The Physiology of Taste (36 page)

The pyloris is a kind of fleshy funnel, which acts as communication between the stomach and the intestines; it is so formed that food can go back through it only with the greatest of difficulty. This important part of the viscera is sometimes obstructed; death from hunger is the result, after long and hideous suffering.

The intestine which receives the food as it passes from the pyloris is the duodenum; it has been thus named because it is about twelve finger-widths in length.

Once the chyle has reached the duodenum it undergoes still another change when it is mixed with the bile and the pancreatic juices; it loses the sour greyish color it had before, turns yellow,
and begins to take on that faecal odor which grows steadily stronger as it approaches the rectum. The various substances involved in this mixture act upon each other: the chyle continues to form and develop, and analogous gases are born at the same time.

The continuation of the organic impulse which drives the chyle out of the stomach pushes it toward the small intestines: there it withdraws from the solid matter and is absorbed by the organs meant to use it, so that it is carried toward the liver, where it will mingle with the bloodstream, to rectify the losses caused by the absorption of the vital organs and by breathing.

It is rather difficult to explain how the chyle, which is a white and almost tasteless and odorless liquid, can thus extract itself from a solid mass whose color, taste, and odor are necessarily very pronounced.

However it may be, this extraction of the chyle seems the true purpose of digestion, and as soon as it has blended with the bloodstream, man is made aware of it by a feeling of renewed vitality and an instinctive realization that his bodily losses have been repaired.

The digestion of liquids is much less complicated than that of solids, and can be explained in a few words.

The nutritive particles of a liquid separate themselves from it, become part of the chyle, and share all its hazardous changes.

The purely liquid part is absorbed by the sucking interior of the stomach and thrown into the bloodstream: from there it is carried by the draining arteries to the kidneys, which filter and develop it, and by means of the ureters
*
lead it into the bladder in the form of urine.

Once it has arrived at this last receptacle, and in spite of being held there by a sphincter muscle, the urine does not stay long; its exciting action gives rise to a need to urinate; soon a voluntary constriction forces it into the light of day, and it gushes out through those irrigation canals which everyone knows about and which we have agreed never to name.

Digestion lasts a short or a long time, following the characteristics of each person. However, it can be allotted a general period of about seven hours: a little more than three hours of work for the stomach, and the rest for the passage as far as the rectum.

By means of this explanation, which I have extracted from the best writers and have tried as politely as possible to strip of its anatomical dryness and its scientific abstractions, my readers will be able to judge fairly accurately for themselves just where the last meal they have eaten is located: during the first three hours, it will be in the stomach; later, in the intestinal tract; and, after seven or eight hours, in the rectum, waiting its turn to be expelled.

81: Digestion is of all the bodily operations the one which has the greatest influence on the moral state of the individual.
³
This assertion will astonish nobody, and cannot be contradicted.

The simplest psychological principles teach us that the human soul is influenced only by means of the organs which are its tools and which put it in contact with the outside world; from this it follows that when these organs are badly cared for, starved, or irritated, such a state of degradation exercises an inevitable power over the sensations which are the intermediary and occasional means of intellectual activity.

Thus the customary process of digestion, and above all its results, makes us habitually sad or gay, taciturn or talkative, morose or melancholy, without our even questioning it, and especially without our being able to deny it.

Under this subject could be classified the whole civilized world, in three main categories: the regulars, the constipated, and the diarrhetic.

It is well proven that the people found in each of these divisions not only have similar natural dispositions and certain propensities in common, but that they are even alike in some ways in their manners of fulfiling the duties which chance has thrust upon them during their lifetimes.

In order to clarify my point with an example, I shall take one from the vast field of literature. I believe that men of letters more
often than not owe the style in which they have chosen to write to the state of their bowels.

Following this theory, the comic poets must be found among the regulars, the tragic among the most constipated, and the elegiac and pastoral among the lax and diarrhetic: from which it follows in turn that the most tearful poet is separated from the funniest by no more than a certain degree of intestinal activity.

It was in applying this same theory to the subject of courage that someone at the court of Louis XIV cried out, during the war days when Eugene of Savoy was doing his worst to France, “Oh, if I could only loosen his bowels for eight days! That way I could soon make of him the yellowest dastard in all Europe!”

And an English general once said, “Let us be sure to hurry our soldiers into battle while they still have a bit of good beef in their bellies!”

Digestion is often accompanied by a slight chilliness among the young, and by a strong wish to sleep among the old.

In the first case it is because Nature withdraws the surface heat of the body to use it in the interior; in the second, it is the same action, which, weakened by age, is not strong enough to take care at one time of both digestion and the excitation of the senses.

In the first moments of digestion, it is dangerous to give oneself up to mental labors, and still more dangerous to abandon oneself to the frenzies of physical passion. The current which flows always into the cemeteries of Paris carries along with it every year some hundreds of men who, after having dined well and sometimes after having dined too well, have not known how to close their eyes and stop up their ears.

This observation of mine has a warning in it, even for youth which perforce will pay no heed; a bit of advice for mature men, who forget that time never stops in its flight; and a life-and-death law for men who have stepped over the brink of fifty (
ON THE WRONG SIDE FIFTY
).

Some people are cantankerous as long as they are digesting: this is not the time either to propose new projects or to ask favors of them.
⁴

Marshal Augereau
⁵
was a fine example of this; for the first hour after he had eaten he was ready to kill anyone, friend or foe.

