and began following my motor-car.
He asked me numerous questions about it; and the end of it was that he paid me to bring it into his park and let him try it; which I did, and at the finish I sold him the car and went on to London endowed with my new experiences, the chief being the divine beauty of the Riviera, and the new power given to one by the motor- car.
The motor-car enriched life like the discovery of two or three new poets. I always give one instance of its almost magical power. I think I was the first person who ever saw the four great cathedrals of France in one day. I was staying in Amiens, and after a last look at the west door of the cathedral, about seven o'clock in the morning I drove the car to Beauvais and spent some hours with its beauties; thence I drove to Paris. At Paris I just looked at Sainte-Chapelle and went on to Chartres, where I had a late lunch; after lunch and feasting my eyes again on the beauties of the cathedral, I drove on to Rheims and had another great impression.
I suppose the day will come when one will see the four in a morning and fly to Monreale, near Palermo, for lunch, and then from Palermo to the Parthenon of Athens, and so on to the church of San Sofia at Constantinople, the inside of which is one of the wonders of the world.
One other experience I had in the last years of the century which I want to put on record, for it taught me that a machine heavier than air might fly. It was, of course, an American who gave me the experience; I have forgotten his name, although I knew him very well. He talked to me about a flying machine: 'The motor-car engine,' he said, 'was still very heavy,' but he felt certain that if speed enough could be got up, it would be possible to fly in an airplane heavier than air. He took me down one day to his place in the country. He had rigged up there a sort of airplane with a motorcar engine and a long set of rails down a fairly steep hill. He told me that the rails were there in order to get sufficient speed in the descent for the airplane to fly; he asked me would I risk a flight with him. I said I should be delighted. We got in; he started the engine; we ran down the slope and to my wonder lifted into the air and went about three hundred yards, crossing a fence in our flight before descending in a grass field. 'Twasn't anything very brilliant, but it taught me, certainly, that man had conquered the air and would yet have a machine to wing the ether like a bird.
Less than twenty years later I went up in an airplane at Nice, but I shall talk about that in another volume.
Now that I am telling about the pleasures of life and living, I want to tell about eating and drinking. I have already noted, I think, in a previous volume, that the English ideal of cooking is the best in the world; it is the aristocratic ideal and consists in the desire to give to each article of food its own especial flavor, whereas French cooking is apt to obliterate all distinctions with a democratic sauce.
The drawback of English cooking is that England has scarcely any cooks, and so it is seldom you find their ideals carried out. In one particular, however, I was always quarreling with English food: you can get the best game in the world in England, but alas, the English always keep it until it is 'high,' or if you prefer the truth, till it is almost rotten. I remember one Englishman of great position telling me that he always hung grouse till the bird fell of its own weight, drawing out its legs. Professor Mahaffy in Dublin once told me with huge gusto that he never cared for woodcock till it was represented by a green sauce on his plate. And all this is done, I have been told, in order to make game more tender; but I found out in Scotland once that if you cook game on the day it is shot, before the rigor mortis has set in, it is just as tender as if you kept it for a month. I used to take special pains to get my grouse cooked before the rigor mortis, and sent down to me from Yorkshire.
I think it was the ladies in England who first told me that my lunches were the best in London because the game was so delightful — not 'smelly,' they said.
It is possible in London to get the best beef and mutton in the world, and any one who tries Simpson's restaurant in the Strand will soon convince himself of the truth of this assertion. The veal, however, is not nearly so good as it is in France; and of course the average of French cooking is immeasurably higher than the average of English cooking; but I repeat, I have had the best dinners of my life in England.
Ordinarily here in France, at the seaside, one gets fish at the best restaurants that isn't fresh, and when you protest, the maitre d'hotel assures you that it is quite fresh; was alive that morning. Now high game is not injurious to the health. Beef and mutton, too, can be kept a long time without being harmful, but stale fish is often deadly; and I therefore want to tell my readers how to distinguish between fresh and stale fish at one glance. When the fish is put before you, you naturally open it; lift the flesh from the backbone; if the backbone has marked the flesh in the slightest way, it is two or three days old; and if the marks are dark brown, it is probably two weeks old. Yet at the best hotel I had fish of the Mediterranean, and the arete, or back bone, had marked the flesh black. No assurance of the maitre d'hotel would induce me to touch such fish. French bread, too, that used to be the best in the world, is now tenth-rate, but it is always possible to get sticks of gluten that look and taste like the best bread and are very easy to digest.
