Put yourself in the place of a poor woman of doubtful beauty, who owes
her husband to the weight of her dowry, who gives herself infinite
pains, and spends a great deal of money to appear to advantage and
follow the fashions, who does her best to keep house sumptuously and
yet economically—a house, too, not easy to manage—who, from morality
and dire necessity, perhaps, loves no one but her husband, who has no
other study but the happiness of this precious husband, who, to express
all in one word, joins the maternal sentiment _to the sentiment of her
duties_. This underlined circumlocution is the paraphrase of the word
love in the language of prudes.
Have you put yourself in her place? Well, this too-much-loved husband
by chance remarked at his friend Monsieur de Fischtaminel’s, that he
was very fond of mushrooms _a l’Italienne_.
If you have paid some attention to the female nature, in its good,
great, and grand manifestations, you know that for a loving wife there
is no greater pleasure than that of seeing the beloved one absorbing
his favorite viands. This springs from the fundamental idea upon which
the affection of women is based: that of being the source of all his
pleasures, big and little. Love animates everything in life, and
conjugal love has a peculiar right to descend to the most trivial
details.
Caroline spends two or three days in inquiries before she learns how
the Italians dress mushrooms. She discovers a Corsican abbe who tells
her that at Biffi’s, in the rue de Richelieu, she will not only learn
how the Italians dress mushrooms, but that she will be able to obtain
some Milanese mushrooms. Our pious Caroline thanks the Abbe Serpolini,
and resolves to send him a breviary in acknowledgment.
Caroline’s cook goes to Biffi’s, comes back from Biffi’s, and exhibits
to the countess a quantity of mushrooms as big as the coachman’s ears.
“Very good,” she says, “did he explain to you how to cook them?”
“Oh, for us cooks, them’s a mere nothing,” replies the cook.
As a general rule, cooks know everything, in the cooking way, except
how a cook may feather his nest.
At evening, during the second course, all Caroline’s fibres quiver with
pleasure at observing the servant bringing to the table a certain
suggestive dish. She has positively waited for this dinner as she had
waited for her husband.
But between waiting with certainty and expecting a positive pleasure,
there is, to the souls of the elect—and everybody will include a woman
who adores her husband among the elect—there is, between these two
worlds of expectation, the difference that exists between a fine night
and a fine day.
The dish is presented to the beloved Adolphe, he carelessly plunges his
spoon in and helps himself, without perceiving Caroline’s extreme
emotion, to several of those soft, fat, round things, that travelers
who visit Milan do not for a long time recognize; they take them for
some kind of shell-fish.
“Well, Adolphe?”
“Well, dear.”
“Don’t you recognize them?”
“Recognize what?”
“Your mushrooms _a l’Italienne_?”
“These mushrooms! I thought they were—well, yes, they _are_ mushrooms!”
“Yes, and _a l’Italienne_, too.”
“Pooh, they are old preserved mushrooms, _a la milanaise_. I abominate
them!”
“What kind is it you like, then?”
“_Fungi trifolati_.”
Let us observe—to the disgrace of an epoch which numbers and labels
everything, which puts the whole creation in bottles, which is at this
moment classifying one hundred and fifty thousand species of insects,
giving them all the termination _us_, so that a _Silbermanus_ is the
same individual in all countries for the learned men who dissect a
butterfly’s legs with pincers—that we still want a nomenclature for the
chemistry of the kitchen, to enable all the cooks in the world to
produce precisely similar dishes. It would be diplomatically agreed
that French should be the language of the kitchen, as Latin has been
adopted by the scientific for botany and entomology, unless it were
desired to imitate them in that, too, and thus really have kitchen
Latin.
“My dear,” resumes Adolphe, on seeing the clouded and lengthened face
of his chaste Caroline, “in France the dish in question is called
Mushrooms _a l’Italienne, a la provencale, a la bordelaise_. The
mushrooms are minced, fried in oil with a few ingredients whose names I
have forgotten. You add a taste of garlic, I believe—”
Talk about calamities, of petty troubles! This, do you see, is, to a
woman’s heart, what the pain of an extracted tooth is to a child of
eight. _Ab uno disce omnes_: which means, “There’s one of them: find
the rest in your memory.” For we have taken this culinary description
as a prototype of the vexations which afflict loving but indifferently
loved women.