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French Gastronomy and
the Magic of Americanism
In the series Politics, History, and Social Change, edited by John C. Torpey

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

Donald Pitkin, Four Germanys

John Torpey and David Jacobson, Transformations of Warfare in the
Contemporary World
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Aidan McGarry and James Jasper, The Identity Dilemma: Social Movements and
Collective Identity
Philipp H. Lepenies, Art, Politics, and Development: How Linear Perspective Shaped
Policies in the Western World
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State Centralization, and Teacher Unionism in France and the United States
Philip S. Gorski, The Protestant Ethic Revisited
Étienne Balibar, Sandro Mezzadra, and Ranabir Samaddar, eds., The Borders of Justice
Kenneth H. Tucker, Jr., Workers of the World, Enjoy! Aesthetic Politics from
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Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the
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Ernesto Verdeja, Unchopping a Tree: Reconciliation in the Aftermath of
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Rebecca Jean Emigh, The Undevelopment of Capitalism: Sectors and Markets in
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Aristide R. Zolberg, How Many Exceptionalisms? Explorations in Comparative
Macroanalysis
Thomas Brudholm, Resentment’s Virtue: Jean Améry and the Refusal to Forgive
Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism,
and Feminism
Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, translated by Assenka Oksiloff, The Holocaust and
Memory in the Global Age
Brian A. Weiner, Sins of the Parents: The Politics of National Apologies in
the United States
Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley, Seeking Mandela: Peacemaking between Israelis
and Palestinians
Marc Garcelon, Revolutionary Passage: From Soviet to Post-Soviet Russia, 1985–2000
Götz Aly and Karl Heinz Roth, translated by Assenka Oksiloff, The Nazi Census:
Identification and Control in the Third Reich
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Uncertainties of Knowledge
Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War
through the Cold War
Rick Fantasia

French Gastronomy and

the Magic of Americanism

TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Philadelphia • Rome • Tokyo
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
www.temple.edu/tempress

Copyright © 2018 by Temple University—Of The Commonwealth System

of Higher Education
All rights reserved
Published 2018

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fantasia, Rick, author.

Title: French gastronomy and the magic of Americanism / Rick Fantasia.
Description: Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2018. | Series:
Politics, history, and social change | Includes bibliographical references
and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021246 (print) | LCCN 2018024830 (ebook) | ISBN
9781439912317 (E-book) | ISBN 9781439912294 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN
9781439912300 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Gastronomy—France. | Popular culture—United States. |
Globalization.
Classification: LCC TX637 (ebook) | LCC TX637 .F28 2018 (print) | DDC
641.01/3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021246

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials,
ANSI Z39.48-1992

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to the memory of

René Métral (1935–2017),

who shared with me his knowledge and love

for French gastronomy,
and

Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002)

whose advice and encouragement

made me think I might be able to make
analytical sense of it
Contents

Preface: Making Sense of both France and “France” ix

Acknowledgments xv

1 Who Killed Bernard Loiseau? 1

2 The Symbolic Economy of French Gastronomy 37
3 Fast Food in France: A Market for the Impossible 91
4 Industrial Cuisine and the “Magic” of Americanism 127
5 Conflicts of Interest: A Cultural Field in Transformation 167

Index 213
Preface
Making Sense of both France and “France”

S
o who am I to be writing a book about France anyway? And a book
about French gastronomy at that! After all, I am American and have
been my entire life. For over half of it I’ve worked as an academic,
teaching and writing about class, culture, and cities, mostly in the United
States. Where, along this intellectual path, did France come from and why
French gastronomy? Frankly, where did I get the chutzpah to think I could
insinuate myself, intellectually, into the very heart of French society and
begin rummaging around in its cultural imagination? In certain ways I
was compelled to engage with “France” because it had always loomed large,
symbolically, in my own cultural imagination. And this, before ever having
visited the country or knowing very much about it. For me, “France” had
always signified a particular expression of “Europe,” in the sense of being
a generic construction that seemed to represent and embody qualities of
refinement, of venerability, of erudition, and of sophistication. Although
not entirely absent from the world I knew, these tended to be rare qualities
in my surroundings growing up. With this preface I’d like to provide a short
“socio-self-analysis” by offering some reflections on my relationship with
France as a place, and with “France” as a symbolic construction. In other
words, I wish to identify the principal social determinants that compelled,
or made possible, the work that produced this book. Although the form
x PR E FAC E

seems autobiographical, its objective is socioanalytic, with the aim of objec-

tifying the experiences that produced this work.1
My first trip to France in 1970 was part of a dual escape strategy. One
purpose was to take myself away from the lure of violent radicalism that had
begun to bubble over among my fellow antiwar activists at a community
college in upstate New York. Our group was largely made up of Vietnam
War veterans, local working-class youths awaiting their fate in the impend-
ing draft lottery, and students from New York City who were seeking ref-
uge upstate as part of their own escape plan. At the time the radicalism of
our rhetoric seemed inadequate to counter the provocations of the Nixon
administration, and so militant action was increasingly contemplated and
quietly discussed (though in retrospect, it seems very possible that those
doing the most to encourage violent actions were undercover provocateurs
working for the government). In the context of this political turbulence,
being a 19-year-old community college student seeing few clear routes ahead
of me, I took the advice of a sympathetic instructor and made a plan to go
to France to study.
The second motive for my escape strategy was to seek a kind of social
refuge in France. In taking out a loan to study in Paris for a year, I was
bankrolling a fantasy of social mobility (a student loan of $1,000 in 1970
somehow covered the cost of a one-way flight, all student fees, and several
months of room and board!). By making my way to Paris, I imagined I was
defying the probability of a conventional lower-middle-class life in upstate
New York and avoiding the social fate of my father, a Willy Loman–like
figure who was a white-collar salesman with a warm, generous, outsized
personality but little self-worth. France was an opening to another world,
as it has been to generations of idealistic young Americans chasing their
bohemian escapade in Paris. For me, Paris was also a site of social levitation
where, despite having arrived with few French language skills, I soaked
in its cultural cornucopia and learned nearly every contour and cranny of
the city by taking a different walking route home every night after the last
metro, from the bars and cafés of the Latin Quarter to a dilapidated but
magnificent little studio apartment in the north of the city. Although the
Paris I inhabited was not the Paris of writers and artists and intellectuals
that filled my cultural imagination, I could begin to imagine what inhabit-
ing that Paris might be like.

1. In this I have been encouraged by Pierre Bourdieu’s socioanalytical orientation in Sketch

for a Self-Analysis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
 Preface  x i

Some years later, and after taking a rather long, meandering route
through college, with stops both before and after for extended stints as a
worker and labor organizer, I went to graduate school to study sociology.
The combination of a less-than-privileged social background and several
years of experience on the shop floor had given me confidence and motiva-
tion to challenge areas of sociological theory and research that concerned
labor and the working class. By taking a critical stance in graduate school
and beyond, I was in a somewhat oblique position in relation to mainstream
sociology, with its strong currents of positivism and its quantitative impera-
tive, and to the radical alternatives that had been spawned in reaction to
it, particularly those weighted down by various inflections of Althusserian
structuralism. It was in this intellectual context that I encountered the work
of Pierre Bourdieu.
One advantage of having gone on to marry into a French family was that
it occasioned regular visits to France during summer breaks and on sabbatical
leaves. These visits were a vantage point from which I could observe the daily
rhythm of life in a small village near the Alps and provided an opportunity
to struggle with the French language skills that had always been so difficult
to master. For an American academic increasingly interested in the sociology
of France, such regular visits provided a valuable observation post. For an
academic attempting to understand the social logic of French gastronomy,
having a father-in-law with a lifetime of experience as a French chef and
restaurant owner was a truly unique gift. He was more than willing to share
the language, techniques, organization, and informal ways of the French
restaurant, all of which had been practiced every day in his kitchen.
I was fortunate to have been introduced to Pierre Bourdieu in 1990, just
as I was beginning a small research project to study the establishment of
markets for American mass culture in France. I was particularly drawn to
the processes of production, marketing, and consumption of fast food, blue
jeans, Disneyland, Tupperware, and other iconic American mass cultural
goods. To be able to read Bourdieu and then be able to discuss this work
with him at various points was an extraordinary privilege that was critically
important on several levels. One thing that I soon understood was that
I would not be able to practice Bourdieu’s analytical approach effectively
if I were only focusing on the social world “out there” (i.e., the empiri-
cal world of American mass cultural goods in France), without, simultane-
ously, analyzing the social world “in here” (i.e., the conceptual universe of
received categories operating inside of my own head). That is, Bourdieu’s
theoretical method required a thorough questioning of the internalized
xii PR E FAC E

social world, a sort of mental and conceptual “housecleaning” through

which the conventional categories of sociological analysis are critically re-
appraised. Fundamentally, this also required a reconsideration of the very
object of my analysis, which meant (in this case) a thorough reexamination
of what I had imagined would be a perfectly reasonable “cultural studies”
approach to “Americanization” in France. This reappraisal prompted me to
erase and to redraw the boundaries of the project several times. At the most
basic level, it pushed me to relinquish a conceptual framework in which
fast food (or “Americanization”) could be understood as a thing-in-itself
and to begin to consider ways in which Americanized mass culture and
traditional (French) cultural forms had been constructed in relation to one
another. Thus, despite the appearance of a relationship of mutual disdain
at the symbolic level, what began to reveal itself was a relationship that
was thoroughly interpenetrated at the institutional level and in completely
counterintuitive ways.
In the summer of 1995, before arriving for one particular meeting with
Bourdieu, I had expected that an early study of fast food in France would
be completed upon the publication of a forthcoming article on the topic.2
During the discussion, however, it became clear that the project was actu­
ally just getting started, for if I were serious about constructing a truly
relational analysis it would require an understanding of the practices and
institutions of haute cuisine, in relation to the practices (and practitioners)
of fast-food production and consumption in France. This meant that on top
of the research I had already completed on the latter I would have to begin
collecting a sufficient quantity of empirical material to allow for a serious
analysis of the former. My father-in-law proved to be extremely helpful in
this regard by serving as an informal, but informed, informant on French
gastronomy, as well as for making available to me a personal archive of
trade magazines and journals from his participation in the chef profession.
Starting with these sources I began to construct a database that had three
elements: (1) biographic dossiers on 37 chefs who had received three-star rat-
ings in the Michelin Guide during the decade of the 1990s; (2) a collection of
the profiles of 244 other French chefs who had received recognition within
the profession during that same decade, by virtue of having been the focus
of at least one profile published by the main professional journal for chefs;
(3) studying the career trajectories of less-consecrated chefs by examin-
ing the resumes of “culinary professionals” that included 792 chefs and

2. R. Fantasia, “Fast Food in France,” Theory and Society 24 (1995).

 Preface  x i i i

640 culinary workers in secondary positions, in a directory put out by the

publishers of an important French culinary guide.3
Such a newly reconfigured (and expanded) project would prove to be
extremely time consuming, since much of the work could only be done
during relatively short windows of time, but it was a thoroughly rewarding
intellectual experience for it forced me to rethink almost everything. This
included a long-standing intellectual commitment to a Marxist analysis that
favored “production” over the cultural and symbolic dimensions of the social
world. Critical to the process of rethinking, especially during its early stages,
were the gestures of support and encouragement from Professor Bourdieu.
Partly, they served to compensate for a relatively modest level of institu-
tional consecration (an educational background outside of the most highly
ranked centers of sociological training, and a somewhat modest position
at an undergraduate college which, although somewhat elevated socially,
stocks only a limited supply of scientific capital). And partly, encourage-
ment from Bourdieu provided a strong source of motivation in a process of
intellectual renovation that might otherwise have seemed too difficult, or
too “impractical,” or simply too unrewarding to a sustained investment of
time in the middle of a busy academic career. To have felt oneself as part
of Bourdieu’s scientific project, if only for a few years, provided a powerful
impetus. Since no one was as aware of the impact of the conditions of intel-
lectual production on scientific work as Bourdieu, it is hard to believe that
the demonstrations of generosity and attention that he extended were with
no thought to their value as a source of symbolic capital. Moreover, in the
process of rethinking, Bourdieu’s analytical method represented a potent al-
ternative source of intellectual/scientific authority, serving as counterweight
to the residues of positivism in American sociology, as well as to both the
preconstructed political requirements of cultural studies and the categorical
imperatives of Marxist theory.
Perhaps most important, Bourdieu’s encouragement provided crucial
symbolic ballast for a project that, among other things, has sought to de-
mystify a cultural domain whose value so many have seemed to have a stake
in safeguarding. Whether fruitful or not at an analytical level, to the extent
that this project disturbs the veil of belief surrounding French gastronomy,
it can be viewed as a challenge to the stylistic pretensions of social and in-
tellectual elites everywhere. Among many things, “Europe,” “France,” and

