French & English

The French are supposed to be a much more temperate nation than the English, and, in fact, there used to be few drunkards in France. That country has, however, a peculiar characteristic as to drinking. It is a country where moderate drinking is itself immoderate. The reader understands what this contradictory statement means.

Men are called moderate drinkers so long as they do not show any outward sign of being “the worse for liquor.” But there is an education of the body by which it may be made to absorb great quantities of alcoholic stimulants without exhibiting anything in the nature of drunkenness. In France it is considered shameful and disgusting to be drunk; but no blame is attached to the utmost indulgence in drinking so long as it keeps on the safe side. This leads to that artful kind of drinking which is well known to all French physicians, and which produces, in the long run, that peculiar state of body which they call “l’alcoolisme des gens du monde.” A peasant may get perfectly drunk once a month and yet be a very small consumer of alcohol; a gentleman, without ever being even tipsy, may consume five times as much alcohol as the peasant.

The following account of what a comfortable Frenchman may consume in the twenty-four hours is founded on actual observation, but is not intended to represent temperate habits in France, which will be dealt with later. This first description may stand for the habits of a drinker who lives in a state of constant stimulation only.

On rising in the morning he will probably take either brandy, or sherry, or white French wine. The working men now prefer brandy. In former times white wine was more drunk, especially in the wine districts. If French wine is preferred the moderate quantity will be half a bottle, but it is easy to go beyond, and a lover of wine will finish his bottle without stopping half-way. He will eat a crust of bread with it, and perhaps a morsel of Gruyère cheese. There is no pleasanter early breakfast; it is much pleasanter than the sickening English combination of sweet coffee and fat ham; the wine is exhilarating, and by its help the day opens cheerfully; its pleasures seem attractive and its duties light. Unfortunately, the white wine habit is known to tell on the nervous system in course of time. Before déjeuner the moderate drinker will go to a café and take his apéritif, usually a vermouth, and perhaps something else. Vermouth is simply white wine in which aromatic herbs have been infused. At déjeuner he will drink a bottle of red wine. Immediately after he returns to the café and orders coffee, which is invariably accompanied by brandy, and of that he takes a large dram. If inclined to rest some time in the establishment he will order a little glass of liqueur, and if he meets with friends they may perhaps treat each other to different kinds of liqueurs for the sake of good-fellowship and variety. At five o’clock he returns to the café for his absinthe. In ordinary times he will be content with one absinthe, when inclined to exceed he will take two, or possibly even three, or a mint in the place of the third. Just before dinner he may think it necessary to “open his appetite” with an apéritif, say bitters and curaçao. At dinner he drinks a bottle of common wine, and possibly some good wine at dessert if he dines with friends. After dinner come liqueurs, and then he drinks ale in a café all the evening whilst he smokes. This lasts till eleven o’clock, when he goes to bed. He has never shown the slightest sign of tipsiness all day, and is ready to go through the same course on the morrow. Meanwhile, in case he should feel thirsty, he has a “verre d’eau” in his bedroom, which means a very pretty little glass tray with a glass, a small sugar-basin, a decanter of water, and a small decanter of pure cognac.

The state of this Frenchman is one of incessant alcoholic stimulation. If he takes hard exercise he may bear it for many years, if not, he will feel the effects of it, and the physician will privately note his case as one of alcoolisme des gens du monde.

Now, with regard to the common people in France, the old habit of drinking large quantities of wine in the wine districts seems to have done wonderfully little harm. As the subject interests me I have asked for the opinion of several physicians, and they all say that the drinking of pure French wine is harmless if accompanied by exercise. Without exercise it may establish gout. The physicians dread the effects of spirits even in small quantities; they look upon wine as a kind of safeguard, and on spirits as a terrible danger. The reader may remember a passage in Lewes’s Life of Goethe, where the biographer says that the illustrious German “was fond of wine, and drank daily his two or three bottles. The amount he drank never did more than exhilarate him; never made him unfit for work or for society. Over his wine he sat some hours.” Lewes appended to this passage a quotation from Liebig in which he says that amongst the Rhinelanders “a jolly companion drinks his seven bottles every day, and with it grows as old as Methuselah, is seldom drunk, and has at most the Bardolph mark of a red nose.”

