Gonthier is the father of cookery, as Descartes, of French philosophy. It is said that Gonthier, in less than ten years, invented seven cullises, nine ragoûts, thirty-one sauces, and twenty-one soups. A woman opened the gates of an enlightened age; it was Catherine, the daughter of the celebrated Lorenzo de Medici, niece of Leo the Tenth, then in all the bloom of beauty. Accompanied by a troop of perfumers, painters, astrologers, poets, and cooks, she crossed the Alps, and whilst Bullan planned the Tuileries, Berini recovered from oblivion those sauces which, for many ages, had been lost. Endowed with all the gifts of fortune, the mother and the wife of kings, nature had also gifted her with a palate, whose intuitive sensibility seldom falls to the lot of sovereigns. In consequence of which, after having driven before her this troop of male and female soothsayers, who pretended to foretel the future, she consulted her _maître d'hôtel_, about some roast meat brought from luxurious Florence; and dipped in a rich sauce the same hand that held the reins of the empire, and which Roussard compared to the rosy fingers of Aurora! Let the foolish vulgar laugh at the importance which the queen-mother seems to place in the art of cooking; but they have not considered that it is at table, in the midst of the fumes of Burgundy, and the savoury odour of rich dishes, that she meditated the means of quelling a dangerous faction, or the destruction of a man, who disturbed her repose. It was during dinner she had an interview with the Duke of Alba, with whom she resolved on the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Not long after the massacre of St. Bartholomew the throne was occupied by Henry de Valois, brother to Charles the Ninth, and son of Catherine. He was a prince of good appetite, a lover of wine and good cheer, qualities which his mother had carefully fostered and cultivated, that she alone might hold the reigns of government. Henry de Valois spent whole days at table, and the constellations of the kitchen shone with the greatest splendour under this gourmand king. We date from the beginning of his reign the invention of the fricandeau, generally attributed to a Swiss. Now the fricandeau having its Columbus, its discovery appears not more wonderful than that of America, and yet it required _une grande force de tête_. Though we acknowledge the immense influence this monarch had over cookery, we must not conceal that he brought in fashion aromatic sauces, tough macaroni, cullises, and brown sauces calcined by a process like that of roasted coffee. These sauces gave the dishes a corrosive acidity, and as Jourdan le Cointe remarks, far from nourishing the body, communicated to it a feverish sensation, which baffled all the skill of physicians, in their attempts to cure it. They were positive poisons which the Italians had introduced into France, a taste for which spread through every class of society.