I once heard him say that there were in the army two people whose execution could at any moment be ordered by the commander in chief, that is the chief paymaster and the chief-of-staff. Both these gentlemen were present: General Chérin replied in an obsequious but witty way, and the paymaster said nothing but probably thought none the less on it.

I was at this time attached to the Marshal’s staff, and my place was always laid at his table; but I rarely sat there, because of my dislike for these chronic fits of bad temper; I was afraid that, at a word from me, he might send me to digest my meal in prison.

I have often met him since then in Paris; and as he very obligingly told me of his regret at not having seen more of me in the old days, I did not hide the reason from him. We laughed together over it, and he more or less admitted that I had not been totally mistaken.

One time when we were stationed at Offenburg,
⁶
a complaint was made by the staff that there was neither game nor fish to eat.

This lament was justified, for it is a maxim of warfare that the conquerors must be well-fed at the expense of the conquered. Therefore, that very day I wrote a most polite letter to the chief forester, pointing out the evil and prescribing its remedy.

The forester was a tough old soldier, tall, dry, sun-parched, who could not stand the sight of us, and who undoubtedly made us uncomfortable in the hopes that we would not take root in his land. His answer, therefore, was more or less negative and full of evasions. His keepers had fled, afraid of our soldiers; the fishermen no longer paid attention to game laws; the waters were too high, etc., etc. I made no reply to such good reasons; but I sent him ten grenadiers to be well-lodged and boarded by him until further notice.

My ruse was successful: no more than two days later, at the crack of dawn, a richly and heavily loaded wagon arrived for us; the gamekeepers had obviously come back, and the fishermen were toeing the line, for we had been brought, in game and fish, enough to treat ourselves for more than a week: deer, woodcocks, carp, pike. It was a gift from heaven.

I delivered the unhappy forester from his hostages, on receiving such an expiatory windfall. He came to see us; I talked
reasonably with him; and for the rest of our stay there we could have nothing but praise for his generosity.

1.
M. Jourdain, the chief character in Molière’s
BOURGEOIS GENTILHOMME
, is an old merchant who has suddenly grown rich, and who hires a string of teachers to educate him. When one of them explains to him the difference between poetry and prose, the old fellow is astonished to find that all his life he has been speaking prose without even trying to!

2.
Brillat-Savarin uses the word chyle throughout this section, although according to the great Greek physician Galen, who died about 200
A.D.
, there is a difference between chyle and chyme. The latter comes first, and is the acid pulp made from food by gastric secretion. From this, chyle is formed by the action of bile and pancreatic juice.

3.
It is all too easy to add to this true truism, to quote what one more glib or inspired human being has said about it. Disraeli, for instance, who might fall into either category, once wrote in an essay on statesmanship: “A good deal depends upon education, something upon nerves and habit, but most upon digestion.”

4.
An endocrinologist once told me that the best procedure when business must be combined with eating is to watch your victim’s ear lobes and feed him rare beef. When his lobes turn ruddy, make your proposition … and quickly!

5.
Pierre François Charles Augereau (1757–1816) was a brilliant soldier who was made both Marshal of France and Duke of Castiglione by the grateful Napoleon, but who died in disgrace as a quisling.

6.
This pretty town in the grand duchy of Baden was captured by the French in 1797.

82:
MAN IS NOT
made to enjoy an indefinite activity; Nature has shaped him for an interrupted existence, and his perceptions are bound to cease after a certain period of time. This period can be prolonged by varying the sensations which are aroused in it; but such continuity of a man’s existence ends by making him crave rest. Rest leads to sleep, and sleep brings dreams.

And here we find ourselves at the final fringes of humanity: the man who sleeps is no longer a social being. Although the law still protects him, he himself is outside its control.

This is the right place for me to relate a fairly singular incident which was told to me by Dom. Duhaget, who was prior, many years ago, of the Carthusian monastery at Pierre-Châtel.

Dom. Duhaget came from a very fine Gascon family, and had served with distinction in the army: he had been a captain in the infantry for twenty years, and was a chevalier of the order of Saint-Louis. I have never known a man of deeper piety nor one whose conversation was more delightful.

“When I was Prior at …, before coming to Pierre-Châtel,” he began his story, “we had a brother of melancholic humor and sombre character, who was known to be a sleepwalker.

“Sometimes he would leave his cell and then return to it by himself, during an attack; occasionally he would lose his way and have to be led back. Doctors were consulted, and their prescriptions were followed; finally his seizures occurred less often, and we forgot to worry about him.

“One night when I had not gone to bed at my usual hour, but was at my desk going through some papers, I heard the door of my apartment open quietly, since I almost never kept it
locked, and then I saw this brother enter, in a state of complete somnambulism.

“His eyes were wide open, but fixed. He wore only the tunic in which he was supposed to sleep, and he held an enormous knife in his hand.

“He went straight to my bed, whose place in the room he knew, and it seemed as if he verified, by feeling with his hand, the fact that I was really lying there. Then he struck three such ferocious blows that after the blade had pierced the covers it buried itself deep in the mattress, or rather in the bag of straw which served as one.

“When he had first passed before me, his face was contracted and scowling, but when he had finished his stabbing he turned around, and I could see that his whole countenance had cleared and that a look of satisfaction filled it.

“The light of the two lamps which burned on my desk made no impression on his eyes; he went out as he had entered, opening and closing with caution two doors which led to my cell, and soon I made sure that he had continued directly and peaceably to his own.

“You can imagine,” the prior went on, “the state I was in during this ghastly performance. I shuddered with horror to see the danger I had escaped, and gave thanks to Providence for it; but my emotion was such that I could not close my eyes for the rest of the night.