like the Dunnes. I’m going to stay with ’em next week. Grev’s home, training for the R.N.A.S. And young Frank’s just out of Osborne.”
“Here—get on this Oxford Circus bus—I want to buy presents for everybody this afternoon, to love me by when I’m gone. You can help me choose—you have such taste and originality, dear Richard!”
“Feeling lively, aren’t you?” grunted Richard, as they climbed to the top of the bus. A shower of rain had washed the two rows of seats empty for them.
“So would you be, if you’d got rid of a nightmare like mine....”
“’M yes—I know something about getting rid of nightmares.” This was the black September of his eighteenth birthday, but Deb had saved him.... At any moment now, he might expect to hear from Samson that he was exempt from internment, and eligible to enlist. So Richard was in high spirits as well, though they did not leap and exult and fling themselves about and glitter into speech as uncontrollably as did David’s. David was in quicksilver mood on the eve of his embarkation for Palestine.
