were invented by the Duchess de Berry, daughter of the regent
Orleans, who himself invented _Pain a la d'Orleans_, while to Richelieu
we are indebted for hundreds of dishes besides the renowned mayonnaise.

_Cailles a la Mirepois_, _Chartreuse a la Mauconseil_, _Poulets a la
Villeroy_, betray the tastes of the three great ladies whose name they
bear.

But not in courts alone has the art had its devotees. Almost every great
name in French literature brings to mind something its owner said or did
about cooking. Dumas, who was a prince of cooks, and of whom it is
related that in 1860, when living at Varennes, St. Maur, dividing his
time, as usual, between cooking and literature (_Lorsqu'il ne faisait
pas sauter un roman, il faisait sauter des petits oignons_), on
Mountjoye, a young artist friend and neighbor, going to see him, he
cooked dinner for him. Going into the poultry yard, after donning a
white apron, he wrung the neck of a chicken; then to the kitchen garden
for vegetables, which he peeled and washed himself; lit the fire, got
butter and flour ready, put on his saucepans, then cooked, stirred,
tasted, seasoned until dinner time. Then he entered in triumph, and
announced, "_Le diner est servi_." For six months he passed three or
four days a week cooking for Mountjoye. This novelist's book says, in
connection with the fact that great cooks in France have been men of
literary culture, and literary men often fine cooks, "It is not
surprising that literary men have always formed the _entourage_ of a
great chef, for, to appreciate thoroughly all there is in the culinary
art, none are so well able as men of letters; accustomed as they are to
all refinements, they can appreciate better than others those of the
table," thus paying himself and confreres a delicate little compliment
at the expense of the non-literary world; but, notwithstanding the naive
self-glorification, he states a fact that helps to point my moral, that
indifference to cooking does not indicate refinement, intellect, or
social pre-eminence.

Brillat-Savarin, grave judge as he was, and abstemious eater, yet has
written the book of books on the art of eating. It was he who said,
"Tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are," as pregnant with
truth as the better-known proverb it paraphrases.

Malherbe loved to watch his cook at work. I think it was he who said, "A
coarse-minded man could never be a cook," and Charles Baudelaire, the
Poe of Fran