"Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day!" [Illustration] [Illustration] L'ALMANACH DES GOURMANDS[19] "Tout s'arrange en dinant dans le siècle où nous sommes, Et c'est par des dîners qu'on gouverne les hommes." CASSIMIR DELAVIGNE: Les Comédiens. Reasoning from the standpoint that the stomach is the great motor of vital energy, it may justly be adduced that everything which contributes to a perfect balance of its mechanism is of inestimable importance. As, moreover, the true function of improved cookery is to second hygiene and to replace medicaments by ingenious combinations of natural products, it will be readily apparent that a good cook and a good writer on cookery--a cook who can compose and a writer who can suggest and stimulate--at once become of even greater value than a college of physicians. [Illustration: "UN VIEL AMATEUR" A. B. L. Grimod de Reynière, né à Paris le 20 9bre, 1756 From an old print] These desirable qualifications belong preëminently to the French, as brewing belongs to the Germans, weaving to the Orientals, sculpture to the Italians, and mechanical invention to the Americans. The same facilities present themselves in many countries--it has remained for France to perfect them and create a literature on the subject distinctively its own. The Frenchman may keep on his hat during the entr'actes of a play and be forever wrangling with his mode of government, but he has taught the world how to dine. "Let me have books!" cries Horace; "Let us have cooks!" exclaims the Gaul. And with the cooks come the cook-books--the meditations, codes, almanacs, physiologies, manuals, and guides. In considering those works that have treated most pleasingly of the art with which mankind is so directly concerned thrice a day, that of Brillat-Savarin stands foremost. He is the Addison of the dinner-table, as instructive as he is diverting, and his brilliant disquisition will remain a classic so long as dinners endure. But Grimod de la Reynière, whose contributions Savarin passed by in silence, had preceded him and had first enlightened the past century in regard to what Molière has termed _la science des bons morçeaux_. Let justice be rendered where justice is due--the "Physiology of Taste" is indebted in no little degree to the "Almanac of the Epicures." Had La Reynière possessed as much refinement as Savarin, had he observed greater concentration, and had he refrained from the frequent puffery of mercantile establishments, the "Almanach" might not be numbered to-day among unjustly forgotten books. But he is not alone in his references to the tradesmen: even Savarin is guilty of shop-puffery to a limited extent--a trait almost universal among French writers on gastronomy, though none have vied with La Reynière in immortalising a maker of pâtés or in elevating a vender of truffles to the dignity of a minister of state.