3. Les Éditions du Bottin Gourmand, Les Étoiles de la gastronomie française 1998–1999

(Paris, 1998).
x iv PR E FAC E

especially French gastronomy have served as symbolic resources furnishing

endless opportunities for social elites to display their good taste and their
cultural plumage to one another. Quite frankly, the prospect of helping to
deflate such pretentions has probably helped me stay focused on this pro-
tracted project for far longer than I otherwise would have imagined.
Acknowledgments

O
ver the long life of this project there were many people who lent
encouragement and criticism, in various forms, and I am extremely
grateful to them all. They include Jérôme Bourdieu, Mary Ann
Clawson, Catherine Eden, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Marita Flisback, Zoe
Greenfield, Chaia Heller, Micah Kleit, Michèle Lamont, Vanina Leschziner,
Emily Ruppel, and Loic Wacquant. In addition, I’d like to thank my hosts and
audiences at a number of Sociology Departments, both in the United States
and abroad, for kindly permitting me to present various parts of this work
at various stages. While I take complete responsibility for all errors of logic
and presentation, this book has benefited greatly from their ideas and insights.
Thanks to Mélusine Bonneau, Anna Marechal, Christiane Métral, and
Nathalie Métral for their assistance with the research at various points, as
well as Jamie Armstrong for her production work and Kate Weigand for
developing the index. Throughout the life of this project I have enjoyed
the support and goodwill of a wonderful group of colleagues in the Smith
College Department of Sociology; and I am grateful to the Provost’s office
and the Committee on Faculty Compensation and Development at Smith
for sabbatical support, travel grants, and other funding assistance that
facilitated the research that has made this book possible. And many thanks
to Ryan Mulligan, Nikki Miller, and the rest of the Temple University Press
team for their work in bringing this book into being.
French Gastronomy and
the Magic of Americanism
1

Who Killed Bernard Loiseau?

A Preliminary Autopsy

I
t is not entirely clear why the sudden death of the master chef Bernard
Loiseau caused such a stir in France. His wide notoriety surely played a
role, as his beaming smile was displayed seemingly everywhere, on tele-
vision screens and across the pages of all the major mass-market magazines.1
It may also have been the sheer incongruity between the brutal way that he
died and the grandeur and elegance of the world that he left behind. Or per-
haps it was that, after having occupied such a central place in such a revered
domain, it was simply impossible for most people to imagine haute cuisine
without the presence of Bernard Loiseau, who was among the grandest of
the grand chefs of France when, on the afternoon of February 24, 2003, at
the age of fifty-two, he retired to his bedroom with his hunting rifle and
took the hard way out. While a medical autopsy left no doubt that it was
he who had pulled the trigger, the absence of a suicide note left family, the
media, colleagues in the culinary profession, and most everyone else search-
ing for a motive.

1. A poll published by the trade magazine L’Hôtellerie indicated that almost nine out of ten
French people recognized the face of Bernard Loiseau, making him perhaps the most widely
recognized of all the chefs in France, according to William Echikson, in “Death of a Chef,”
New Yorker, May 12, 2003, p. 61.
2 CH APTER 1

Almost immediately, speculation centered on the downgrading of

Loiseau’s la Côte d’Or restaurant by the Gault&Millau guide, which had
recently lowered his rating from nineteen to seventeen, out of a possible
twenty points. Paul Bocuse, Loiseau’s longtime friend and probably the
most venerated of the grand chefs of France, bitterly declared “Bravo, Gault-
Millau, you have won,” noting that “Gault-Millau took away two points,
and, along with two or three press articles, that is what killed Bernard.”2
Jacques Pourcel, renowned chef and president of the Chambre Syndicale
de la haute cuisine française, circulated a letter to his colleagues blaming
“terrible media pressure” for the death of Loiseau; while François Simon,
food critic for the newspaper Le Figaro, suggested that Loiseau’s la Côte
d’Or might have been in danger of losing its third star in the all-important
Michelin Guide.3
The entire French culinary profession seemed to engage in a long mo-
ment of introspection following Loiseau’s demise, with the outsized influ-
ence of the gastronomic guides as a central focus of culpability. Within
months of the tragedy a survey of head chefs was commissioned by a restau-
rant industry trade magazine that posed the question unambiguously: “The
tragic disappearance of Bernard Loiseau, last February 24th has revived a
lively polemic on gastronomic guides and critiques. What is your opinion
of the latter?”4 The chef/respondents were offered several structured answers
to choose from, but overall their survey responses were quite muted. Only
10.5 percent of the chefs agreed with the statement that the gastronomic
guides “create an impossible level of stress”; while an even smaller percent-
age (7.7 percent) indicated that they had themselves been judged “wrongly”
by the guides (37.5 percent thought that food critics failed to visit their
restaurants regularly enough to make an informed critique). It probably
should not be surprising that just a small percentage of chefs were willing
to express enmity or resentment with respect to gastronomic guides since,

2. Craig S. Smith, “Bitterness Follows French Chef ’s Death,” New York Times, February
26, 2003, p. A3. Two days earlier, after having spoken with Loiseau by telephone and finding
him depressed, Bocuse had sent him a photo of the two of them on which he had written,
“Bernard, life is beautiful” (“La Disparition tragique du chef Bernard Loiseau,” Le Monde,
February 25, 2003).
3. See Echikson, “Death of a Chef,” pp. 61–62.
4. The survey, by Néorestauration magazine, was conducted by fax on a sample of 3,920
head chefs in a wide variety of restaurants and kitchens (commercial, institutional, independ-
ent, and chain establishments) and had a 9.92 percent (389) response rate. See Patrice Cec-
conello, “Les Guides gastronomiques: Un baromètre indispensible,” Néorestauration, no. 400,
July/August 2003, p. 36.
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 3

as a group of “believers,” these practitioners of the gastronomic faith could

not be expected to easily or simply reject the system of belief that governed
their professional lives.
In response to the death of Loiseau, a representative of the Gault&Millau
guide immediately rushed to deny culpability. Its head, Patrick Mayenobe,
reportedly asserted, “It’s not a bad score or one less star that killed him. . . .
This great chef must have had other worries,” adding “on the contrary, he
said in 2000 that if he passed from 19 to 17 out of 20 [rating points], that
it would be a formidable challenge for him to return to the top”; while a
spokesperson for Michelin reportedly “would only express sadness for Loi-
seau’s death and confirm that his stars were safe—for this year at least.”5
While the loss of a Michelin star could have a seriously damaging effect on
the career of a chef, including on their position and reputation within the
profession, and therefore in French society, not to mention the economic vi-
ability of their restaurant, the power of the Gault&Millau rating was much
less significant at the time of Loiseau’s death. I show in this book that not
only was its power of consecration always a distant second to the power of
the Michelin Guide but whatever influence it once wielded has diminished
in recent years, thereby complicating any clear understanding of his reac-
tion. After all, at the time Loiseau took his life he still held the highest rating
in the more important Michelin Guide.6
Of course it was also possible that Loiseau harbored a “fear of falling,”
or an anxiety about losing a Michelin star. Indeed, several months prior he
had attended a meeting at Michelin headquarters in Paris, where—after
having been gently warned, “stay in your kitchen and don’t do too much
business”—he is said to have confided to Paul Bocuse that “he would kill
himself if he lost a star.”7 Later, Michelin’s director of publications, Derek
Brown, with whom Loiseau had met, denied the significance of the meeting,
noting that “Bernard was his usual charming, warm, dynamic self. . . . We
didn’t and never would threaten to take away a star, and we did not advise
him what to do. We are not a consultancy, after all.”8

5. Quoted in J. B. “Disparition tragique”; and Amanda Ripley, “Fallen Star,” TIME Eur-
ope, vol. 161, no. 10, March 10, 2003, p. 47.
6. At the time of his suicide he knew that he had retained his three stars because while the
annual Michelin ratings are typically released in March, they happened to have been released
in early February in 2003 (as they were again in 2004), several weeks before his suicide. Smith,
“Bitterness Follows,” p. A3.
7. Smith, p. A3, and see Echikson, “Death of a Chef,” p. 67.
8. Echikson, “Death of a Chef,” p. 67.
4 CH APTER 1

Apart from the explicit reactions by the gastronomic guides, defense of

the system of gastronomic criticism was mounted by the press on both sides
of the Atlantic. One, issued by the former restaurant editor of the New York
Times, seemed calculated to deflect criticism of the guides by underscor-
ing the relative insignificance of Gault&Millau, pointing to its “precipitous
decline” in recent years and its low standing in relation to the importance
of Michelin stars, while noting that “if Mr. Loiseau was distraught, it prob-
ably wasn’t over stars,” adding (adamantly, but somewhat incongruously):
“I don’t believe for a minute that the press killed the chef. To the contrary,
Bernard Loiseau benefited mightily from press laurels. In 1986, he rose
to prominence when a popular French magazine named him an up-and-
coming culinary genius. The magazine was Gault&Millau.”9
In the issue that followed his suicide, the weekly Paris Match displayed
the photo of a bright, smiling Loiseau on its cover and an eight-page photo
spread of the chef inside that presented him interacting happily with his
family and colleagues, at work and at play, and included one photo of him
out hunting, with a rifle slung over his shoulder. The accompanying article
surveyed the various theories of his suicide, playing down the issue of the
guides, while emphasizing instead his powerful hunger for cultural recog-
nition (“It was my goal to be huge as a chef, like one of the greatest of soc-
cer stars” p. 40) as well as the financial pressures he faced that threatened
to mire him in debt until the year 2010.10 It is quite true that after being
granted his third star in the all-important Michelin Guide in 1991, Loiseau
embarked on an ambitious and expensive series of renovations and addi-
tions to his la Côte d’Or restaurant; he also purchased three bistros in Paris,
creating a culinary edifice that made him the first grand chef to be listed
on the Paris stock exchange.11 But even though he had headed a substantial
business operation, Loiseau’s finance director rejected the idea that money
was the cause of his death, suggesting a less rational motivation: “All of
that is completely false. The restaurants were doing quite well”; he stressed

