The Physiology of Taste (12 page)

When I write and speak of myself as I, in the singular, it presupposes a collaboration with my reader: he can examine what I say, question it, argue, even laugh. But when I arm myself with the redoubtable we, I am The Professor: he must bow down!

1.
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was born in Belley, in the Ain, in France, on the first day of April, 1755. He lived and died a lawyer, like the other men of his family. As Mayor of Belley he resisted the bloody revolutionists in 1793, and was forced to flee his country, first to Switzerland and then to America. He spent some two years in New York, giving language lessons and playing his violin in a theater orchestra. In 1796 he returned to France, and although he had lost almost everything, including his fine little vineyard, he was reinstated as an honorable citizen. He was appointed judge in the Court of Appeal in Paris, after a few years of service as secretary to the General Staff of the French Army in Germany and as Commissioner to the Tribunal of the Seine-et-Oise, and he spent the last twenty-five years of his life peacefully and unobtrusively as a conservative royalist, unmoved by political upheaval and the feverish social changes of life in Paris at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1825 he published at his own expense
THE
PHYSIOLOGY
OF
TASTE
, on which he had been working with amusement and pleasure for some three decades. He died on February 2, 1826.

2.
See Meditation 22 for more about this opinionated and admirable gentleman, who in the manner of the day chose to live fast and well, rather than at the more sedate pace of his admittedly more intelligent Professor.

3.
I hesitate to quarrel with what is apparently Brillat-Savarin’s own advice, but I feel that “Meditation 12” is more connected with this footnote than the tenth one. Certainly a discussion of the various kinds of gourmands seems more linked with this little anecdote of the two dinner parties than does one which details with such quirkish dispassion as Number 10 the possible last days of our planet and ourselves!

4.
Here is the first of uncounted (at least by me) inventions in language, by the lively-minded old Professor. Some of them are “barbaric,” as one translator has bluntly stated, but always they are amusing as sidelights on the writer’s character, if for no other reason. Anyone with a basic knowledge of Latin can understand most of them, and in this translation they have been set in
SPACED
SMALL
CAPS
, along with Brillat-Savarin’s unconscious boners in his use of English and other “living” languages, to differentiate them from the simple italics which he himself used for emphasis in his text or, occasionally, for foreign phrases.

5.
It will easily be seen throughout this book that the Professor’s statement, even though he qualified it by saying “more or less well,” was somewhat ingenuous. His American, for instance, is more French than his French, and presented with disarming trust and self-confidence. There is a little Italian in a footnote or two. There are a handful of Spanish words. There is a modicum of Gallicized German, which he may have spoken with some fluency because of his service with the army in Germany and because of the many titled exiles from that country who flocked to the salons and dining rooms of such people as his cousin Madame Récamier. But there is a pleasing smugness in his assumption that five living languages were “more or less” at his command.

THE
SENSES
ARE
the organs by which man communicates with the world outside himself.

1: There are at least six of them:

    
Sight
, which embraces space itself, and tells us by means of light of the existence of the objects which surround us, and of their colors.

Hearing
, which absorbs through the air the vibrations caused by agreeably resonant or merely noisy bodies.

Smell
, by means of which we savor all odorous things.

Taste
, by which we appreciate whatever is palatable or only edible.

Touch
, by which we are made aware of the surfaces and the textures of objects.

Finally
physical desire
, which draws the two sexes together so that they may procreate.

    It is astonishing that, almost to the time of Buffon, so important a sense as this last one was misunderstood, and confused with or rather linked with the sense of touch.

However, the two have nothing in common: the sixth sense has its own organism, as much so as the mouth or the eyes, and the strange part of it is that although each sex possesses everything necessary to produce this reaction of desire, male and female must be together before they can attain the end for which it was created. If
taste
, whose purpose is to enable a man to exist, is indisputably one of his senses, then how much more reasonable
it is to call a sense that part of him destined to make mankind itself survive.

Let us therefore give to
physical desire
the
sensual
position it is entitled to, and then depend on our offspring to keep it there.

2: If it is permissible to travel back, in one’s imagination, to the dawn of humanity, it is equally permissible to believe that man’s first sensations were purely direct; that is to say that he saw but vaguely, that he heard dimly, that he chose without thought the food he ate without tasting, and that he copulated with brutality instead of pleasure.

But because all these senses sprang from the soul, that special attribute of human beings, that ever-active cause of perfectibility, they were thought about, compared, judged. Soon one sense came to the aid of another and another, for the use and the well-being of the sentient
ego
, or, what is the same thing, the individual.

Thus, touch corrected the errors of sight; sound, by means of the spoken word, became the interpreter of all emotions; taste helped itself through sight and smell; hearing compared the noises that came to it, and was able to judge distances; and desire invaded the precincts of all the other senses.

The flood of time, rolling over centuries of mankind, brought endless new perfections whose genesis, always active although almost unperceived, is found in the progress of our senses, which, over and over, demand their satisfaction.

