Morgan O’Dogherty was wrong--and, sooth to say, he was not often so--
when he pronounced a Mess to be ‘the perfection of dinner society.’ In
the first place, there can be no perfection anywhere or in anything, it
is evident, where ladies are not. Secondly, a number of persons so
purely professional, and therefore so very much alike in their habits,
tone of thinking, and expression, can scarcely be expected to make up
that complex amalgam so indispensable to pleasant society. Lastly, the
very fact of meeting the same people each day, looking the very same way
too, is a sad damper to that flow of spirits which for their free
current demand all the chances and vicissitudes of a fresh audience. In
a word, in the one case a man becomes like a Dutch canal, standing
stagnant and slow between its trim banks; in the other, he is a bounding
rivulet, careering pleasantly through grassy meadows and smiling fields-
-now basking in the gay sunshine, now lingering in the cool shade; at
one moment hurrying along between rocks and moss-grown pebbles,
brawling, breaking, and foaming; at the next, expanding into some little
lake, calm and deep and mirrorlike.
It is the very chances and changes of conversation, its ups and downs,
its lights and shadows--so like those of life itself--that make its
great charm; and for this, generally, a mixed party gives the only
security. Now, a Mess has very little indeed of this requisite; on the
contrary, its great stronghold is the fact that it offers an easy
tableland for all capacities. It has its little, dry, stale jokes, as
flat and as dull as the orderly book--the regular quiz about Jones’s
whiskers, or Tobin’s horse; the hackneyed stories about Simpson of Ours,
or Nokes of Yours--of which the major is never tired, and the newly-
joined sub is enraptured. Bless their honest hearts! very little fun
goes far in the army; like the regimental allowance of wine, it will
never intoxicate, and no man is expected to call for a fresh supply.
I have dined at more Messes than any red-coat of them all, at home and
abroad--cavalry, artillery, and infantry, ‘horse, foot, and dragoons,’
as Grattan has it. In gala parties, with a general and his staff for
guests; after sweltering field-days, where all the claret could not
clear your throat of pipe-clay and contract-powder; in the colonies,
where flannel-jackets were substituted for regulation coats, and land-
crabs and pepper-pot for saddles and sirloins; in Connemara, Calcutta,
or Corfu--it was all the same: _caelum non animum_, etc. Not but that
they had all their little peculiarities among themselves-- so much so,
indeed, that I offer a fifty, that, if you set me down blindfolded at
any Mess in the service, I will tell you what corps they belong to
before the cheese appears; and before the bottle goes half around, I’ll
engage to distinguish the hussars from the heavies, the fusiliers from
the light-bobs; and when the president is ringing for more claret, it
will go hard with me if I don’t make a shrewd guess at the number of the
regiment.
The great charm of the Mess is to those young, ardent spirits fresh from
Sandhurst or Eton, sick of mathematics and bored with false quantities.
To them the change is indeed a glorious one, and I’d ask nothing better
than to be sixteen, and enjoy it all; but for the old stagers, it is
slow work indeed. A man curls his whiskers at forty with far less
satisfaction than he surveys their growth and development at eighteen;
he tightens his waist, too, at that period, with a very different sense
of enjoyment. His first trip to Jamaica is little more than a ‘lark’;
his fourth or fifth, with a wife and four brats, is scarcely a party of
pleasure--and all these things react on the Mess. Besides, it is against
human nature itself to like the people who rival us; and who could enjoy
the jokes of a man who stands between him and a majority?
Yet, taking them all in all, the military ‘cut up’ better than any other
professionals. The doctors might be agreeable; they know a vast deal of
life, and in a way too that other people never see it; but meet them _en
masse_, they are little better than body-snatchers. There is not a
malady too dreadful, nor an operation too bloody, to tell you over your
soup; every slice of the turkey suggests an amputation, and they sever a
wing with the anatomical precision they would extirpate a thigh bone.
Life to them has no interest except where it verges on death; and from
habit and hardening, they forget that human suffering has any other
phase than a source of wealth to the medical profession.
The lawyers are even worse. To listen to them, you would suppose that
the highest order of intellect was a skill in chicanery; that trick and
stratagem were the foremost walks of talent; that to browbeat a poor man
and to confound a simple one were great triumphs of genius; and that the
fairest gift of the human mind was that which enabled a man to feign
every emotion of charity, benevolence, pity, anger, grief, and joy, for
the sum of twenty pounds sterling, wrung from abject poverty and briefed
by an ‘honest attorney.’
As to the parsons, I must acquit them honestly of any portion of this
charge. It has been my fortune to ‘assist’ at more than one visitation
dinner, and I can safely aver that never by any accident did the
conversation become professional, nor did I hear a word of piety during
the entertainment.