Wine has never been much of an evil in France except as a cause of useless expense. A Frenchman’s wine bill is usually out of proportion to his income, especially in the present day, when common wine is no longer cheap enough to make the quantity consumed a matter of indifference, nor yet dear enough to impose the other and still more effectual economy of abstinence, except in the poorest classes. For my part, I am convinced that to grow sound light wine, as the French once did at marvellously cheap rates (a penny a bottle or even less in years of great abundance), is an immense blessing to a community, because it is the most effectual rival of strong spirits.[52] Sound light wine exhilarates, but it does not brutalise; brandy, acting on excitable brains, drives many literally mad. The effect of dear wine in France has not been favourable to temperance, but the contrary, by increasing the consumption of poisonous spirituous liquors. That has now reached such a pitch in the working classes that drunkenness of the most dangerous kind—the kind unknown in wine countries—is established amongst them as it is in the lower orders of London or Glasgow. In fact, the worst form of Scotch dram-drinking is common in the great French cities.

If a French workman buys wine he must buy it at a low price, and in Paris, where the octroi duties are so high, it is impossible that cheap wine can be unadulterated. I will not presume to say what the “wine” is made of, I do not pretend to know, but at present prices it cannot be the juice of the grape.

Now, let us pass to the pleasanter subject of French temperance. It is very commonly believed in England that every Frenchman must have his café to go to and his theatre. As a matter of fact provincial French people go very little to the theatre, and the cafés, though flourishing, are maintained by a remarkably small number of habitués. Many Frenchmen never go to a café at all, unless perhaps occasionally when travelling. Amongst the daily visitors there is an immense difference in drinking habits. I remember a middle-aged gentleman who confined himself to one tiny glass (like a thimble) of pure cognac per day, an allowance that he never exceeded. Another visits the café every day regularly at six in the afternoon and takes his absinthe, a third drinks only ale, a fourth confines himself to coffee with the petit verre.

With regard to the consumption of wine, there are great numbers of half-bottle drinkers at each meal. The women generally belong to this sect, and half a bottle of light wine, taken whilst eating, is but a gentle stimulus, especially if mixed with water. The use of water with wine varies very much. I never in my life saw a French peasant mix his wine with water; there may be peasants who do it, but I have never met with one. The peasant will drink water abundantly by itself, but when he gets wine he seems to think that to water it would be a sin against the rites of Bacchus. When there is wine on a peasant’s table, the water-bottle is not to be seen.

On the contrary, in the middle and upper classes, it is the general custom to mix water with the vin ordinaire whilst people are eating, but the finer wines are never watered. Then you have all degrees of watering. You have the gentleman who puts three drops of water in his wine in deference to custom, though it is a mere form; you have the conscientious man who mixes the two liquids carefully in equal quantities; and you have the drinker of eau rougie, who would probably be a water-drinker, like an English teetotaller, if he had not before his eyes the dread of the French proverb “Les buveurs d’eau sont méchants.”

I remember, however, one of those drinkers of “reddened water,” who used to maintain that a few drops of wine almost infinitely diluted gave the taste of the grape-juice far more delicately and exquisitely than the unalloyed grape-juice itself. The reader may try the experiment, if he likes. Let him take a glass of water, and just redden it with claret. If he fails to appreciate the exquisite taste of the beverage, it will, at least, inflict no injury on his constitution. Unless, indeed, as the old bacchanalians affirmed, water brings on the dropsy; for what saith the good Maistre Jean Le Houx, the gentle singer who immortalised the Vau de Vire?

In France there is a large class of total abstainers between meals. These observe rigorously the rule of never drinking except at meal-times. They have a set phrase by which they are known, their shibboleth. This phrase is “Je ne bois jamais rien entre mes repas.” They are not teetotallers, as they drink at déjeuner and dinner, but between these periods they observe a strict abstinence, like the Mahometans in the Ramadan fast between the rising and the setting of the sun. They pretend that they are never thirsty, but I do not believe them; it is merely the pride of their sect.

