Huysmans' sad young man, for instance: his “farewell dinner to a temporarily dead virility,” as the invitations shaped like bereavement notices called it, was a masterpiece of jaded extravagance. He needed to be a millionaire, as well as a determined exquisite, to serve in a black-draped room lighted by green flames, attended by nude black virgins wearing silver slippers and stockings trimmed with dripping tears, a dinner beginning with blackest caviar and ending with blackheart cherries. He needed to be at least a demimillionaire to fill his fountain with ink for that one dubious feast, and line his ash-covered paths with cemetery pine trees.
He needed, above all, to be sublimely indifferent to the taint of vulgarity … for his earnest efforts at eccentricity were indeed vulgar, and ridiculous, too, in a basically shameful and extravagant way. All that saved them from oblivion, so that we still read about them, was his dignified disregard of anything but his own kind of pleasure.
It is the same with some of the dishes we still read about with a strange fascination, cooked for the most dissipated of the Romans, two thousand years or so ago. Doubtless many of those men tried to astound their sycophants by serving whole platters of the tongues of little birds that had been trained to talk before they went into the pot. We do not remember their names, nor anything more than their vulgarly idiotic waste. But what if one of those epicures, greatly in love with a proud lady named Livia, had taught a thousand birds to sing her name, Livia, Livia, to the moment of most perfect diction, and then had served forth to the lady a fine pie of their tongues, split, honied, and impaled on twigs of myrrh? Then, I think, that fat lover would still be known to us for what he was, an exquisite … silly perhaps, extravagant certainly, but with his own dignity about him.
I remember deciding once, long ago and I believe after reading Ellwanger's Pleasures of the Table for the first time, that the most exquisite dish I had ever heard of was a salad of satin-white endive with large, heavily scented Parma violets scattered through it. It meant everything subtle and intense and esthetically significant in my private gastronomy, just as, a few years earlier, a brown-skinned lover with a turquoise set in one ear lobe was my adolescent epitome of dreamed passion. It is a misfortune, perhaps, that not many months ago the salad that had been a symbol was set before me in a bowl.
The fact that it was not very good was relatively unimportant: the dressing was light to the point of being innocuous and unable to stand up under the perfumed assault of the blossoms. The thing that disappointed me in it, finally and forever, was that it was not served exquisitely, and by an exquisite, with an exquisite disregard of the vulgar.
Instead, it was concocted and presented with both affectation and awkwardness and, at best, an attempt at the insidious decadence which is a prerequisite of my definition. It became suddenly ridiculous.
I blushed for my long dream of it and felt a hollowness … for where again will I know so certainly that such-and-such a dish is it? What will it be? Expense is not enough, for sure, and no intricate silverware, no ritual of serving and compounding, can guarantee the magic. There must, for me at least, be a faint nebular madness, dignified no matter how deliberate, to a dinner that is exquisite….
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