Thus, sight gives birth to painting, sculpture, every kind of spectacle;

From sound come melody and harmony, music and the dance, with all their ramifications;

From smell springs the discovery of perfumes, and their culture and use;

Taste develops the production, the selection, the preparation of everything that can nourish us;

Touch brings us skill in all the arts and industries;

Physical desire develops whatever can induce or embellish the
union of the two sexes and, since the time of Francis I, it also nurtures romantic love, coquetry, and fashion, and above all coquetry, which was born in France, which has no other name than its French one, and which the world’s choicest souls come every day to study in Paris, their spiritual capital.

This theory, strange as it may sound, is nevertheless easy to prove, since in no other language can we express ourselves clearly on these three prime motives of modern society.

I once wrote on this subject a dialogue which had its good points, but which I decided to leave out of my book so that each reader might have the pleasure of creating one according to his own tastes: there is room in it for a whole evening’s display of fancy, and even of knowledge.

We said before that physical desire had invaded the workings of all the other senses; no less strongly has it influenced all our sciences, and on looking at them closely it will be seen that everything subtle and ingenious about them is due to this sixth sense, to the desire, the hope, the gratitude that spring from sexual union.

Such is, then, in good truth, the genesis of even the most abstract sciences: they are nothing more than the immediate result of our continuous attempt to gratify the senses we have developed.

3: These senses to which we owe so much are still far from perfection, as I need not take time to prove. I shall simply observe that both sight, so ethereal, and touch, at the other end of the scale, have gradually acquired an additional power which is most remarkable.

By means of
lenses
, eyes can escape, as it were, a senile weakening which triumphs over most of the other senses.

The
telescope
, for another instance, has discovered stars hitherto unknown to us and inaccessible to our native means of measurement. It has seen such distances that luminous bodies, in spite of their immense size, have appeared to us as no more than cloudy and almost invisible spots.

The
microscope
has initiated us into the knowledge of the inner
configurations of things; it has shown us forms of life which we never even suspected before. Through it we have seen creatures a hundred thousand times smaller than the tiniest ones visible to our naked eyes, animalcules which move and feed and multiply, so that our imagination is confounded by the presupposition of the minute size of their various organs.

On the other hand, mechanical skills have added to our various powers; man has carried out every plan he has been capable of making, and has thrown off burdens which in the beginning he seemed powerless to fight against.

By means of weapons and the lever he has made all nature submit to him; he has bent it to his pleasures, his needs, his whims; he has turned it upside down, and a puny biped has become lord of creation.

Sight and touch thus fortified could well belong to more superior beings than we are; or, better yet, mankind would be quite different if all the other senses had been equally developed.

It must be noted, however, that although touch has made great progress as a muscular power, civilization has done almost nothing with it as a sensitive apparatus; but we must not despair, remembering that mankind is still very young, and that it is only after a long series of centuries that the senses can enlarge their domains.

For instance, it is but some four hundred years ago that
harmony
was discovered, that celestial science, which is to sound what painting is to colors.
^*

Doubtless the ancients knew how to sing to instruments played in unison; but their knowledge stopped there: they could neither separate one sound from another nor appreciate what they might thus hear.

It is only since the fifteenth century that the tonal scale has been established and the arrangement of chords determined, to accompany the human voice and strengthen its range of expression.

This discovery, so late in coming and yet so natural, doubled our sense of hearing, which was now shown to include two more or less independent faculties, one to receive sounds and the other to appreciate their tones.

German scholars even assert that those men who can hear harmony have one more sense than their fellows.

As for people to whom music is but a welter of confused noises, it can be noticed that they usually sing out of tune, which leads me to believe that their hearing apparatus is made so that it receives only waveless short vibrations, or, more likely, that because their two ears are not tuned to the same pitch, the differences in wave lengths and in sensitivity can only transmit to their brains a vague and indeterminate sensation, like two instruments playing in different keys and in different rhythms, without even a common melody to follow.

The last few centuries have also brought important enlargements to the sphere of taste: the discoveries of sugar and its many uses, of alcohol, of ices, vanilla, tea, and coffee, have transmitted previously unknown pleasure to our palates.

Who can say if the sense of touch will not be next, and if some lucky accident will not open up to us a new source of happiness through it? Such a thing is more than likely, since the tactile sense exists on every surface of the body, and as a result can be excited everywhere.

4: We have seen that physical desire is a part of all the sciences; it asserts itself in them with that tyranny which always characterizes it.

Taste, a more cautious and prudent faculty although no less active a one, has arrived at the same goal with a slowness which guarantees the lasting quality of its triumphs.

We shall devote ourselves later to the consideration of this
progress; but at this point we can remark that any man who has enjoyed a sumptuous meal, in a room decorated with mirrors and paintings, sculptures and flowers, a room drenched with perfumes, enriched with lovely women, filled with the strains of soft music … that man, we say, will not need to make too great an effort to convince himself that every science has taken part in the scheme to heighten and enhance properly for him the pleasures of taste.

5: Let us now look at the general working of all our senses, and we shall see that the Creator has had two ends in view, one of which is the result of the other, namely, the preservation of the individual and the continuation of the species.