English writers are often on the look-out for subjects of accusation against the French (this attention is reciprocal), and they generally hit upon immorality. May I give them a hint that may be of use, at least in affording the refreshment of change? Why do they not accuse the French of gormandism? There are a hundred proofs of that vice for one of the other. It is visible everywhere in France, and in some parts of the country it predominates over all other pleasures of life. Most well-to-do French people who live in the rural districts and are excessively dull find a solace and an interest twice a day in the prolonged enjoyments of the table. There is no country in the world where so much thought and care, and so much intelligence, are devoted to feeding as in France, and the reward is that the French govern the world of good eating, and their language is the language not of diplomacy only but of that far more important matter the menu. They will talk seriously for an indefinite length of time about the materials of dinners and their preparation. When the English newspapers give an account of a royal feast, they do not tell you what the distinguished personages had to eat, but French reporters give the menu in detail. Some French newspapers present their subscribers with a menu for every day in the year, others announce what will be the dinner at a great hotel.

The love of good cheer in France has all the characters of vulgarity and refinement. In former times gourmand meant a judge of eating, and gourmet a judge of wine. We find those interpretations still in the dictionaries, even in Littré and Lafaye, but custom has given the words a new significance. Gourmet is now universally understood to refer to eating and not to drinking. Gourmand has acquired a lower sense between gourmet and glouton. The gourmand of the present day is a passionate lover of good eating, who gives it inordinate attention, and usually eats more than is good for him. The glouton is the quite unintelligent animal feeder who stuffs himself like a pig; and there is a still worse word, the goulu, which means the voracious man who throws eatables down his throat. There is also goinfre, the man who is very disagreeable to other people in his eating, which he does to excess and dirtily.

The gourmet, on the contrary, is a product of high civilisation. He enjoys with discrimination, and is above the vulgarity of estimating the quality of dishes by their elaboration or their costliness. He values the commonest things, if they are good of their own kind; he will praise well-baked bread or pure water. He is entirely on the side of temperance. A French gourmet once said to me, “I am excessively fond of oysters, but never exceed one dozen, being convinced that after the first dozen the palate has become incapable of fully appreciating the flavour.” A real gourmet preserves his palate in the healthiest and most natural condition. He would not cover an oyster with pepper, nor even squeeze a lemon over it. Plain things are often preferred by a true gourmet to richer things. The uninitiated drink wine and eat cakes at the same time. A gourmet would not do that unless the wine were unworthy of his attention; with a wine of any quality he would eat a crust of bread. A gourmet prefers the simplest meal, such as a fried mutton chop, if it is really well cooked, to an elaborate banquet where the cookery is less than excellent. In Thackeray’s imitation of Horace (Persicos Odi) he expresses contempt for “Frenchified fuss” in the first stanza, but in the second he exactly hits the taste of a French gourmet in praising the good qualities of a simple dish—

I knew a Parisian who was a gourmet in Thackeray’s manner, and his way of living was to order one dish of meat, one of vegetables, and a little dessert, at an excellent and expensive restaurant à la carte. He did not desire the more abundant feeding at the restaurants à prix fixe and the tables d’hôte. He drank very moderately also; in a word, he lived as a gentleman ought to live, without excess, yet with perfect appreciation.

The influence of the French gourmet on the price of eatables is remarkable. The dealers know that extravagant prices will be given for anything that is exceptionally good. The result is that the Parisian connoisseur in good living feeds very expensively, and his tendency is to maintain a high standard of costliness.

The accusation against the French that they are a nation of gormandisers is to be understood with the reserves that I have now indicated, but I must add, in justice, that France is a country of plain living as well as of rich and elaborate living. The peasants, a very numerous class, live with extreme sobriety and simplicity; the soldiers, also a numerous class, live just sufficiently and no more; the priests live simply as a rule, though they are said to enjoy a good dinner when invited to a château, the only pleasure they have. Then you find large classes in which simple living is a matter of necessity, such as the members of religious houses and young people in educational establishments.

Nevertheless, I believe it is true that the love of good living in the middle and upper classes amounts to a serious evil, and actually operates as a restraint on population since it would be as cheap to feed a large family in a very plain way as to feed a small one on luxuries. My opinion is that luxury in food and dress are the two great parents of evil in France.

