came. His brain began to turn; there would be
not enough fish—a second and deeper disgrace.
First day, not meat enough; second day, only
fish enough for the king. The prince would be
indignant. The joke in Paris would be, Vatel
is trying to save the prince the price of two red
mullets a month. Better death than that.
Then a sneering inner voice whispers inside his
tormented brain, "The man who cannot feast a
king and his retinue does not deserve to live."
His hand falls by accident on his rapier hilt; yes,
yes, there is the solution. He finds Gourville,
and says to him, in a flushed, excited way,
"Monsieur, I shall never survive this disgrace."
Gourville makes light of it. Vatel strides up
stairs, between the rooms full of sleeping men,
and locks the door; he draws his rapier, places
it against the door, throws himself on it once,
twice, then through the heart, and falls dead
in a pool of his own blood. Presently the sun
rises, the light widens, the fish comes pouring
in, the purveyors are loud at the outer gate.
Vatel is wanted to distribute it, to cull the
soles, to select the turbots. They run up to
his room; they knock, they dash at the door,
they break it in. There, lies the faithful
cook, with the blood weltering from his gaping
wounds. They hurry, and tell Condé. He
is deeply affected. The prince relates to the
king what has passed, with deepest sorrow.
Vatel's death was attributed to the high sense of
honour he had, after his own way. He was
highly commended: some praising, a few blaming,
his fanaticism. The king confessed to
Condé that he had delayed coming to Chantilly
for five years, dreading the trouble and
embarrassment such a visit might occasion.

M. Grimaud de la Reynière, in a dedicatory
epistle to the shade of Vatel the great
captain's devoted servant, in the last volume of the
amusing Almanach des Gourmands, says: "Who
was ever more worthy of the respect and gratitude
of true gourmands than the man of genius
who would not survive the dishonour of the
table of the great Condé, and who immolated
himself with his own hands because the sea-fish had
not arrived some hours before it was wanted?
So noble a death insures you, venerable shade,
the most glorious immortality! You proved
that the fanaticism of honour can exist in
the kitchen as well as in the camp, and that
the spit and the saucepan have also their Catos
and their Deciuses."

Times have changed; French cooks now
prefer living on their masters to dying for
them. "The glorious suicide," as Reynière
calls it, is not often imitated now. The great
desire of noblemen's cooks in this present
century seems to be to teach their masters great
moral lessons by remorseless waste, extravagance,
and peculation, to wean them from the
fatal error of "plunging" into the bottomless
pits of bankruptcy and disgrace. Yet we must
not be bitter, for the world was always troubled
with servants, who tried to rival their masters
in their pride and folly, imitating the vices
only of the order whom they served, and
forgetting the simpler virtues of their own.
The Prince de Soubise (inventor of a sauce, the
discovery of which was more glorious than
twenty victories) rejoiced in a cook of large
views, economy being ("son moindre défaut")
his least weakness. The prince intending
to give a magnificent supper to all the
beauty and wit of Paris, requested Bertrand to
draw up a menu, a sort of rough estimate; for
the prince was like our Chancellors of the
Exchequer, rather a hypocrite in his affectation
of economy. He wanted, however, to persuade
himself and friends that he was anxious to save.
The chef's estimate had no hypocrisy about it; it
was sublimely reckless. The first hypothesis was,

"Fifty hams!"

"What, what! Fifty hams!" spluttered the
prince: "why, Bertrand, your brains are surely
like your spits, they are turning. Are you going
to feast the whole army of the Rhine?"

Bertrand was blandly contemptuous. "No,
monseigneur, only one ham will appear upon
the table; but the rest are indispensable for my
espagnoles, my blonds, my garnishes, my——"

"Bertrand, you are plundering me!" stormed
the prince. "This article shall not pass."

Bertrand's blood was up. "My lord," he
said, sternly, "you do not understand the
resources of our art. Give the word, and those
poor fifty hams which so perturb you, why,
ma foi, I will melt them all down into one little
glass bottle no bigger than my thumb."

The prince was abashed by the genius of the
spit, and the fifty hams were purchased.

Ude, cook at Crockford's, speaking from vast
experience, says on this subject, in his book:
"The chief fault of all great people's cooks is
that they are too profuse in their preparations.
Suppers are often only ridiculous proofs of the
extravagance and bad taste of the givers." Then
Crockford's right hand goes on to allude to the
shameful waste he had witnessed at Lord Sefton's
and other great houses, and which seems
even to have weighed on his seared conscience,
as if every wasteful party had been a distinct
crime. His description makes us shudder, when
we picture to ourselves outside the area rails,
and behind the mews of those very houses,
the pale pinched faces of starving needlewomen,
beggar children, and bedridden old people, to
whom meat once a week is a gift that seems
sent from Heaven.

"I have known," the shrewd and sagacious
old cook says (he had been cook to the bankrupt
Duke of York, and ought to have known
something of heartless extravagance); "I have
known balls where, the next day, in spite of the
pillage of a pack of footmen, which was enormous,
I have really seen twenty or thirty
hams, one hundred and fifty or two hundred
carved fowls (four shillings each?), and forty or
fifty tongues, given away! Jellies melted on all
the tables; pastry, pâtés, aspics, and lobster
salads, all heaped up in the kitchen and
strewed about the passages, completely
disfigured by the manner in which it was necessary
to take them from the dishes in which they had