9. Whether or not Loiseau benefited is really beside the point, just as the suicide is really
beside the point with respect to the influence of the guides on culinary practices. In fact,
even more recently than 1986 Loiseau was named one of the “Best Eight Chefs of France” in
the magazine, published every trimester. See Luc Dubanche, “Bernard Loiseau: La force du
bâtisseur,” Gault&Millau, no. 337, Winter 1999–2000, pp. 54–58.
10. “Bernard Loiseau: Une vie brisée,” Paris Match, no. 2806, February 27–March 5, 2003,
pp. 36–43.
11. The acquisition of three Michelin stars and its significance is detailed in William
Echikson’s remarkable profile of Bernard Loiseau, Burgundy Stars: A Year in the Life of a Great
French Restaurant (Boston: Little, Brown, 1995).
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 5

that although “Bernard started to think that if he didn’t change, next year
he’d lose a star, then reservations would go down, debts would accrue, and
he would go bankrupt,” Loiseau had no pending financial troubles at the
time of his suicide: “It would have taken a decade of losses before we were
bankrupt.”12 If the problem was not financial, then what could it have been?
Speculation turned to the effects of stress and overwork on Loiseau’s mental
and emotional state, a completely reasonable assumption in a profession
where the top chefs are expected to maintain establishments that consist-
ently perform at a level approaching perfection. In her article “A Chef Dies:
How Many Stars Are Enough?” Patricia Wells, the influential food critic
of the International Herald Tribune, recounted her final interaction with
Loiseau: “The last time I spoke with Loiseau was in October 2000, at a
Michelin luncheon to honor the world’s three-star chefs. Then, the chef Mi-
chel Guerard told me that the challenge of maintaining three stars is ‘like
Michelin asking us to be Olympic champions every day.’ Loiseau added,
‘The toughest thing in life is to endure.’”13
It was Dominique Loiseau, Bernard’s wife and collaborator, a former
food writer and the second most conspicuous personality at la Côte d’Or,
as the face that greeted customers at the entrance to the dining room, who
openly raised the issue of Loiseau’s mental state. “Gault&Millau didn’t
kill him” she told a journalist, recounting his periodic bouts of depression
and chronic overwork.14 Newly chosen to lead the ownership group of her
husband’s enterprises, and having served as codirector of Bernard Loiseau
S.A. from the time of its initial listing on the stock exchange, Dominique
Loiseau took firm control of the family business shortly after his death.15
Although seemingly in the best position of all to assess her husband’s men-
tal state, as the new sole restaurant owner her primary goal was now to
maintain the restaurant’s three-star Michelin rating, so it also would have
been exceedingly impolitic for her to join in the public criticism of the gas-
tronomic guides.16

12. Bernard Favre, Loiseau’s finance director is quoted in Ripley, “Fallen Star,” p. 47, and
in Echikson, “Death of a Chef,” p. 67.
13. Patricia Wells, “A Chef Dies: How Many Stars Are Enough?” International Herald
Tribune, February 26, 2003.
14. Echikson, “Death of a Chef,” p. 62.
15. Patrice Cecconello, “Dominique Loiseau aux commandes du groupe Bernard Loiseau
SA,” Néorestauration, April 2003, p. 15n397.
16. Echikson noted of Dominique Loiseau (“Death of a Chef,” p. 67) that “she was care-
ful not to blame the guidebooks for the tragedy.” Her determination to maintain a three-star
rating was something that she was explicit about, and it was a goal that she shared with her
6 CH APTER 1

All of this suggests that a definitive answer to the question, “Who Killed
Bernard Loiseau?” would remain elusive. Although a medical autopsy would
surely verify that he had died of a gunshot wound, and a forensic analysis
would have confirmed that it had indeed been Loiseau who pulled the trig-
ger, thereby satisfying official medical or legal inquiries, and a psychoana-
lytic postmortem might have provided names for the psychic demons that
tormented him, I propose that none of these would permit us to truly under-
stand what caused Loiseau to take his own life. The standard measures
remain incomplete, because to fully understand the nature of the pressures
and forces bearing down on a human being requires attention to the logic of
the social world that they inhabit and an analysis of their trajectory through
it. In other words, more so than a medical autopsy or forensic psychology,
what is needed is a “social autopsy.”17
As with a medical autopsy, a social autopsy should avoid treating the
event as a tragedy (however tragic it undoubtedly is when a person is driven
to such despair), not only because we want to reduce the analytical distor-
tions that sentimentality inevitably generates but because tragedy represents
just one mode of expression through which social recognition is conferred,
and the social construction of recognition is an important element of what
we want to understand about French gastronomy, the social world inhabited
by Bernard Loiseau. This is why, however counterintuitive it may seem, a
social autopsy cannot be accurately performed if we primarily rely on the
people closest to the subject for our evidence, since those most closely im-
plicated in the subject’s life may actually be deeply implicated in the social
mechanisms we are trying to understand. For example, each of those sur-
rounding Bernard Loiseau tended to shift culpability to the other, with the
chefs blaming the guidebooks and the food writers, and pointing us away
from the chef profession, while the guidebooks and the food writers denied
culpability, pointing us toward his finances. His financial adviser denied
that he had had money problems and implied that the chef may have had
a shaky mental state, while his wife, who now owned and managed the
money (and therefore remained in need of the blessing of the guidebooks

restaurant manager, Hubert Couilloud, and her new head chef, Patrick Bertron (who had
been Loiseau’s trusted “second” for two decades), according to Steven Greenhouse in “A Res-
taurant in Mourning Keeps Its Sights on Its Stars,” New York Times, September 10, 2003, pp.
D1 and D6.
17. This was the term employed by Eric Klinenberg in his dissection of the social, political,
and institutional “organs” of the city of Chicago in his book, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of
Disaster in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 7

and the food writers), pointed us toward the pressures of the profession as
the cause of her husband’s unsteady mental condition.
Culpability circulated in this way because everyone had a certain stake
in the picture being sketched, with each seeking to protect his or her par-
ticular interests deriving from each one’s position in relation to all of the
others while, at the same time, upholding the integrity of the overall ar-
rangement. Viewed together, those who surrounded Bernard Loiseau in life
and who came forward to try and make narrative sense of his death re-
sembled, in miniature form, the universe of French gastronomy itself. That
is, it was a microscopic version of the French gastronomic “field,” by which
we mean a distinctive and relatively insulated domain of human activity,
with its own history, its own rules and institutions, as well as its distinctive
antagonisms, harmonies, resources, and rewards. The focus of our analysis
is not Bernard Loiseau, or any of the other great chefs who have occupied
dominant positions in the gastronomic field, but we must draw frequently
on elements of their life (or death) to make sense of the social logic of the
French gastronomic field.
The task is to uncover the social forces operating in and through this
field of practices; a field in which there are no innocents among the inhabit-
ants, since all participants have a stake in either maintaining or exposing its
contradictions and its mysteries. These social forces may be both material
and symbolic and will tend to be embodied in economic and cultural prac-
tices that are both established and emergent, and to which distinctive social
groups are drawn, having been predisposed toward one or another pole of
this field. Thus, the sort of social autopsy to be performed must comprise
more than the factors that led to a biological death, but that requires an-
alysis of a social life. This includes examination of the field(s) of practice in
which social actors operate, the practical context of their practice.
In such an investigation our focus is drawn to the major fault lines run-
ning through French gastronomy, as these illuminate the social mechanisms
of institutional hierarchy and symbolic authority that govern not only gas-
tronomy but most other cultural fields as well. Within French gastronomy,
one of oldest and most prominent fissures has been the tension between
artisanal and industrial practices. That is, between those methods of culi-
nary practice largely guided by the skills, experience, traditions, and artistry
of grand chefs; and industrial practices principally organized around the
deployment of machinery and other technological processes in the various
stages of food production, preparation, and distribution. The analytical ap-
proach to be taken here is not a straightforward narrative history of French
8 CH APTER 1

gastronomy, for it is my view that the trajectory of the field has been mainly
shaped during a particular conjuncture in the history of the field. From the
1970s through the 1990s cracks appeared in the system of French gastron-
omy that expanded fairly widely and threatened to break apart the entire
edifice. It is the social character of this break—what it demonstrated about
French society and culture and the ways they have been held together—that
is the primary object of our investigation. The cracks that opened at the
center will be traced as they extend outward into areas of French society
that may seem far afield from traditional gastronomic concerns. That is, not
only are the shifting tectonic plates beneath the cultural edifice of French
gastronomy a focus but also the reverberations of these shifts in such var-
ied developments as the growth of commercial sprawl on the periphery of
French cities in the 1970s and the reconfiguration of French rural life and
economy in the 1980s and 1990s. We are compelled to widen our analyti-
cal lens in this way because (a) the traditional boundaries of the field were
themselves stretched and extended during this period, thereby becoming
less recognizable than before, the distortion compounded by the addition of
new institutional entries into the field; and (b) the simultaneity of changes
across widely disparate areas of French life make it nearly impossible to sus-
tain a single, linear narrative to grasp it. Our analysis, therefore, proceeds
through several stages in the development of the field, albeit not in linear
fashion.
We begin below (in the current chapter) by briefly retracing the roots of
the gastronomic field in its emergence as an expression of the French liter-
ary imagination and, subsequently, in its institutional expression with the
invention of the restaurant in the period following the Revolution. We then
advance well into the nineteenth century to track the process by which the
gastronomic field acquired its characteristic forms and attained its relative
autonomy from other cultural fields. The following chapter (Chapter 2,
“The Symbolic Economy of French Gastronomy”) demonstrates the struc-
tures of belief and the forms of social organization that sustained the relative
autonomy of the gastronomic field through much of the twentieth century.
With particular attention to the rules, the customary practices, the sources
of value, and the rites of consecration that have organized the rarified world
of grand chefs and great restaurants in France, we consider gastronomy as
a primary source of cultural power for the French and for the rest of the
world. The two chapters that comprise the following section represent an
examination of the incursion of industrial processes and commercial mar-
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 9

keting techniques that entered the gastronomic field in the 1970s, largely
impelled by the corporate investments of American firms and their French
cousins. The first, Chapter 3 (“Fast Food in France: A Market for the Im-
possible”), traces the development, in France, of a market for American-style
fast food, emphasizing what fast food represented, in social, cultural, and
economic terms for French employers, workers, and consumers, as well as
for the contours of the wider gastronomic field. Subsequently, Chapter 4
(“Industrial Cuisine and the ‘Magic’ of Americanism”) presents the wide
range of institutions, practices, and practitioners occupying the indus-
trial sector of the French gastronomic field. These include the industries
of food processing, institutional catering, and chain restaurants. In taking
measure of this sector we are better able to situate it in relation to the gas-
tronomic field as a whole, whose symbolic features draw heavily from the
aesthetic vocabulary of haute cuisine. The industrial regions of the field, on
the other hand, have been the primary vehicle for introducing American
forms of economic (neoliberal) ideas and practices into French society more
generally.
As this book seeks to demonstrate, a tectonic shift occurring in the gas-
tronomic field in France scraped the cultural bedrock and changed French
society. The character and the dynamics of these transformations are docu-
mented in Chapter 5 (“Conflicts of Interest: A Cultural Field in Transform-
ation”) and illustrate the complex and contradictory ways that the major
institutions and practitioners of French haute cuisine adapted to the chang-
ing configuration of the gastronomic field. The chapter extends the analysis
to reveal the paradoxical mechanisms by which the cult of le terroir and the
related fetishism of “the local” have been largely underwritten by the very
forces of standardization, homogenization, and profit maximization that
they were created to oppose.

