Sanza speme vivemo in disio.
Inferno. Canto IV, 42.
Stripped of all intellectual principle, for Honoré de Balzac writing embodied physical combustion, a war that required heavy ammunition. Monumental, the Human Comedy floats on a sea of fifty thousand cups of coffee. In his Treatise on Modern Stimulants, he describes caffeine intake using military terminology: “Coffee caresses the throat, and then everything stirs: ideas march like battalions of a great army on the battlefield… The cavalry of metaphor unfolds with a magnificent gallop.” Then he fought the battle on his plate. His appetite was as gargantuan as his literary output. According to his editor Werdet, in a single sitting he could devour “a hundred oysters from Ostend, twelve lamb chops, a duck à l’orange, and a couple of partridges,” all as a prelude to fruit, which was a must at his meals. With his body bursting with caffeine and exhausted from giving birth to two thousand characters, he died at the age of fifty-one from cardiac hypertrophy.
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A giant with a booming laugh, Alexandre Dumas cooked with the same excess with which he wrote. His guests often saw him put down his pen to pick up a ladle, correcting proofs amid the steam of his stews, convinced that a chapter could wait, but a béchamel sauce demanded absolute precision. In 1864, he donated his complete collection of works to the city of Cavaillon in exchange for a life annuity of twelve melons a year. Towards the end of his life, having already forgotten his musketeers and his Queen Margot, he retired to Roscoff accompanied by a cook to write his Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine. He handed the manuscript to his publisher, Alphonse Lemerre, just a few weeks before his death, describing the book as “the pillow of my old age.” There he left a sentence that annihilates any intellectual pretensions: “Man does not live on what he eats, but on what he digests.” The novelist who had fed the imagination of France with hundreds of volumes wanted to be remembered, above all, for the precise architecture of a salad. He ended his life by explaining with imperturbable naturalness how to stew an elephant’s trunk, cook bear claws, or season kangaroo fillets.
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He had the audacity to silence his musical genius at the age of thirty-seven to devote himself to the “high composition” of sauces and cannelloni. He defined appetite as “the baton that conducts the orchestra of human passions.” His letters are the best inventory of this voracity: instead of discussing eighth notes, his most passionate paragraphs were pleas to his friends to send him zamponi, olives, and cheeses from Italy, confessing that “the stomach is the only choirmaster my heart listens to.” History records that Gioachino Rossini, capable of writing an overture in the time it took to cook rice, confessed to having cried only three times in his life. The first was after the fiasco of his first opera; the second was when he heard the supernatural beauty of Paganini’s violin; the third and most bitter was when a truffled turkey—which he had prepared during a boat trip—slipped overboard and ended up in the sea to the delight of the fish. For the Swan of Pesaro, seeing that bird sink was one of the few dramas that deserved his tears.
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A bohemian aristocrat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec understood cooking as a liquid extension of his painting. Co-author—along with Maurice Joyant—of the posthumous The Art of Cooking, he did not tolerate mediocrity on the plate, even as a guest. His gastronomic rigor went so far as to always carry a small silver nutmeg grater in his vest pocket, so he could instantly “correct” any sauce, port, or stew he considered mediocre, regardless of whether he was in a sordid Montmartre bistro or a duchess’s salon. His correspondence confirms this militancy: in letters to his mother, Countess Adèle, news about his paintings gave way to tyrannical instructions about the delivery of pâtés and capons, confessing that “painting is a craft, but cooking is a celebration.” He even applied his palette of strong colors to drink: he invented the Tremblement de Terre, a cocktail of absinthe and cognac, to shake his guests out of their lethargy. For the painter who portrayed the beauty of Parisian high society, a lack of flavor was an unforgivable aesthetic error, and nutmeg was the only possible redemption for an insipid civilization.