Country gentlemen are scarcely professional, however the similarity of
their tastes and occupations might seem to warrant the classification--
fox-hunting, grouse-shooting, game-preserving, road-jobbing, rent-
extracting, land-tilling, being propensities in common. They are the
slowest of all; and the odds are long against any one keeping awake
after the conversation has taken its steady turn into shorthorns,
Swedish turnips, subsoiling, and southdowns.
Artists are occasionally well enough, if only for their vanity and self-
conceit.
Authors are better still, for ditto and ditto.
Actors are most amusing from the innocent delusion they labour under
that all that goes on in life is unreal, except what takes place in
Covent Garden or Drury Lane.
In a word, professional cliques are usually detestable, the individuals
who compose them being frequently admirable ingredients, but intolerable
when unmixed; and society, like a _macédoine_, is never so good as when
its details are a little incongruous.
For my own part, I knew few things better than a table d’hôte, that
pleasant reunion of all nations, from Stockholm to Stamboul; of every
rank, from the grand-duke to the bagman; men and women, or, if you like
the phrase better, ladies and gentlemen--some travelling for pleasure,
some for profit; some on wedding tours, some in the grief of widowhood;
some rattling along the road of life in all the freshness of youth,
health, and well-stored purses, others creeping by the wayside
cautiously and quietly; sedate and sententious English, lively Italians,
plodding Germans, witty Frenchmen, wily Russians, and stupid Belgians--
all pell-mell, seated side by side, and actually shuffled into momentary
intimacy by soup, fish, fowl, and entremets. The very fact that you are
_en route_ gives a frankness and a freedom to all you say. Your passport
is signed, your carriage packed; to-morrow you will be a hundred miles
away. What matter, then, if the old baron with the white moustache has
smiled at your German, or if the thin-faced lady in the Dunstable bonnet
has frowned at your morality?--you ‘ll never, in all likelihood, meet
either again. You do your best to be agreeable--it is the only
distinction recognised; here are no places of honour, no favoured
guests--each starts fair in the race, and a pleasant course I have
always deemed it.
Now, let no one, while condemning the vulgarity of this taste of mine--
for such I anticipate as the ready objection, though the dissentient
should be a tailor from Bond Street or a schoolmistress from Brighton--
for a moment suppose that I mean to include all tables d’hôte in this
sweeping laudation; far, very far from it. I, Arthur O’Leary, have
travelled some hundreds of thousands of miles in every quarter and
region of the globe, and yet would have considerable difficulty in
enumerating even six such as fairly to warrant the praise I have
pronounced.
In the first place, the table d’hôte, to possess all the requisites I
desire, should not have its _locale_ in any first-rate city, like Paris,
London, or St. Petersburg; no, it should rather be in Brussels, Dresden,
Munich, Berne, or Florence. Again, it should not be in the great
overgrown mammoth-hotel of the town, with three hundred daily devourers,
and a steam-engine to slice the _bouilli_. It should, and will usually,
be found in some retired and quiet spot--frequently within a small
court, with orange-trees round the walls, and a tiny modest _jet d’eau_
in the middle; a glass-door entering from a flight of low steps into a
neat ante-chamber, where an attentive but unobtrusive waiter is ready to
take your hat and cane, and, instinctively divining your dinner
intentions, ushers you respectfully into the salon, and leans down your
chair beside the place you select.
The few guests already arrived have the air of _habitués_; they are
chatting together when you enter, but they conceive it necessary to do
the honours of the place to the stranger, and at once include you in the
conversation; a word or two suffices, and you see that they are not
chance folk, whom hunger has overtaken at the door, but daily visitors,
who know the house and appreciate it. The table itself is far from
large--at most sixteen persons could sit down at it; the usual number is
about twelve or fourteen. There is, if it be summer, a delicious bouquet
in the midst; and the snowy whiteness of the cloth and the clear lustre
of the water strike you instantly. The covers are as bright as when they
left the hands of the silversmith, and the temperature of the room at
once shows that nothing has been neglected that can contribute to the
comfort of the guests. The very plash of the fountain is a grateful
sound, and the long necks of the hock-bottles, reposing in the little
basin, have an air of luxury far from unpleasing. While the champagne
indulges its more southern character in the ice-pails in the shade, a
sweet, faint odour of pineapples and nectarines is diffused about; nor
am I disposed to quarrel with the chance view I catch, between the
orange-trees, of a window where asparagus, game, oranges, and melons are
grouped confusedly together, yet with a harmony of colour and effect
Schneider would have gloried in. There is a noiseless activity about, a
certain air of preparation--not such as by bustle can interfere with the
placid enjoyment you feel, but something which denotes care and skill.
