When I need a word and do not find it in French, I select it from other tongues, and the reader has either to understand or translate me. Such is my fate.

To invite people to dine with us is to make ourselves responsible for their well-being for as long as they are under our roofs.

The Spanish ladies of the New World are madly addicted to chocolate, to such a point that, not content to drink it several times each day, they even have it served to them in church.

Meals, in the sense in which we understand this word, began with the second age of the human species.

Another novelty is the tea-party, an extraordinary meal in that, being offered to persons that have already dined well, it supposes neither appetite nor thirst, and has no object but distraction, no basis but delicate enjoyment.

The pleasures of the table belong to all times and ages, to every country and every day; they go hand in hand with all our other pleasures, outlast them, and remain to console us for their loss.

An intelligently planned feast is like a summing up of the whole world, where each part is represented by its envoys.