The Foundations of the Field

With its roots tracing back to some of the earliest printed works, late fifteenth-
century German and Italian “cookery books,” the symbolic conditions for
French gastronomic practice were seen as having been set out with the publica-
tion of La Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François in 1651. It was a work that summar-
ized the cooking practices of the French nobility and identified a distinctive
French way of cooking that was differentiated from medieval foodways in its
use of certain spices, flavors, and technical innovations in the food preparation
10 CH APTER 1

process.18 This line of demarcation was increasingly defined by a succession of

similar works that were published over the following decades, each of which
tended to assert proper culinary practices (through recipes and observations)
while disapproving of others.19 Such jostling served to establish a framework of
both old and new within the culinary sphere, thereby setting out, in germinal
form, the outline of a modern culinary aesthetic.
The genesis of a French gastronomic field was the product of more than
these early published narratives and texts, however. While texts charted the
symbolic parameters, practice also required an institutional mooring, and it
was the French Revolution that created the conditions for the development
of an institutional foundation for haute cuisine. The precise nature of the
historical relationship between the Revolution and the restaurant is a subject
of varying interpretation, however. The simplest line of explanation argued
that the cooks who once worked in the kitchens of aristocratic households
were forced to open restaurants when their employers either fled the country
or were slain in the Revolution’s aftermath. However, as Stephen Mennell
and others have pointed out, “the first of a new form of eating-place open
to the public—that which came to be known as the restaurant—made its
appearance in Paris during the two decades before the Revolution.”20
Probably the most persuasive narrative has argued that by rupturing the
guild system the Revolution created the conditions for the transfer of the
artisanal practices of haute cuisine from the court to the bourgeoisie via a

18. François Pierre de La Varenne, La Varenne’s Cookery: The French Cook; The French Pastry
Chef; The French Confectioner, trans. Terence Scully (London: Prospect Books, 2006). These
methods included the use of bouillon or stock for various dishes, spicing with bouquet garni,
the use of egg whites to clarify and fat and flour to thicken, the slow cooking of meats, and
the use of a reduction process to concentrate flavor. These were not revolutionary innova-
tions, as Stephen Mennell points out, for they had most likely been practiced for some time
in various aristocratic kitchens (All Manners of Food, 2nd ed. [Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1996], pp. 64–74).
19. Mennell, All Manners of Food, pp. 72–73, notes the vitriol in the reactions of successive
authors to their predecessors. The key works were identified by Revel as including: Nicolas de
Bonnefons’s Les Délices de la campagne (1645); Pierre de Lune’s Le Cuisinier (1656); Jean Ri-
bou’s L’École parfaite des officiers de bouche (1662); L’Art de bien traiter signed semianonymously
by L.S.R. (1674); and Massialot’s Le Cuisinier royal et bourgeois[sic] (1691) and Instructions pour
les confitures (1692). See Jean-François Revel, Un festin en paroles: Histoire littéraire de la sensi-
bilité gastronomique de l’ Antiquité à nos jours (Paris: Plon, 1995), pp. 172–181.
20. Mennell, All Manners of Food, p. 136. Jean-Robert Pitte, “The Rise of the Restaurant,”
in FOOD: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Jean-Louis Flandrin and Mas-
simo Montanari (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 475, is one who has made
this argument, offering several examples of chefs who had worked in royal households before
opening their own establishments after the Revolution.
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 11

new institution, the restaurant.21 The earliest restaurants were enterprises

run by sellers of “restorative” bouillons or meat-based consommés (them-
selves often called “restaurants”) that were ingested to “restore” health and
strength.22 In 1765 a Monsieur Boulanger (who was also known, variously,
as Champ d’Oiseaux and Champoiseau), a purveyor of “restaurants,” or
bouillons, opened a Paris shop in which he sold (in addition to his res-
taurants) certain foodstuffs whose sale was restricted by the guild system,
and specifically violated the established prerogatives of the traiteurs guild
(comprising cooks and caterers).23 The guild filed a suit against Boulanger
but ultimately decided in his favor, thus signaling the approaching demise
of the guild system and encouraging these new, generic establishments that
sold cooked food, eaten in place.24 Although it took several decades before
the term “restaurant” would be officially recognized for what it was coming
to represent, the new establishments flourished after the Revolution. Where
there had been approximately one hundred restaurants in Paris prior to the
Revolution, the number would rise to five hundred or six hundred under the
empire and to some three thousand during the restoration of the monarchy
(1814–1848).25

21. This is the view Jean-Robert Pitte expressed in French Gastronomy: The History and
Geography of a Passion, trans. Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002)
and later summarized in his chapter, “The Rise of the Restaurant,” Flandrin and Montanari,
FOOD: A Culinary History, pp. 471–480.
22. Prior to the “restaurant” one purchased food in taverns, at inns, and at markets, all
located outside of the city walls (beyond the sphere of taxation) or drank in a café, the first
of which was opened in 1674 in Paris. One could also purchase foods prepared by traiteurs,
rôtisseurs, or charcutiers, who, under guild statutes, held a monopoly over various forms of
cooked meats. Rebecca L. Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic
Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 7–11.
23. See Pitte, “The Rise of the Restaurant,” in Flandrin and Montanari, FOOD: A Culi-
nary History, pp. 474–476.
24. Various historical accounts of French gastronomy have reported the outcome of the
“Boulanger affair” in this way, including Pitte, “The Rise of the Restaurant,” Flandrin and
Montanari, FOOD: A Culinary History, p. 474, and Mennell, All Manners of Food, p. 139.
However, in her otherwise analytically rich analysis of the rise of the restaurant in France,
Spang informs the reader, incongruously, that most accounts have the traiteurs winning their
lawsuit, thus restricting Boulanger (and other “restaurateurs”) from selling anything besides
these consommés and asserting that “no evidence in the judicial, police, or corporate archives
substantiates the story of Boulanger’s defeat [my emphasis] at the hands of the litigious cater-
ers.” See Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, p. 9.
25. Pitte, “The Rise of the Restaurant,” Flandrin and Montanari, FOOD: A Culinary
History, p. 476; and see Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945 Taste and Corruption (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 391.
12 CH APTER 1

This can perhaps be seen as representing the triumph of Paris over the
rest of France as much as it was the triumph of the revolution over the mon-
archy, for in resolving the division between Paris and Versailles the Revo-
lution shifted the axes of politics, culture, and commerce to the capital as
the undisputed center.26 Moreover, while Paris was becoming renowned for
its restaurants, the mystique of the restaurant was amplifying the symbolic
construction of Paris, as Rebecca Spang has noted: “As the fame of the city’s
restaurants spread, so the myth was disseminated of Paris as the nation’s
grand couvert” (which translates to “big place setting”).27 Widely established
in Paris, restaurants were soon spread throughout the country, as traditional
cabarets and dance halls (guinguettes) changed themselves into restaurants
and as a style of aristocratic grandeur and excess devolved from Paris to
various provincial outposts, preserved in the aspic of haute cuisine. As one
analyst has written:28

The refinement once associated with the old aristocratic households

could be found in the deluxe restaurants of the grands boulevards of
Paris (the Café Riche and the Café Anglais), on the Place Bellecour
in Lyon, and in the back streets of Bordeaux. The great restaurants
relied on recipes developed and written down by Antonin Carême,
the chef who presided over the extraordinaires (official banquets for
major state occasions of the Empire and Restoration) and by his suc-
cessors, Dugléré, Urbain Dubois, and, last, but not least, Escoffier.
Chefs prepared beautiful creations out of fish and shellfish, foie gras
from Strasbourg (which became the very symbol of good dining
in France), seasonal game, chicken, and sirloin, all buried beneath
mountains of truffles and dripping with brown sauces thickened
with cream or butter. Menus at these restaurants could be as long
as the dinner menus for the great occasions of the Ancien Régime,
but now, for reasons of convenience and price, customers picked
and chose the dishes they wanted before the food was prepared and
served.

26. See Priscilla Ferguson, “A Cultural Field in the Making: Gastronomy in Nineteenth
Century France,” in FRENCH FOOD on the Table, on the Page, and in French Culture, ed.
Lawrence R. Schehr and Allen S. Weiss (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 11.
27. Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, p. 235.
28. Pitte, “The Rise of the Restaurant,” Flandrin and Montanari, FOOD: A Culinary
History, p. 477.
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 13

It is this sort of cornucopian representation that has been a central part

of the complicated illusion of the restaurant; the symbolic dimension that
one historian has identified as the restaurant’s mythic core—its legends and
lore and mystique. More than mere embellishment, the production of the
phantasmagoric has been viewed as a central part of the restaurant’s func-
tion.29 Not only did restaurants serve to locate Paris in the French cultural
imagination, as we’ve indicated, but, as Rebecca Spang has shown, restau-
rants can be seen as having symbolically performed a wide variety of “social”
tasks. For example, she indicates how on one level, restaurants enacted a
distinctively modern and bourgeois sociability as “publicly private” spaces
that allowed one to be alone in public, to ignore others while being among
them. On another, the restaurant composed a theatrical spectacle calculated
to conceal the hellish kitchen area, physically and symbolically separating it
(backstage) from the opulence of the dining room “out front.” Moreover, the
restaurant provided its customers with an illusion of hospitality, welcome,
and generosity that masked any pecuniary interests and, in the context of a
bourgeois order that “implicitly required the presence of somebody outside,”
represented an institution of both exclusion and envy.30
In these ways the institution at the very center of French gastronomy,
the restaurant, performed an extraordinary amount of symbolic labor, a
point to be revisited in subsequent chapters. For the moment, however,
it should be noted that in the establishment of French gastronomy a fair
amount of the actual work of symbolic construction was performed by a
new type of socioliterary persona, the gastronome, a figure who emerged
as the product of the very gastronomic universe whose boundaries he was
assigned to define and to police.
The term “gastronomy,” meaning “the art and science of delicate eat-
ing,” or of eating well, was sometimes used interchangeably with the word
“gourmand,” before the latter was increasingly employed as a pejorative
term of excess and of greed, as in “glutton.”31 It was in the spirit of the
earlier meaning that the notorious Alexandre-Balthazar-Laurent Grimod
de la Reynière (1758–1838) published his annual Almanach des gourmands
over the course of the first decade of the nineteenth century, chronicling
the development of French gastronomy; and later, in 1825, Jean-Anthelme

29. Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, pp. 234–236.

30. See Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, pp. 86–87, 234, 236, 239–241, 245.
31. Mennell, All Manners of Food, pp. 266–267. The Oxford English Dictionary defines
“gourmand” as both “one who is over-fond of eating, one who eats greedily or to excess, a
glutton” and “one who is fond of delicate fare; a judge of good eating.”
14 CH APTER 1

Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) published his Physiologie du goût (Physiology of

Taste) a book of “meditations” on taste, the senses, the preparation of meals,
the social character of dining, and the philosophy and aesthetics of food,
the table, and the body.
An important genre of gastronomic writing was established through
these works, one that served both a devotional function with regard to food
and eating and manners and also to render visible the gastronome/author
as a social actor in the world that was being depicted and symbolically con-
structed. Thus Grimod de la Reynière not only told of restaurants visited
and of meals eaten but often did so through descriptions of the weekly
outings of his “Jury de Dégustateurs” (Taster’s jury) and later, his “Société des
Mercredis” (Wednesday Society).32 These were groups composed of those so-
phisticated diners that Grimod assembled (and with whom he participated)
who gathered together on a weekly basis to dine and to judge dishes and
restaurants, thereby casting themselves as central players in the world that
Grimod was depicting in his writings. Thus the gastronome-as-tastemaker
was essentially brought into being by the gastronome-as-writer. In asserting
their evaluative judgments in this way, gastronomic writers prefigured the
role played by the gastronomic guides (such as the Michelin red guide) as
institutional gatekeepers, and, by establishing themselves as arbiters of taste,
gastronomes also represented a significant part of the restaurant “public” in
this formative period.
In an analysis of the genesis of gastronomy as a cultural field in the
nineteenth century, Priscilla Ferguson places gastronomic literature at its
very foundation. She argues that through gastronomic writers (Grimod de
la Reynière, Carême, Brillat-Savarin) as well as through dominant literary
figures from other cultural domains who wrote about gastronomy (Balzac
in literature and Fourier in philosophy) the emergent “gastronomic field”
was able to receive symbolic fortification from more secure and established
cultural fields. Thus as gastronomic writing was accepted as good literature
the gastronomic field was afforded a measure of legitimacy, thereby aiding
in its establishment and in its achievement of a certain level of autonomy.
According to Ferguson, Brillat-Savarin played a particularly important
role in this process because, unlike most of the food writing done by jour-
nalists and chefs, his was a noninstrumental viewpoint and his writing had
a quality that transcended the domain of gastronomy, placing it “within a
larger intellectual and social universe”: “For Brillat-Savarin, the text was its