You feel, in fact, that impatience on your part would only militate
against your own interest, and that when the moment arrives for serving,
the potage has then received the last finishing touch of the artist. By
this time the company are assembled; the majority are men, but there are
four or five ladies. They are _en chapeau_ too; but it is a toilette
that shows taste and elegance, and the freshness--that delightful
characteristic of foreign dress--of their light muslin dresses is in
keeping with all about. Then follows that little pleasant bustle of
meeting; the interchange of a number of small courtesies, which cost
little but are very delightful; the news of the theatre for the night;
some soiree, well known, or some promenade, forms the whole--and we are
at table.
The destiny that made me a traveller has blessed me with either the
contentment of the most simple or the perfect enjoyment of the most
cultivated cuisine; and if I have eaten _tripe de rocher_ with Parry at
the Pole, I have never lost thereby the acme of my relish for truffles
at the ‘Frères.’ Therefore, trust me that in my mention of a table
d’hôte I have not forgotten the most essential of its features--for
this, the smallness and consequent selectness of the party is always a
guarantee.
Thus, then, you are at table; your napkin is spread, but you see no
soup. The reason is at once evident, and you accept with gratefulness
the little plate of Ostend oysters, each somewhat smaller than a five-
franc piece, that are before you. Who would seek for pearls without when
such treasures are to be found within the shell--cool and juicy and
succulent; suggestive of delights to come, and so suited to the limpid
glass of Chablis. What preparatives for the potage, which already I
perceive to be a _printanière_.
But why dwell on all this? These memoranda of mine were intended rather
to form a humble companion to some of John Murray’s inestimable
treatises on the road; some stray recollection of what in my rambles had
struck me as worth mention; something that might serve to lighten a
half-hour here or an evening there; some hint for the wanderer of a
hotel or a church or a view or an actor or a poet, a picture or a
_pâte_, for which his halting-place is remarkable, but of whose
existence he knew not. And to come back once more, such a picture as I
have presented is but a weak and imperfect sketch of the Hôtel de France
in Brussels--at least, of what I once remember it.
Poor Biennais, he was an _artiste!_ He commenced his career under
Chicaud, and rose to the dignity of _rôtisseur_ under Napoleon. With
what enthusiasm he used to speak of his successes during the Empire,
when Bonaparte gave him carte-blanche to compose a dinner for a ‘party
of kings!’ Napoleon himself was but an inferior gastronome. With him,
the great requisite was to serve anywhere and at any moment; and though
the bill of fare was a modest one, it was sometimes a matter of
difficulty to prepare it in the depths of the Black Forest or on the
sandy plains of Prussia, amid the mud-covered fields of Poland or the
snows of Muscovy. A poulet, a cutlet, and a cup of coffee was the whole
affair; but it should be ready as if by magic. Among his followers were
several distinguished gourmets. Cambacérès was well known; Murat also,
and Decrès, the Minister of Marine, kept admirable tables. Of these,
Biennais spoke with ecstasy; he remembered their various tastes, and
would ever remark, when placing some masterpiece of skill before you,
how the King of Naples loved or the arch-chancellor praised it. To him
the overthrow of the empire was but the downfall of the cuisine; and he
saw nothing more affecting in the last days of Fontainebleau than that
the Emperor had left untouched a _fondue_ he had always eaten of with
delight. ‘After that,’ said Biennais, ‘I saw the game was up.’ With the
Hundred Days he was ‘restored,’ like his master; but, alas! the empire
of casseroles was departed; the thunder of the cannon foundries, and the
roar of the shot furnaces were more congenial sounds than the simmering
of sauces and the gentle murmur of a stew-pan. No wonder, thought he,
there should come a Waterloo, when the spirit of the nation had thus
degenerated. Napoleon spent his last days in exile; Biennais took his
departure for Belgium. The park was his Longwood; and, indeed, he
himself saw invariable points of resemblance in the two destinies.
Happily for those who frequented the Hôtel de France, he did not occupy
his remaining years in dictating his memoirs to some Las Casas of the
kitchen, but persevered to the last in the practice of his great art,
and died, so to speak, ladle in hand.
To me the Hôtel de France has many charms. I remember it, I shall not
say how many years--its cool, delightful salon, looking out upon that
beautiful little park whose shady alleys are such a resource in the
evenings of summer; its lime-trees, beneath which you may sit and sip
your coffee, as you watch the groups that pass and repass before you,
weaving stories to yourself which become thicker and thicker as the
shade deepens, and the flitting shapes are barely seen as they glide
along the silent alleys, while a distant sound of music--some air of the
Fatherland--is all that breaks the stillness, and you forget in the
dreamy silence that you are in the midst of a great city.
The Hôtel de France has other memories than these, too. I ‘m not sure
that I shall not make a confession, yet somehow I half shrink from it.
You might call it a love adventure, and I should not like that; besides,
there is scarcely a moral in it--though who knows?