Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 92, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 April 1912 — STRANGE FEATS OF FAMOUS GLUTTONS [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

STRANGE FEATS OF FAMOUS GLUTTONS

“BEASTS FEEJD, MAN eats. V The wise man alone knows how to eat.” But' not always.’ It would scarcely be incorrect to describe Balzac, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, for instance, as wise men in their own way; and yet they were human gluttons, whose gastronomic feats would strike the average reader as somewhat amazing, to say the least ' Balzac has told us himself that at the end of a hard writing he went to a certain famous eating house in Paris and there ordered, and ate, a little dinner carefully composed es twelve dozen Ostend oysters, twelve mutton cutlets, a duck, two roast partridges, a Normandy sole, fruit, coffee and liqueurs. Victor Hugo, whose iron teeth could crush a cutlet bone as if it were an almond, sometimes amused his grandchildren, after eating through a dinner of six courses, by collecting the remnants of soup, entree, fish, roast, vegetables, and sweet dishes, mixing them, and eating this horrible “salad” there and then with obvious pleasure. Voltaire who almost lived on strong coffee, bragged of drinking sixty cups, a day, which reminds one of Dr. Johnson, who could almost equal this record in the matter of tea. Judging, however, from the Information contained in a book lately published in ETance, on eating, it would appear that not even Balzac, Hugo, or the more modern eating-champions we occasionally read about, whose feats for wagers—such as disposing of a trifle like twenty pounds of plum duff, fifty or sixty eggs, or a score of pigeons—would not have stood muen chance if matched against one on two of the French kings. Take Louis XIV., for Instance, who was a gourmand, and a gourmet, too. He had as many as 1,500 men to cook for him and to wait at his banquets. Here is the menu of one of his ordinary dinners: One broth made of two fowls and one of four partridges and cabbages; one additional soup, made of six pigeons and one of cocks’ combs; two*further soups, one of fowl and one of partridge; a twenty-pound side of veal and twelve pigeons; a fricassee of six chickens and two hashed partridges, three roast partridges, six braised partridges, two roast turkeys, three truffled hens, two fat capons, nine chickens, nine pigeons, two young chickens, six partridges and four pigeons. The dessert consisted of two china bowls of raw fruit, two of Jam and two of cbmpote.

“I wish you wouldn’t contradict me, my dear.” “I don’t.”

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