32. See Mennell, All Manners of Food, pp. 267, 272.

 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 15

own end, a status hardly altered by the few recipes included in the work.
The often noted stylistic qualities of the Physiology of Taste—the anecdotal
mode, the witty tone, the language play—give this work an almost palpable
literary aura.”33
An analytical focus on the importance of literature in the emergence of
the gastronomic field is insightful, but two qualifications are in order. One
has to do with the limits imposed on a social analysis of the gastronomic
field by a focus on literary practices alone. While literature was undoubt-
edly crucial in the genesis of a gastronomic field in the way that Ferguson
has shown, a fuller grasp of its social logic would seem to require that the
means of its symbolic construction be conjoined to a broader range of so-
cial practices. A second hesitation has to do with the relations between
fields, and in particular with the idea that the relative strength of a field
(its “cultural resonance” and “cultural resistance” in Ferguson’s terms) is a
function of its dependence on its connections to other cultural fields (or in
relation to the “larger society” in her words).34 Despite the fact that it must
be demonstrated empirically and not simply asserted, one would expect the
strength of a field to rest not so much on its dependence on other fields as on
the degree of relative autonomy it enjoys from other fields. In other words,
its strength would seem to reside in its ability to operate in terms of its own
proper rules and principles of regulation and on its own internal evaluative
criteria, thus fortified against principles of evaluation and regulation intro-
duced from other fields (as in the domain of cinema, for example, where the
rules and principles governing the artistic field have been challenged, if not
superseded by standards introduced from the economic field).35
While in the early stages of its formation, gastronomy may indeed have
acquired a level of social prestige through the links it was able to forge with
individuals and institutions in more established fields, like philosophy and
literature; as it gained a certain autonomy (the phase of “consolidation” for
Ferguson), it asserted itself as more than a branch of either, and therein
lay its strength as a field. In other words, the strength of a field rests on
its capacity to uphold and maintain its own rules and its own standards of

33. Quoted (pp. 616–617) in Priscilla Ferguson, “A Cultural Field in the Making: Gas-
tronomy in 19th Century France,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 104, no. 3, November
1998, pp. 597–641.
34. Ferguson, “Cultural Field in the Making,” p. 602.
35. See L. Creton, Cinéma et marché (Paris: Armand Colin/Masson, 1997); and J. Tunstall,
The Media Are American (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977). Ferguson, “Cultural
Field in the Making,” p. 632.
16 CH APTER 1

evaluation, over and above those of competing or neighboring fields. Of

course the independence of a field is always relative and a function of its
historical trajectory, but achieving independence does not consign a field to
“the cultural equivalent of solitary confinement” as Ferguson fears. To the
contrary, it can be viewed as a measure of its maturation.
Moreover, however independent they may be at any given historical
moment, the various fields of human activity that constitute a society are
always structured, hierarchically, in relation to one another, even when the
effects of dominance are sometimes expressed negatively, as in the case of
the field of culture, which operates (or once did) according to principles
directly opposed to those that govern the economic field.36 The relations
that prevail between different cultural fields (as well as between the cultural
and the normally more powerful political and economic fields) reflect the
relations of relative dominance and subordination of practices within the
society, although they may be configured differently in different societies
and in different historical periods. Thus just as a field can achieve a degree
of independence, the autonomy of a social field may wane or be eroded over
time and in relation to other fields in the society.
Over the first half of the nineteenth century, Brillat-Savarin’s medita-
tions on taste, the body, and the aesthetics of food, Grimod de la Reynière’s
symbolic construction of a French “public” for restaurants, and chef Anto-
nin Carême’s celebration of the culinary arts, taken together, can be seen
as having symbolically constructed a certain design for living, the “art of
eating well,” whereby the act of properly nourishing the body simultaneous-
ly accomplishes the proper nourishment of the soul. It was a form of percep-
tion that, among other things, abandoned the traditional dietetic/medicinal
principles of cooking that had governed culinary practice for several hun-
dred years, in favor of a kind of pure gastronomic aesthetic, very much the
equivalent of the stance of “art for art’s sake” that emerged contemporan-
eously in fields of artistic practice.37 It can be seen as having been one part

36. Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on the relations between fields are widely spread across his
huge corpus of work, but he provided a simple diagram to illustrate the relationship between
the field of cultural production and the field of power in The Field of Cultural Production (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 37–40. Bourdieu has shown that the disavowal of
the economy is at the very heart of the functioning and transformation of the cultural field,
and he therefore had good reason for entitling his analysis “The Field of Cultural Produc-
tion, or: The Economic World Reversed” (my emphasis) in that same volume (pt. I, chap. 1, pp.
29–73). In the same volume, also see chap. 2, “Faith and Bad Faith,” pp. 78–80.
37. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially pt. I, chap. 1, “The Conquest of Autonomy”
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 17

of a gradual process of symbolic labor through which the gastronome was

distinguished from (and elevated above) the gourmand. Constructed as the
discriminating connoisseur and raised to “the lofty position of high priest
for this new cult,” the gastronome was thereby discursively differentiated
from the sinful and indulgent gourmand, the glutton who “only knows
how to ingest.”38 The development of a pure gastronomic disposition was
an expression of a distinctive “art of living,” the basic inspiration for all acts
of cultural distinction, and a (barely) misrecognized assertion of bourgeois
dominance in the society. As Pierre Bourdieu put it, “At stake in every
struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living, that is, the
transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life
which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness.”39
The other purpose that the gastronomic literature served was a national-
izing one, symbolically cementing the distinctive and enduring association
that has come to prevail between cuisine and France. Although the asso-
ciation had been recognized earlier, as the culinary practices of the French
aristocracy had been exported to royal kitchens throughout Europe (much
as the French language had been adopted as the lingua franca of European
courts everywhere), the modern concept of the nation was only just emerg-
ing in early nineteenth-century France and thus the gastronomic literature
inscribed grand cuisine and culinary practice in the national consciousness
at a formative moment.40 The authoritative writing style of the most influ-
ential gastronomes, combined with their vigorous and explicit declarations

(pp. 47–112), and see chap. 5, “Field of Power, Literary Field, and Habitus,” in The Field of
Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
Jean-Louis Flandrin points out that in the seventeenth century the fine arts borrowed the
metaphor of taste from the culinary domain, where it had long been central to the dietetic
principle, because taste is what determined the age and the toxicity of foodstuffs and served to
match specific foods to the temperament and the body of the individual. See Jean-Louis Flan-
drin, “From Dietetics to Gastronomy,” in Flandrin and Montanari, FOOD: A Culinary History.
38. Ferguson, “Cultural Field in the Making,” pp. 608–609.
39. Pierre Bourdieu, DISTINCTION: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) [1979, Les Éditions de
Minuit], p. 57. In this case “cuisine for cuisine’s sake” is the expression of a “pure culinary
aesthetic” upholding the sublime (in the act of consumption) alongside the artistry of human
creation (in the act of production), against merely “cooking to eat” (as a basic practical and
biological matter of necessity) or “cooking for sale” (as a commercial matter of business).
40. Priscilla Ferguson (“Cultural Field in the Making,” p. 20) points out that while seven-
teenth-century cookbooks had asserted the “Frenchness” of their methods, this was a social
reference to the French court and aristocracy and not to a geographic France, which did not
yet exist.
18 CH APTER 1

of a French “culinary nationalism,” helped to establish a firm link between

Frenchness and the culinary arts.41 Contributing to the strength of the asso-
ciation was the centralization that followed the Revolution and that placed
Paris (and its restaurants) at the symbolic and institutional center of the
nation; as well as the publication, in 1808, of the first of many gastronomic
maps of France that redrew the map of the nation using culinary divisions
instead of political or administrative boundaries, a visual innovation that
was as much a contributor to the national myth-making apparatus as it was
a product of it.42
The symbolic construction of the French nation entailed more than
the elevation of a center, for the other side of the centrality of Paris was its
periphery, located in newly created “départements,” with all of the material
and symbolic resources that they brought with them into the new nation.
The problem of national sovereignty has been worked and reworked in a
recurring symbolic project designed to sort out the relationship between the
capital and the regions, Paris and the provinces, the center and the periph-
ery. Just as a body of writing and a group of writers offered up a national
culinary discourse that buttressed the nation as it “nationalized” its cuisine,
writers and their writings also served to symbolically incorporate the regions
into the nation by “nationalizing” regional cuisines.
A culinary provincialist literature emerged at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century that took the form of cookbooks focused on regional dishes
and that codified traditional local recipes.43 It was written by local digni-
taries, scholars, and cooks; published by local publishers; and intended for
local readers in places like Alsace, Gascogne, Languedoc, Provence, and
elsewhere. However, after about 1900, regional culinary books were increas-

41. Priscilla Ferguson, “Cultural Field in the Making,” pp. 620–622. While Ferguson
makes a good case for the nationalizing tendencies of the gastronomic literature, she is mis-
taken when she minimizes the importance of regional cuisines (and their literatures) in the
national project in order to strengthen the case for centralization. This is unfortunate, for it
misses something analytically important about the relationship between the nation and the
regions.
42. Grimod de la Reynière introduced “alimentary topography” as a necessary element of
gastronomic education; while the carte gastronomique presented a cornucopian image of the
French national landscape, symbolically representing France through a visualization of what
is now termed its culinary patrimony. See Spang, Invention of the Restaurant, p. 169.
43. The most popular of these books, La Cuisinière de la campagne et de la ville ou la nou-
velle cuisine économique by L. E. Audot, was reportedly reprinted forty-one times between
1833 and 1900; and Gérard’s Ancienne Alsace à table (1862) and Tendret’s La Table au pays de
Brillat-Savarin (1882) are reportedly still in print today. See Julia Csergo, “The Emergence of
Regional Cuisines,” in Flandrin and Montanari, FOOD: A Culinary History, p. 505.
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 19

ingly published in Paris as part of a nationalizing impulse that celebrated

“the culinary riches of France in all its regional and social diversity.”44 Some
of these were compilations of local family recipes that sought to survey the
breadth of French culinary practices, and others reflected royalist Catholic
political sentiments, holding up traditional rural France against the deg-
radations of modern urbanization (a perspective that, later on, would slide
more or less easily into Vichy fascism), but together they reflected a general
nostalgia for a rural way of life that was felt to be disintegrating in the swirl
of modern industrial development. As Julia Csergo put it:

Perpetuating the romantic conception of the local as a conservatory

of the sensibility of the past, a new system of representations emerged
in which regional cuisines became the embodiment of local agricul-
tural traditions and rural allegiances, family and religious customs,
and nostalgic longing for a pre-industrial, pre-urban past. . . . These
reconstructed regional cuisines allowed modern urban society to res-
urrect its provincial roots by savoring dishes consecrated by memory.
Peasants who went to Paris in search of employment frequently re-
vived the atmosphere of the villages they left behind by choosing to
live and associate with others from the same region.45

On one level, it is by now axiomatic that nostalgia for the regional and
the traditional is a product of nationalizing/centralizing and modernizing
forces, so that one is not only preconditioned by the other but actually mu-
tually constitutive of one another. At the same time, however, to the extent
that nationalism always represents a mythic social unity, we should keep in
mind that the French nation was the assertion of a largely invented socio-
cultural homogenization.46

44. Csergo, “Emergence of Regional Cuisines,” p. 506.

45. See Csergo (“Emergence of Regional Cuisines,” pp. 507, 513n3), who also points to
the rise of ethnology museums in the latter two decades of the nineteenth century as further
expressions of this modernizing nostalgia.
46. This is a central point in Eugen Weber’s classic study, Peasants into Frenchmen. In it he
suggests that the public expression of a French national identity in the late nineteenth century
covered over social heterogeneity and deep sociocultural divisions between city and country
and that patriotic discourse betrayed a widespread practical ambivalence over the nation and
the modern (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976). See chap. 7, “France, One and
Indivisible” and esp. pp. 112–114. This is a view that is not fundamentally at odds with the
notion of nation as a social construct, such as that advanced by Greenfeld, for example, who
has viewed the construction of French nationalism as a matter of the appropriation of the cat-
egory “the people” by eighteenth-century French elites, who redefined citizenship to include
20 CH APTER 1