In drinking, England is a country of extremes. It has the misfortune of not being a wine-producing country, with the usual consequence that the consumption of ardent spirits is very great, and drunkenness of the most dangerous and most brutal kind very common. On the other hand, this horror has produced a reaction going as far in the other extreme, so that there are far more water-drinkers in England than in France. What is called “moderation” is also much more moderate in England. I lunch with an Englishman in London, and observe that he takes perhaps a single glass of claret and nothing after it; a Frenchman equally moderate would take half a bottle, with coffee and cognac afterwards. The same Englishman will never drink in a public-house from January to December; the Frenchman sees no harm in visiting his café every day.

Vulgar French people delight in accusing English ladies of dipsomania. Some of them drink, I have known several instances, and I have known instances of the same infirmity in France, but I am quite convinced that Englishwomen in the middle and upper classes are usually more abstemious than French. Comparing people equally sober, equally removed from all suspicion of drunkenness, a bottle of claret would last the English lady a week and the French lady a day. It is true that the English lady might take a glass of port after dinner, but that answers to the Frenchwoman’s occasional liqueur.

I am writing of the present, that is, of the ninth decade of the nineteenth century, when excessive drinking has come to be considered vulgar in England. French accusers delight in taking the worst examples of the past and in representing them as the average of the present. I was reading lately a French book of travels in England, including an account of a visit to a large country house. There are certain signs by which an English critic knows at once whether narratives of this kind are genuine or fictitious. A Frenchman who invents anything about England, and pretends that he is recounting a real experience, is sure to invent clumsily. In the present instance, I know by two pieces of evidence that the writer has been drawing upon his imagination. He makes the men in the smoking-room, after dinner, talk about the absent ladies in a style absolutely incompatible with English breeding, and he describes these gentlemen as having all got nearly or completely drunk before they were helped to bed by the domestics. This Frenchman has read that such things happened under the Georges, and as he is not describing a real experience he makes our contemporaries drunk to gratify the malevolence of French readers.

England is now a country of very temperate, very intemperate, and very abstemious people. If a man belongs to the refined classes he will probably take wine in moderation, perhaps in great moderation; if he belongs to the humbler classes he may be a besotted drunkard, a sober workman who appreciates a glass of beer, or an apostle of total abstinence with a blue ribbon in his button-hole. The country spends too much in drink, but its expenditure is gradually diminishing, and the burden of it falls very unequally on the citizens. Looking to the future, which is more interesting than the past, I may add that it is hopeful for England, which is improving, and discouraging for France, which is going from bad to worse.

As to eating, the English are rarely either gourmands or gourmets, but they have a rooted belief in the value of an abundant flesh diet, which cannot be good for health unless accompanied by hard exercise. Although the English are not extravagant like the French from a love of expensive delicacies, they are extravagant in the display of great abundance. Immense pieces of the finest meat in the world appear on English tables, and then disappear to be replaced by others equally imposing. People tell you of the quantities eaten by their servants with a smile of indulgence. In the poorer classes there is waste of another kind from simple ignorance and want of culinary economy and art. In a French household the smallest fragments make a little dish, and nothing is lost; in England this kind of economy is practised least where it would be most required. In the French middle and lower classes the daily use of soups is an economy, as the soup is the final save-all of the little establishment, and it presents the materials in the most nourishing and digestible form. As to extravagance, the well-to-do French and English may be equally extravagant, but in different ways, and as to temperance in eating, there is little difference. The French eat heavier meals, but they eat less frequently. Each nation accuses the other of over-eating, and doctors say that the accusation is merited in both cases.

One is sometimes struck in England by the combination of a very stately service with a very plain table. Fine linen, expensive plate, formidably dignified servants, and all this ceremony about a leg of mutton and some boiled potatoes. Thackeray amused himself with noting this contrast. It is a revelation of English character, which is deeply attached to state and style, but is really not given over to sensual pleasures. Occasionally the English go rather far, perhaps, in the direction of plain living. The total abstainer gives you pure water, the very moderate drinker forgets to pass the decanter, and so do his servants. I remember being invited once to an early dinner in the country and riding to it several miles in drenching rain. I was cold and wet, for it was winter, and I looked forward confidently to warm old English hospitality; but my host had principles, and principles are nothing if you do not act up to them, so he gave me a slice of cold beef with a glass of cold water. That menu was easily and long remembered.