shamed. Every time we sin
against self-respect at the bidding of the ruling passion, we rivet
its hold upon us; the more that passion requires of us, the stronger
it grows, every sacrifice increasing, as it were, the value of a
satisfaction for which so much has been given up, till the negative
sum-total of renouncements looms very large in a man's imagination.
Pons, for instance, after enduring the insolently patronizing looks of
some bourgeois, incased in buckram of stupidity, sipped his glass of
port or finished his quail with breadcrumbs, and relished something of
the savor of revenge, besides. "It is not too dear at the price!" he
said to himself.

After all, in the eyes of the moralist, there were extenuating
circumstances in Pons' case. Man only lives, in fact, by some personal
satisfaction. The passionless, perfectly righteous man is not human; he
is a monster, an angel wanting wings. The angel of Christian mythology
has nothing but a head. On earth, the righteous person is the
sufficiently tiresome Grandison, for whom the very Venus of the
Crosswords is sexless.

Setting aside one or two commonplace adventures in Italy, in which
probably the climate accounted for his success, no woman had ever smiled
upon Pons. Plenty of men are doomed to this fate. Pons was an abnormal
birth; the child of parents well stricken in years, he bore the stigma
of his untimely genesis; his cadaverous complexion might have been
contracted in the flask of spirit-of-wine in which science preserves
some extraordinary foetus. Artist though he was, with his tender,
dreamy, sensitive soul, he was forced to accept the character which
belonged to his face; it was hopeless to think of love, and he remained
a bachelor, not so much of choice as of necessity. Then Gluttony, the
sin of the continent monk, beckoned to Pons; he rushed upon temptation,
as he had thrown his whole soul into the adoration of art and the cult
of music. Good cheer and bric-a-brac gave him the small change for the
love which could spend itself in no other way. As for music, it was
his profession, and where will you find the man who is in love with
his means of earning a livelihood? For it is with a profession as
with marriage: in the long length you are sensible of nothing but the
drawbacks.

Brillat-Savarin has deliberately set himself to justify the gastronome,
but perhaps even he has not dwelt sufficiently on the reality of the
pleasures of the table. The demands o