Culinary nationalism, then, can be seen as having served to reinforce

French national consciousness, while firmly attaching to the French nation
an association with cuisine. As Ferguson has shown, this was largely accom-
plished by a new genre of culinary literature that charted the contours of an
emergent gastronomic field. However, culinary “nationalization” seems to
have been less of a linear process of increasing centralization than it was a
process of conquest, occurring over two stages. In the first, Paris conquered
Versailles by the Revolution, asserting its political and cultural authority
over the new nation, and this was reflected in the culinary domain by the
invention and proliferation of restaurants, both by the rise of the gastro-
nomes and their writings and by the ideological construction of a French cu-
linary nationalism. In a second stage, the center asserted itself in relation to
the periphery, and in the culinary domain this was expressed by the rise and
representation of regional cuisine in the first half of the nineteenth century
and its gradual appropriation by the gastronomic field in the latter decades
of that century and the early decades of the twentieth century. This was not
to be mistaken for a kind of oppositional version of regionalism (or whatever
might have been the culinary equivalent of a rebellious Corsica or Vendée)
but rather as a domesticated expression of provincial cultural pride.47
Within the culinary world itself, there was no more important player
in establishing the legitimacy of regional cuisine than Maurice-Edmond
Sailland, pseudonymously known as “Curnonsky.” A chef and gastronome,
Curnonsky famously traveled the length of France, in the years follow-
ing World War I, with his friend and colleague Marcel Rouff, with whom
he published twenty-four of his twenty-eight volumes of La France gas-
tronomique. These were the first of what would become a rich genre of tour-
ist guides concentrating specifically on regions and their dishes, wines, and
restaurants, and in them, as well as in the other books produced by Curn-
onsky and his circle, culinary wonder was conjoined with tourism, firmly

themselves and swore loyalty to a state that was increasingly elevated to the level of the sacred
in response to the waning of their influence and power. See Liah Greenfeld, NATIONALISM:
Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 154–155.
47. This was expressed in various initiatives, according to Csergo, including the founding
of various ethnological museums and societies (like the Société des traditions populaires in
1886; the Société d’ethnologie nationale et d’art populaire in 1885; the first ethnograph-
ic museum, the Museon Arlaten in 1894; and the Société dauphinoise d’ethnologie et
d’anthropologie in 1894) and the growth of “regionalist” gastronomic societies in Paris that
were formed by provincial elites living in the capital to preserve regional cultural forms; an
initiative often encouraged by political interests eager to cultivate agricultural interests with
regional roots. Csergo, “Emergence of Regional Cuisines,” pp. 507–508.
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 21

fixing the two realms together in the French national consciousness.48 He

was a powerful influence in establishing the legitimacy of regional cooking
(in a universe dominated by Paris) and thus in shaping the terrain of French
gastronomy at a crucial point in its development.49 Curnonsky advanced a
kind of culinary populism that advocated simplicity in presentation and
technique and that eschewed stylistic deference to social elites; and he ad-
vocated a “gustatory pluralism” that emphasized the quality of raw materi-
als and rejected doctrinaire cooking styles. For these reasons he has been
likened to Gault and Millau, who would come to name and to promote
nouvelle cuisine decades later.50
Curnonsky and his circle have sometimes been noted as having “invent-
ed” traditional French peasant cuisine by recovering it and recognizing (and
thereby sanctifying) it as haute cuisine. However, as Mennell has pointed
out, the peasant dishes that they gathered together in their writings tended
to reflect the “festival dishes” that French peasants would have perhaps
eaten on annual feast days or in very rare periods of plenty but that did not
comprise their everyday diet.51 For example, the dinner menu presented in a
typical listing in their 1923 guide to La Savoie—soup, a plate of local ham
and sausage, scallops in cream, green beans, sheep’s leg, dessert and a local
wine—would have likely represented a truly extraordinary and memorable
feast for a typical Savoyard peasant of the time.52

48. See Csergo, “Emergence of Regional Cuisines,” p. 510. As Stephen Mennell points out
(“Food and Wine,” in French Culture Since 1945, ed. M. Cook [London: Longman, 1993], p.
184), the linkage between tourism and gastronomy were quickly capitalized on by the tire
companies, Michelin and Kléber-Colombes, who published guides to restaurants and hotels
in France and stood to benefit substantially from the growth of auto tourism.
49. In a 1927 poll of its readers conducted by Paris-Soir, Curnonsky was elected “prince of
the gastronomes,” receiving 1,823 out of 3,388 votes cast. One historian of French gastronomy
has noted that in the culinary world Curnonsky’s judgments “were irrevocable” and “he was
feared by food service figures and restaurant owners, whose fame and fortune he could estab-
lish.” See Jean-Robert Pitte, French Gastronomy: The History and Geography of a Passion (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 138–139.
50. Mennell offers this comparison in his depiction of Curnonsky (“Food and Wine,” pp.
185–186).
51. Mennell, p. 187.
52. The menu cited was from l’Auberge du Bras de Fer in the town of Taninges in the
French Alps, and one of many that Curnonsky and Marcel Rouff cite from local inns, res-
taurants, and hotels in their La France gastronomique: La Savoie (Paris: F. Rouff, 1923), p. 32.
Until the middle of the twentieth century, the French peasant diet in traditional regions,
as well as among workers who retained peasant traditions, was still mostly based on slowly
boiled vegetables (soups) that were eaten at every meal of the day. In the wealthier peasant
households, soup might be supplemented with cheese or eggs or charcuterie [various cold
22 CH APTER 1

It hardly mattered that regional dishes were not what peasants ate, for
Curnonsky’s writings were not intended as ethnological chronicles but were
meant to legitimize and popularize regional culinary cultures in relation to
Parisian grand cuisine. His guides and his writings were thus instrumental
for “nationalizing” regional cuisine through acts of assertion (or represen-
tation), in the same way that Brillat-Savarin, Grimod de la Reynière, and
Carême had been instrumental in establishing gastronomy as French a cen-
tury earlier. Curnonsky’s was a “domesticated” regionalism, easily digested
into a gastronomic universe fully dominated by Paris and its restaurants
and, once incorporated, this reconstituted universe could then be expanded
outward from Paris to the rest of the world.

The Conquest of Autonomy

The development of the French gastronomic field has been characterized as
a process of “consolidation” by Priscilla Ferguson: “The gastronomic field
took shape in two major phases: emergence over the first half of the nine-
teenth century, consolidation thereafter.”53 “Yes” and “No,” we must re-
spond. “No” if the term “consolidation” refers to a linear movement toward
a condition of internal cohesiveness and unification, for that characteriza-
tion would tend to misunderstand one of the fundamental properties of a
social field, that it is an arena of struggle and conflict. For as Pierre Bour-
dieu explained in terms of his own practical use of the concept, a field is a
field of force operating on those within it and is equally a field of struggles
through which social agents act to preserve or transform the distribution
of forces within it.54 What appears to be the consolidation of the field may
therefore reflect a particular representation imposed by social actors with
the power to impose their own vision (and division) of the social world. So,
just as it was suggested that the process of culinary “nationalization” ought
to be considered in terms of the relational tension between the regional and
the national, we ought to remain open to the nonlinear trajectory of the

meats and sausages]. For most peasants, animal protein was too valuable to be consumed and
had to be retained for sale at market, and so until the 1880s French peasants very rarely ate
any meat at all; by 1900 they ate only a quarter of the average meat ration of a city dweller
and just a fifth of what Parisians consumed, a division that continued up until World War II.
See Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, p. 142, and see Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945 Taste
and Corruption (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 381.
53. Ferguson, “Cultural Field in the Making,” p. 601.
54. See, for example, pp. 101–102 in Pierre Bourdieu and Loic J. D. Wacquant, An Invita-
tion to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 23

gastronomic field, paying attention to the internal schisms that propel it. If
it at all resembles other cultural fields, the domain of culinary practices will
be, among other things, a site of conflict over legitimacy and recognition
and thereby a conflict over competing visions and divisions of the social
world. At the same time, we readily respond with a “yes” to Ferguson’s no-
tion of consolidation of the gastronomic field, if by that is meant acts of
consolidation by some social forces over and against others. Again, symbolic
representations of unity and solidity may very well be an attempt by inter-
ested factions to make certain things happen with words; in effect, making
a fait accompli by declaration. To avoid becoming an unwitting instrument
of complicity in a process of ratification, then, our analytical task must be
to understand, simultaneously, the social construction of the social world
and the social construction of its representation.
As we demonstrate in subsequent chapters, the social life and logic of the
gastronomic field has been characterized by an ongoing struggle to preserve
its autonomy in relation to other fields and other logics. If the symbolic
construction of autonomy took place over time in the ways that others have
shown, the assembly of its material infrastructure has been more recent. The
latter decades of the nineteenth century saw the development of a range of
practical and technical innovations that, together, created the institutional
infrastructure to support a self-regulating (and reproducing) gastronomic
field in France. Advances in food production, processing, preservation, dis-
tribution, and storage were under way throughout Europe, compelled by
the same kinds of forces that were driving industrial development more
generally. However, Europe’s rapid urbanization and population growth
had generated enormous levels of food production requirements that could
not be met by European agricultural capacity alone (while improvements
in transportation made it possible to develop agricultural links to colonial
and former colonial economies outside of Europe). Thus, while such ancient
practices as bread making, wine making, and sausage making could be
surprisingly responsive to industrial methods (mechanization, chemistry,
temperature control, systems of storage, etc.), there were other traditional
food production practices that were simply abandoned in the face of trade
competition, as when American and Russian cereals were introduced in the
1880s and Europeans were forced to abandon certain traditional forms of
grain cultivation.55

55. Giorgio Pedrocco, “The Food Industry and New Preservation Techniques,” in Flan-
drin and Montanari, FOOD: A Culinary History, p. 482.
24 CH APTER 1

Although French scientists had earlier made crucial advances in food

preservation techniques, including Louis Pasteur’s discoveries of the scien-
tific bases of food sterilization that served as its foundation, the practical
roots of a food-processing industry were slower to develop in France than
elsewhere.56 Aided by innovations in refrigeration techniques, American
firms successfully entered the European market during an agricultural de-
pression in 1873, by exporting substantial quantities of fresh and processed
foods to Europe. The mass production of preserved foods had already been
well under way in the United States, where canning factories had expanded
rapidly with the outbreak of the Civil War and where companies like Camp-
bell, Heinz, and Borden had successfully experimented with advertising
techniques that would later be employed in Europe.57 As Europe’s agricul-
tural crisis lifted, the imposition of protectionist tariffs and the appearance
of alternative markets permitted European agricultural interests to begin to
compete again with U.S. industry. However, America’s facility with com-
mercial techniques in the food preservation industry, a facility that reflected
its growing supremacy across all industrial sectors, meant that the presence
of the “American model” would remain a permanent fixture in Europe, in
French society, and in the domain of commercial foodways.
Virtually synonymous with the industrial logic of efficiency, high vol-
ume, and standardized practices, the very embodiment of industrial moder-
nity itself, the “American model” has represented a form of socioeconomic
practice that is always most visible when posed in relation to its opposite
form. In other words, like all such cultural representations, the notion of
“Americanism” has required a reciprocally defining “other,” and that has
been readily furnished by Europe and by France when they have been rep-
resented as old, traditional, cultivated, and refined. Such broad cultural
categories and representations are almost always advanced to accomplish a
symbolic goal of one kind or another, with effects both between and within

