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From a letter Balzac sent to Levavasseur, while finishing the last pages of the manuscript, it appears that he commenced his task as a jest and completed it with more serious purpose: "I intended to dash off a pleasantry," he told him, "and you came one morning and asked me to do in three months what Brillat-Savarin took ten years to do. I haven't an idea which is not the Physiology.
"We could put up a large reception-hall with a portion of our capital, and advertise a series of nights say one a week throughout the season. These would be Warriors' Night, Story-tellers' Night, Poets' Night, Chafing-dish Night under the charge of Brillat-Savarin, and so on.
The count, though rather tall and constitutionally slender, had of late acquired some protuberance of stomach, but he "restrained it to the majestic," as Brillat-Savarin once said. His clothes were always so well made, that he kept about his whole person an air of youth, something active and agile, due no doubt to his habits of exercise, fencing, riding, and hunting.
Brillat-Savarin was a French magistrate and legislator, whose reputation as man of letters rests mainly upon a single volume, his inimitable 'Physiologie du Goût'. Although writing in the present century, he was essentially a Frenchman of the old régime, having been born in 1755 at Belley, almost on the border-line of Savoy, where he afterwards gained distinction as an advocate.
The workshop, the work, the provisions have not determined the instinct. The instinct comes first; it lays down laws instead of being subject to them. Brillat-Savarin, when pronouncing his famous maxim, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are," certainly never suspected the signal confirmation which the entomological world would bestow upon his saying.
Then the first course appeared in all its glory; it would have done honor to the late Cambaceres, Brillat-Savarin would have celebrated it. The wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, white and red, were royally lavished. This first part of the banquet might been compared in every way to a rendering of some classical tragedy. The second act grew a trifle noisier.
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