Brillat-Savarin
A French magistrate, born at Belley in 1775, dying at St. Denis in 1826. He is the most delightful and seductive of all the writers on gastronomy, though he might never have written if Grimod de la Reynière had not led the way. His work entitled Physiologie du Goût is a masterpiece. It was published anonymously the year before his death, so that he had not the happiness of reaping his reward and seeing his renown. He gave to the pleasures of the table a poetry little thought of before, and though his works are in prose he is to be ranked as one of the most original of poets. He has himself reported what one of his friends Brown Betty said to him, "You have but one fault: you eat too quickly." That, however, is a great fault in a gourmet, and it is a fault which is much too common in England. Napoleon lost the two great battles of Borodino and Leipsic through indigestion brought on by his habit of eating too fast. Let the frivolous pause and think of this-the chance of losing an empire through unseemly disregard of the dinner-table.
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