56. France was heavily agricultural, with southern growing seasons that were virtually
year-round, and so a French food-processing industry was developed relatively late and in
a small scale, especially relative to Germany. German firms developed earlier (in 1830s and
1840s) in Baltic port cities for both domestic consumption and for export to Russia and
Scandinavia, thereby creating strong links between German agricultural practices and the
food-processing industry. The industry was stimulated further with the discovery of methods
to preserve condensed milk and with the development of a milk-based baby food by Henry
Nestlé (a German scientist residing in Switzerland). By 1905, Nestlé’s company had seventeen
plants throughout Europe and one in the United States. See Pedrocco, “Food Industry,” pp.
487–488.
57. Pedrocco, p. 489.
 W ho K i l l e d Ber n ar d L oi s eau ? 25

social groups, and we see this with regard to the field of gastronomic prac-
tices in France.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, with the gastronomic field
developing into a relatively distinctive and autonomous social universe, a
thin fissure was exposed that would later expand into a fault line. On one
side of the fissure stood entrepreneurs, managers, and industrialists seek-
ing to maximize profit and expand their enterprises. On the other were
the professional chefs, who, like other skilled artisans, tended to respond
to the industrial imperative (toward large-scale enterprise, product stan-
dardization, and routinization of the labor process, etc.) like skilled workers
everywhere, namely with a collective defense of their trade. Thus in the
latter decades of the nineteenth century, small shopkeepers and artisans in
the traditional métiers d’alimentation (including chefs de cuisine, cuisiniers,
pâtissiers, boulangers, traiteurs) increasingly organized themselves into various
chambres syndicales (union organizations) in response to the implantation of
massive food-processing plants in the outskirts of Paris, several of which
employed close to two thousand workers.58
The professional chef and the industrial manager represented social ac-
tors pursuing divergent career paths, who would tend to hold different aes-
thetic dispositions with regard to food and cuisine. Moreover, they gathered
around institutions that tended to draw into their orbit those who were
predisposed to one side or the other, with each represented by writers or
spokespersons who articulated the logic and the value of their respective
positions. Thus, on one side of the artisan/industrial divide stood Auguste
Corthay, an industrialist who had once been a chef to the Italian royal
family, who now extolled the modern virtues of preserved food (“Daily, the
great factories will deliver tasty, freshly prepared and cooked food at very
low prices. It will be the start of a new century!”); and whose book, La Con-
serve alimentaire, was published in four editions between 1891 and 1902.59
Corthay could well be regarded as the industrial counterpart of the
gastronomes of the previous century. Whereas Brillat-Savarin had earlier

58. For example, once urban transportation made regional distribution possible, curing
factories successfully turned pork butchering into a large-scale industrial process, and indus-
trial dairies could achieve a monopoly over milk production. See Amy B. Trubeck, Haute
Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2000), pp. 80–81.
59. La Conserve alimentaire also became the title of the magazine that Corthay founded
and that was published from 1903 to 1914. See Alberto Capatti, “The Taste for Canned and
Preserved Food,” in Flandrin and Montanari, FOOD: A Culinary History, p. 495.
26 CH APTER 1

presented a series of philosophical and aesthetic “meditations” on taste, the

senses, the preparation of meals, the social character of dining, the table,
and the body, Corthay offered up a practical disquisition on the methods
of food processing and conservation and included recipes geared not to the
senses so much as to industrial preparation and preservation. Only second-
arily concerned with matters of taste, Corthay’s recipes primarily focused
on the proper amount of water, salt, sugar, oil, or baking soda added to
the various steamed vegetables, fruit confits, or canned fish or meats that
were laid out in his compendium of industrial foodways. It was a book that
would have likely made connoisseurs of haute cuisine recoil in horror, for
they would have viewed it as a cookbook of badly prepared food, as a col-
lection of meditations on tastelessness, for it deliberately eschewed the skill
of the chef/artisan in favor of the industrial machine.60
Subtitled “Traité practique de fabrication,” it was essentially a book of
industrial technique that eulogized the machinery of industrial production
and that emphasized practical matters of quantity (weights, amount of pro-
duce), as one of the main objectives of industrial production is high volume.
For example, one very brief description of a machine for pressing tomato
sauce, a “passoire à tomate” indicated that two workers were required to op-
erate the machine and that it could process one thousand kilos of tomatoes
per hour (p. 57). Despite its stress on volume and labor investment, the book
also presented a wide variety of processed foods, with recipes for six differ-
ent kinds of canned peas and at least eight different preparations of canned
sardines, for example. Corthay’s book was essentially an industrial manual
that placed both visual and narrative emphasis on the organization of the
industrial kitchen and on the machinery of production deployed within
it, presenting adoring images of the factory-kitchen and food-processing
machines in celebration of the practical virtues of industrial technique.61

60. Auguste Corthay, La Conserve alimentaire: Traité pratique de fabrication, 4th ed. (Paris:
Réty, 1902).
61. Machinery is a central theme throughout this 473-page book, one that pictures all
manner of industrial-sized machines that clean, and steam, and cut, and chop, and puree,
and separate vegetables, fruits, fish, meats, and fowl. Images that depict the spatial organiz-
ation of production systems are presented in numerous drawings, such as one entitled “Vue
d’un laboratoire à vapeur,” which shows a workroom with six workers tending to eight large
vats around the perimeter of the room, with five other workers sitting at a long table in the
middle, busy processing (trimming, cutting) what look to be several large hams and piles
of potatoes. Auguste Corthay, La Conserve alimentaire: Traité pratique de fabrication, 4th ed.
(Paris: Réty, 1902), p. 29.
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 CHAPTER XVI.
WHICH REVEALS THE WAY OF THE SORCERER.

After a restless night, gladdened somewhat by the thought that I

had saved Crystal from a terrible fate, but for the most part troubled
by fears of further danger, I rose early, and, passing through the gap
in the plantation where I had encountered the wizard negro, walked
over the field and down the valley towards the beach, thinking that
perhaps I might learn something of Tiki’s fate.
Finding nothing to guide me, I climbed a high hill seaward, which
overlooked the lower part of the Sound. From that vantage ground I
could see nearly the whole of the slender arm of the sea which
reached inland, the failing breath of the land breeze ruffling its
waters. A glance at the sheltered cove where the yacht had been
anchored told me that Cazotl had either shifted his position or put out
to sea. I scanned the whole length of the Sound, and at last
discerned the yacht passing into the shadows of the high cliffs which
opened on to the Pacific. Her sails were swelling out to the breeze,
and it was with a feeling of great relief that I watched her disappear
between the high rocks. But my relief did not outlive reflection, for I
soon saw that it was not at all probable that Cazotl would relinquish
his object after one failure.
The sun had risen high in the sky by the time I had returned to the
house, and while waiting for the breakfast-bell I strolled round the
verandah. When I came to the corner dedicated to Tiki, I was
surprised to find that faithful Maori coiled up on his bed of straw,
wrapped in his mat, and fast asleep. He must have returned in my
absence.
With an inconsiderate impatience to know what had befallen him I
stooped down and touched him on the shoulder, knowing from
experience that the slightest thing would wake him But he did not
stir. I then shook him soundly, but he made no sign. With a sudden
apprehension I bent over him and listened for his breathing. It was
regular and deep; he was evidently sleeping off the effects of that
strange poison, and, as far as I could judge, he was best left alone.
On going inside I encountered Grey coming downstairs.
“Good morning, Warnock,” he said, as he grasped my hand. “That
was an extraordinary affair last night—can’t think what possessed
the girl: she’s never done anything of that kind before. Good job you
saw her, or there’s no telling what might have happened.”
“Yes, it was lucky I happened to be abroad,” I replied; “I went out
to enjoy the thunderstorm.” Then I explained briefly how it had
occurred, but omitted all mention of the negro and his infernal arts,
as I thought it was better to keep that mysterious and alarming part
of the matter to myself.
“Is she up yet?” I asked in conclusion.
“No; I’ve just been in to see her. She’s fast asleep and seems
perfectly all right.”
“Ah! yes,” I said with assumed carelessness; “that’s the way out of
those peculiar fits: to let them sleep as long as ever they will.”
With that we went to breakfast, and discussed at length the details
of our proposed journey north, which was now finally fixed for the
following day. Grey’s manager was to arrive on the morrow, and, the
day after, we were to proceed overland to a seaport some thirty
miles to the north, and there take our passage in a sailing ship which
Grey had ascertained was bound for Golden Bay, the coast line of
which was situated not fifty miles from the Table Land.
From time to time during the day I learned by repeated inquiries
that Crystal was still sleeping peacefully, but my mental state was
one of extreme tension; for, being ignorant of the after effects of the
strange poison, I was tormented with a thousand apprehensions.
Every half-hour I paid visits to Tiki, for in his condition I felt I had
something to go by. It calmed my fears a little to find that his pulse
was uniformly regular, that his breathing was normal, and that there
were no signs of anything more alarming than a very deep sleep
which, as far as I could judge, was perfectly natural. In this way,
taking Tiki’s state to represent hers, I watched over Crystal in my
imagination the whole day long, now tortured with fears for the issue,
and now relieved by the healthy symptoms.
 In my wanderings in and out and about the house I remembered
the wizard’s reed tube, and found it again in the place where I had
hidden it. It was a strange-looking reed, seven knotted, and marked
with peculiar characters and signs. The darts were arranged in little
receptacles round the mouthpiece. Three were left. I extracted one
and inspected it. There was a blood-red tip to it, and this crimson dye
I knew was the poison. The safest course would be to burn the
accursed things, lest they should do damage by accident.
Accordingly, I took them to the kitchen grate and burnt them. What
the poison was I have no idea, but, as I threw them in one by one,
each emitted a jet of some gas, which burned many colours in
succession, giving a peculiar wail, like the cry of a tortured dumb
animal. So horrible, and yet so plaintive and pathetic was this faint
sound, that I was inclined to confess there was more than poison in
those accursed messengers of evil. Then I burned the tube and
returned to my restlessness.
At length, late in the afternoon, I was standing beneath the nut-
trees, whither I had wandered in my anxiety, when, hearing a rustle
of a dress outside, I looked up and encountered Crystal as she
parted the screen of leaves and came towards me. My fears
bounded off in an instant, for her face was the picture of buoyant
health, and the flush of confusion on her cheeks made her look
radiant.
She extended her hand to me and said, “It’s very absurd for
people to walk in their sleep, but I am very grateful to you all the
same.”
“What are you grateful for?” I asked, wondering how much of the
affair she remembered.
“Why, father told me you found me walking in the garden and
brought me in,” she replied, looking hard at me with unwavering
eyes, though her cheeks were crimson.
“Oh! he told you that, did he?”
“Yes, but not until I made him. He wouldn’t tell me anything about it
at first.”
“You remembered something of what happened, then, and
questioned him for the rest?”
 “Yes, I remembered a little and insisted on being told the whole
story.”
“Will you tell me what you remember?” I urged.
She passed beneath the head of the hammock, and walking up to
the hedge, plucked a piece of the pink geranium-bloom. Turning to
me with a shy smile she held it out towards me.
“I will give you this pretty flower,” she said lightly, “if you will never
speak about it again—it was all so absurd.”
“I’m not joking, Miss Grey,” I said half angrily; “I must know—I will
know.” I had a horrible fear that could only be dispelled by the
knowledge that she could account for all the acts of that infernal
wizard.
The smile faded from her lips. She drew herself up and anger
darted from her black eyes.
“You dare to ask me what I do not choose to tell?” she said, and
never was a man so withered in spirit by a look from a woman’s eyes
as I was then. What was the mystery in them? They seemed to
belong not to this age, but to be looking at me from the beginning of
the world. For a moment I could hardly understand that they should
be set in the lovely face before me.
But the flash of anger passed, and, before I could falter a
crestfallen apology, she said, “Forgive me; I was forgetting all I owe
to you. My temper was too hasty.”
“I think I was too hasty in demanding to know what did not concern
me,” I ventured. “Perhaps I have been too hasty all along in
meddling with affairs that——”
“Ah! don’t say that,” she broke in, with a sharp pain in her voice;
“you have found me a father, you will give me back my mother, and I
—I have spoken angrily to you.” A tear glistened on her lashes; her
bosom heaved beneath the white folds of her dress, and in her eyes
was a tender light of love.
A wild thrill passed through me. In another moment I should have
done a rash thing—indeed, in after years I often wished I had done
that rash thing, that I had clasped that lovely one in my arms for a
brief second and then been struck dead. But the lapse of half that
time showed that the love-light was not for me. She raised her eyes,
but not to mine, and said with sweet repetition, “My mother! My
mother!”
With a slight start she recalled herself and turned to me.
“Do you know, I feel there is hardly anything I could not tell to you,”
she said. “That was why I told you my dream, which I have never
told to another living soul, not even to my father. And now, if, after
what I said a minute ago, you would care to hear what I remember of
last night I will tell you—but it is all very stupid.”
“If I think it is stupid I will say so,” I said.
Crystal seated herself upon the hammock, and, taking off her hat,
placed it in her lap, where she proceeded to fasten the geranium-
bloom among the other fresh flowers therein, as an excuse for
keeping her eyes cast down in shyness at what she considered the
stupidity of her story. I remained standing, for my suspense was
keen, and I felt that I should understand it better than she did.
“Well,” she said, “I dreamed that I was sitting on a bank, when a
black snake suddenly hissed and darted at my shoulder. The pain of
the bite and the horror of the thing woke me, or I suppose I dreamed
that it woke me, for what followed was exactly as if I had been
awake, though of course it was nothing more than a vivid dream. Is it
possible to dream that you are sitting up in bed, wide awake? It was
very strange, but I thought that I was awake, and that I had lost all
power to move. For a moment I listened to the thunder. Then I heard
a voice—a peculiar, harsh, hollow voice, telling me that I must follow
its directions, and be oblivious of all other things—for this, the voice,
was the only thing. It may seem strange, but I did as it directed
without the slightest hesitation. It seemed the most natural thing in
the world to get up and walk downstairs in obedience to this ugly
voice. Out of the house and across the lawn I followed it, until I came
to the way that leads through the plantation. There for a moment I
seemed to be at a loss. Then something—I cannot tell what, except
that it was not the voice—must have stood in my way and held me,
for, when I could again hear the only thing there was in the world, I
was unable to follow, although I struggled to do so. At last the
obstacle let me pass, and soon afterwards I caught up with the
voice, which guided me back again into the house, where it told me
that it had no further authority over me, and that other voices should
command me for awhile. After that I heard it no more, and I have
confused memories of taking a hot bath, with Jane and Mary fussing
about me. Then I must have gone to bed, but I can remember
nothing more till I awoke an hour ago. Was it not absurd? But some
of it must have been real, for I did walk out into the garden.”
I reflected a moment before I spoke. Her memory evidently
covered every inch of the ground. The pain in the shoulder, which
must have been the prick of the negro’s dart discharged during the
first flash of lightning after he gained her room; the falling under the
influence of the poison a moment later; the hearing of the voice in
the darkness, and the ready obedience to its suggestions; the
struggling with an obstacle which was not the voice, but myself, and
subsequently the finding of what she mistook for the voice and
followed back to the house—these were the points of a story, the
details of which must have taken place in the few minutes which
elapsed between my missing the grotesque fragment in the burnt
patch of scrub, and walking round the plantation to re-enter the
grounds again through the opening where I had encountered the
embodied “voice” and its would-be victim.
I glanced up from my rapid reflection, and, encountering Crystal’s
smile at what she supposed was the absurdity of her story, said:
“Your dreams affect me just as if you were recounting an adventure
that had really taken place. Why do you make them so vivid?”
Then we both laughed the matter away.
Later in the evening I visited Tiki again, and found him sitting up
with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Is the little maiden safe?” he asked on seeing me.
“Quite safe,” I replied, and narrated briefly what had happened.
“Where were you all last night?” I inquired when I had finished.
“He Wanaki,” he replied, shaking his head slowly, “I have it
somewhere in my mind where I was, but it slips away from my grasp
like an eel from the hand. I have the head of the lizard, but the tail is
cut off, and, though I can hear it rustling among the leaves, I cannot
find it. This is the head of the lizard, O Wanaki. I watched the great
canoe from sunset on into the night, and, when it was very dark, I
heard a small canoe leave it and take its way towards the end of the
water. I followed it along the shore, and when it came to the beach
down there I stood near by in the darkness and heard some voices.
Then someone made his way up the beach, and I followed the sound
of his footsteps. He must have heard me, for he stopped and made a
noise like the word of the weka22 when it is hiding. E Tama! I was
mad to take his head, for I knew he was going to steal the little
maiden. I rushed towards the ‘word’ and laid about me with my stick.
Again and again I did this, rushing at the ‘word’ in the dark to take
the head of it and lay it at the feet of the little maiden. But every time
I beat the air and nothing more, and every time I heard someone
laugh far away in Reinga. Eta! my only fear was for the little maiden,
so I followed the footsteps again up the valley until we came to the
field out there. The footsteps stopped. Tawhaki was beginning to
move overhead. The light of his eyes would soon show me where to
strike. The light came. I saw the taepo near at hand and rushed at
him. He raised a long stick to his mouth, and some stinging thing
struck me in the shoulder. Then, O Wanaki, I rushed on and on over
all the earth, and the darkness of Porawa closed on me as I went.
“That is the head of the lizard, O Wanaki, but the tail of it is cut off
and wriggles away when I stretch out my hand to grasp it. What has
happened to me between that and this is gone—gone like last year’s
kohu leaves.”
For a space neither of us spoke, but my thoughts were busy. At
length, jumping to a conclusion I said:
“Tiki! did you know that we are to leave here the day after to-
morrow?”
“Yes; the little maiden told me so.”
“Did you know that we are going to land in Golden Bay?”
“Yes, and go overland to the Great Tapu.”
“Ah! all right—very well—now you’d better go and get something
to eat.”
I rose and walked round the verandah, sick at heart. It was as I
had feared. That infernal wizard had, without a doubt, gleaned all our
plans from Tiki while in the obedient condition, and then sent him
home to sleep, with the assurance that on waking he would
remember nothing of what had taken place from the moment he fell
under his influence up to the time he came out of it. There was but
one conclusion to all this. Cazotl had sailed for Golden Bay to await
our arrival.
 CHAPTER XVII.
LOVE AT SECOND SIGHT.