Most tinned and canned foods are better done in England than elsewhere, but one especially-petits pois de Rodel-prepared in two or three different ways in France, are the best sweet peas I have ever eaten.
Long ago I proposed to make a restaurant that should have rooms given to different schools of cookery: the English room, of course, and the French room, and the Russian room, at least; for these are the three great schools of modern cookery; and the best of them, in my opinion, is the English, so far as the ideal of cooking goes; but New York is beginning to run London very close. You can get nearly as good beefsteak and mutton in New York as in London, and better veal; fish, too, you can get in New York as good, except they have no salmon-trout, and the sole are not quite as good as Dover sole; but you can get better lobsters in New York than anywhere in the world, and deep-sea oysters, too-better than Carlingfords, in spite of British opinion. And as for vegetables and fruits, there is no comparison: the American vegetables and fruits are the best to be found anywhere.
But there is one thing which the French have to perfection, and that is many sorts of wine-the best, I think, in the world. I can get vin du pays almost anywhere in France that is light and of excellent flavor, sometimes indeed with a real bouqet, and it is as cheap as mineral water: a franc and a half a bottle, let us say, or two-pence or three-pence in English money, or five cents a bottle. Of course, the best wines, Bordeaux and Burgundy, are much dearer: half a dollar, or a dollar and a half a bottle, according to quality and age; but such luxuries can be omitted when the ordinary wine of the country is absolutely palatable and good. In my time in London champagne was the chief drink, and the English best class knew more about good champagne than the French: they were the first to modify the French habit of adding sugar and brandy to champagne-they have always wanted their wine nature or brut; and the taste for the best dry champagne in London is far higher than it is in Paris; but Burgundy and Bordeaux, and all the varieties of white and red wines are better understood in France than anywhere else.
My reputation for giving good lunches in London was based on the fact that I knew more about the best qualities and the best years of French wines than most people. I have always had a passionate admiration for Rhine wines, too, and the wines of the Moselle. A long time ago now I once earned my living in London by tasting wines: we used to have an excellent lunch, three or four of us, and the six or eight bottles of wine that we had to taste were brought in after we had enjoyed an excellent beefsteak and had cleaned our palates with bread and salt and olives: then each of us had to give his opinion of the various wines and tell especially which would improve with keeping and so be the better purchase. Most of us could give the year of any special vintage.
One man in London knew more about white wine even than I did, but I was a good second, and so I may be allowed to speak on French wines at least with some authority.
I remember making every one at table laugh one day by a comparison between wine and women as the two best things in the world. 'Red Bordeaux,' I said, 'is like the lawful wife: an excellent beverage that goes with every dish and enables one to enjoy one's food, and helps one to live.
'But now and then a man wants a change, and champagne is the most complete and exhilarating change from Bordeaux; it is like the woman of the streets: everybody that can afford it tries it sooner or later, but it has no real attraction. It must be taken in moderation: too much of it is apt to give a bad headache, or worse. Like the woman of the streets, it is always within reach and its price is out of all proportion to its worth.
'Moselle is the girl of fourteen to eighteen: light, quick on the tongue with an exquisite, evanescent perfume, but little body; it may be used constantly and in quantities, but must be taken young.
'If you prefer real fragrance or bouquet, you must go to a wine with more body in it, such as Burgundy, Chambertin or Musigny. Burgundy I always think of as the woman of thirty: it has more body than claret, is richer, more generous, with a finer perfume; but it is very intoxicating and should be used with self-restraint.
'Port is the woman of forty: stronger, richer, sweeter even than Burgundy; much more body in it but less bouquet; it keeps excellently and ripens with age and can only be drunk freely by youth; in maturity, more than a sip
