smoking cinders, gnawing horse bones. The brilliant paintings of the
hall, the guards, the richly clad officers, the musicians playing
the melodies of Lambert and Lulli in the gallery, the golden
goblets, the silver plate, the silken tablecloth, the Venetian
glass, the chased epergnes full of rare flowers, the heavy
candlesticks--they cannot change, cannot lend a dissimulating charm
to the true nature of this unclean charnel-house, where men and
women assemble over animal bodies, broken bones and torn meats to
gloat greedily over them. Oh, what unphilosophical nourishment! We
swallow with stupid gluttony muscle, fat and intestines of beasts
without discerning in those substances such parts as are truly
adapted to our nourishment and those much more abundant which we
ought to reject; and we fill our stomach indiscriminately with good
and bad, useful and injurious. That's the very point, where a
separation is to be made, and, if the whole medical faculty could
boast of a chemist and philosopher, we should no more be compelled
to partake of such disgusting feasts.

"They would prepare for us, gentlemen, distilled meats, containing
nothing but what is in sympathy and affinity with our body. Nothing
would be used but the quintessence of oxen and pigs, the elixir of
partridges and capons, and all that is swallowed could be digested.
I do not give up all hope, gentlemen, of obtaining such results by
thinking somewhat deeper over chemistry and medicine than I have had
leisure to do up till now."

At these words of our host, M. Jerome Coignard, raising his eyes
over the thin black broth in his plate, looked uneasily at M.
d'Asterac, who continued to say: