EATING-AND TALKING

Evening Star, Issue 21743, 11 June 1934, Page 11

EATING-AND TALKING

CONVERSATION THE SAUCE A resident in Paris has lately told us that a change has stolen over the Parisians as regards their meals. Because. nowadays men travel faster and work faster than formerly,, the idea is that they must eat faster, too (says H. C. Mmchin in the London ‘ Sunday Times ’). There are noted restaurants in the capital where until recently it was the mode to spend as much as two hours over dejeuner, but where now twenty minutes are deemed adequate. Clients may even be seen taking cold lunch at the counter, horrified portent to those who are aware of the depth of French social conservatism. What happens to conversation in circumstances so revolutionary? Good talk, oldfashioned Parisians are grumbling, has hitherto been considered an essential element of a good meal. Nevertheless I can supply a proof that talk is not invariably, among the French, a concomitant of eating. Years ago, after a hot and tedious train journey from Bordeaux, [ reached Carcassonne, and in due course found myself one of a large company at dinner at a hotel salle-a-manger. There were at least fifty of us. The guests, all men, were, I found, mainly residents of the town, who habitually ate in this communal fashion. Wives and children, presumably, fed at home. Having heard so much about Gallic vivacity, especially in the Midi, I anticipated a babble of animated voices; judge, then, of my surprise on finding that the meal, which was long and well-served, began, proceeded, and ended in a chilling and unbroken silence! It suggested a feast of the deaf and dumb. It was about as discouraging as a Barmecide repast. It was Tike a Quakers’ meeting, with viands thrown in and the inner light of inspiration thrown out. It was a gastronomic death in life. Oh for some Tartarin to burst in from neighbouring Tarascon, and rend with magniloquent explosion of egoism that sinister quiet—a quiet born not of calm, seemingly, but of apprehension. But no Tartan came

Was this the procedure night after night, one wondered* in that lofty, spacious chamber? Or could the presence of a single alien put an ox, so to say (Aeschylus has said it) upon the general tongue? No valid explana tion was forthcoming. I could only conjecture that some local or provincial crisis was brewing, on which Catholics and Freemasons were acutely sundered, and that the owners of those dark, unsmiling faces were adherents of the opposing factions, united only in the single purpose of not giving themselves away by so much as a solitary word. A BAD SYSTEM. What a contrast to the experience of an English traveller seated at meat in a hotel at IJlm, when the officers of a German regiment on the march swarmed in clamorous for food. No wave over broke upon the beach with

a more resonant roar. All at once did those warriors talk, and all at the top of their voices, and so it continued to the end of the meal. The dinner at Carcassonne reminds me of the ennui_ of quasi-silent meals at a school for little boys in England, where conversation was restricted, byorder, to the master and his assistant. You can imagine that the utterances of the the first were elevated and tendentious, and that the responses of the second were rich in obsequious assent. “My friends,” said Mr Pecksniff, on a well-known occasion, “ let us be moral.” It was a little like that.

The little boys had to endure in silence. But the bolder among them, when the ordeal was over, would sometimes express themselves about it to the usher with refreshing candour. He did not childe them much, poor fellow, being in substantial agreement. This was a miserable, oppressive system, not conducing to health, temper, or anything else worth preserving. Let us hope that medieval monks got more profit from what was read aloud to them in the refectory than the little boys did from the edifying remarks of their masters. THE HAPPY MEAN. Such repression, of course, might invade a private table. Was there not our vanished relative, James, known to us in his serene old age, whose boyhood’s fate it was to pass his holidays at the house of a severe and taciturn uncle? James could not recall that any speech passed between them in the course of dinner. He did not mind that, being usually hungry. But ho did recall with feeling the avuncular remark which made a second helping impossible, and invariably signified that he might “get down”: “James, will you have anything more? I have done.”

If people, whether in Paris, the Provinces, or England, eat m silence, they will eat too fast, and then farewell Eupepsia! An interchange of ideas is as essential to the success of a meal as are the contents of the cruet, whether we are feasting in summer under the shade of boughs, which need not then be melancholy, or in winter with curtains drawn and a fire blazing on the hearth. Then let quip overtake jest, and comment flit easily from theme to theme, for so shall “ good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both.”

But conversation must not be overdone, any more than the roast. “ We’re talking too much,” says Stephen Dallison in Galsworthy’s ‘Fraternity’; “we really must let your father eat!” And the remainder of the dinner was achieved in silence. In fine, it is Aristotle’s good doctrine of the mean that calls aloud for application to talk at the meals taken in common.