Grand Sybaris Hotel, and if he had an equal in his profession he
had never acknowledged the fact. In his own domain he was a
potentate, hedged around, with the cold brutality that Genius
expects rather than excuses in her children; he never forgave, and
those who served him were careful that there should be little to
forgive. In the outer world, the world which devoured his
creations, he was an influence; how profound or how shallow an
influence he never attempted to guess. It is the penalty and the
safeguard of genius that it computes itself by troy weight in a
world that measures by vulgar hundredweights.

"Once in a way the great man would be seized with a desire to
watch the effect of his master-efforts, just as the guiding brain
of Krupp's might wish at a supreme moment to intrude into the
firing line of an artillery duel. And such an occasion was the
present. For the first time in the history of the Grand Sybaris
Hotel, he was presenting to its guests the dish which he had
brought to that pitch of perfection which almost amounts to
scandal. Canetons à la mode d'Amblève. In thin gilt lettering on
the creamy white of the menu how little those words conveyed to
the bulk of the imperfectly educated diners. And yet how much
specialized effort had been lavished, how much carefully treasured
lore had been ungarnered, before those six words could be written.
In the Department of Deux-Sèvres ducklings had lived peculiar and
beautiful lives and died in the odour of satiety to furnish the
main theme of the dish; champignons, which even a purist for Saxon
English would have hesitated to address as mushrooms, had
contributed their languorous atrophied bodies to the garnishing,
and a sauce devised in the twilight reign of the Fifteenth Louis
had been summoned back from the imperishable past to take its part