It was the last day at the home of Crystal, and it was the last day,
too, of my fool’s paradise, from which I was driven by a fact as
startling as a flaming sword. Love at first sight was a thing I well
understood, but love at ‘second sight’ was a matter which before that
day I should have rejected as a wild impossibility—a thing to be
sworn to only by a class of visionaries who will swear to anything,
even on hearsay, provided it be sufficiently marvellous. The tale of
my love at first sight, its beginning, its hopes, its fears, and its fate—
not its ending—may be inferred from the brief attention I have called
to it here and there in this history of adventure; but Crystal Grey’s
love at ‘second sight’ for another, whom she had never seen in the
flesh, but who stood none the less surely between her and me, must
be told in detail.
It was scarcely surprising that a deep love which sprang up in full
tide in the brief space that it requires for the senses to transmit an
image to the brain and impress its meaning on the heart, should not
flow silently for very long. Up to the day of which I write it had not
entered Crystal’s mind that she was as a goddess in my eyes; it had
not occurred to her that when, filled with thoughts of the great
happiness which I, as a mere instrument in the hands of a loving
Providence, had brought her, she let her dark eyes meet mine with
the warm regard of a pure soul in them, I should be blinded by love
into the fatal conclusion that she could return my love. But something
occurred to Grey. That very morning, as we stood alone on the
verandah after breakfast, he had said to me: “Warnock, my friend, I
like you—I seem to have known you a long, long time. Listen to me. I
have found my daughter; Heaven may will it that I shall find my wife;
and then, when times are more settled, it may chance that, in the
man who will have been instrumental in restoring these two greatest
blessings, I may find a son.” He placed his hand on my arm, as he
added with a smile, “My dear boy, I know what I am talking about. I
may have forgotten nearly half of my life, but I can see what I can
see. Speak to her, Warnock. Speak to her, my dear boy. Nothing
would please me more than to call you my son.” With a final hearty
clap on my shoulder he left me wondering how on earth he could
have found out what I had revealed only to the stars and the setting
sun. It is strange how people in love fancy that no one can know the
fact until they are told.
So I spoke to Crystal, and in accordance with the matter-of-fact
bed-rock of my nature, I did not waste many words in doing it. After
spending most of the day in reviewing mazes of words which might
possibly hold my feelings and convey them, I scattered everything to
the winds, emptied my brain, and, with a full heart, strode down to
the nut-trees, where I stood before her with my hat in my hand and
said, “Crystal! I want to tell you something.”
She looked a little surprised at my first use of her Christian name,
but, looking up, said sweetly, “What is it, Wanaki?”
“It is this,” I said. “I love you more than anything else in the world:
so much that—that——”
I paused, for a look of pain flitted across her brow and the colour
left her cheeks. She rose from her seat and stood facing me, with a
soft, despairing sorrow in her eyes, while to her lovely face was
added a sadness that made it more lovely still; for even in that
moment, while I seemed plunged for ever into outer darkness, the
sweet soul of tender pity and pain suffusing the face of the woman I
loved was like balm to my crushed spirit.
“Wanaki, oh, Wanaki!” she said, “I am more sorry than I can say. I
owe you everything, but I cannot return your love. Oh! I could take
my heart out and crush it for what it tells me—that I cannot turn it to
you: that I cannot love you, Wanaki.”
Her words sounded in my ears like a plaintive lament sung over
my dead hopes, over the ashes of my heart. I knew not what to say;
for awhile I stood dumb, trying to conceal my pain. But she, watching
me with anxious eyes, searched it out, and turned away with a low
moan. Her bosom heaved beneath her white dress—I knew it was
with sorrow for me—but she said no more.
“Why?—tell me why!” I said at length, with a vague feeling that this
terrible state of things required some explanation; “do you love
someone else?”
She looked at me for a moment without answering. Then she said:
“Yes, but—but he—I have never seen him.”
She averted her eyes and hung her head in a manner which
showed me that she considered I had a kind of right to question her
as to the cause of my misery.
“You love a man you have never seen?” I said quickly, feeling
there was a ray of hope.
“You hated a man you had never seen,” she replied just as quickly;
“the man in the picture whom you called a fiend—you hated him
because his face revolted you. Then why should I not love a man I
have never seen?”
“But I saw the face depicted, and I hated the meaning of it.”
“Well, I too have seen a face, and I love the meaning of it.” She
spoke still sadly, but like a woman who means to hold her own.
“In the same way as you saw the other?” I asked with a gleam of
intelligence.
“Yes; in dreams—in many dreams. For years my heart has been
given to the heart of the man whose face I see in dreams.”
“But do you believe that man exists in the flesh?”
“Yes; I believe I shall meet him some day.” A light chased the
sadness from her eyes—a light like that of a star when night is
darkest.
“But you rejected the idea that the vile one, whose face you have
pictured, had any original on earth—why deny to the one what you
grant to the other?”
“I do not fear the vile one enough to believe in him, but my love for
the other compels belief.”
“It is a phantom of the brain,” I urged on hearing this. “What proof
have you that it is the presentment of a living man?”
“None, except a strange feeling I have in regard to it.”
I was silent for a little. I felt an uncompromising belief in her
strange feelings.
“Listen, Wanaki,” she said after a pause. “You told me of a man
who saw his heart’s desire depicted in a sculptured stone, and when
you spoke of his love I said I quite understood it. I meant that his
love was similar to mine: he loved the ideal woman—I love the ideal
man.”
I bent my brows and tacitly admitted the similarity.
“Tell me what he is like,” I said presently, “so that I may try to
understand.”
She placed her hand within the bosom of her dress and drew forth
a cameo attached to a golden chain.
“Honestly,” I said as I drew near to examine it, “I do not see why a
mere face should carry such conviction with it. And why,” I added to
myself, as she unfastened the chain and placed the cameo in my
hand, “why should a mere dream face, an unsubstantial vision of the
brain stand between me and——”
There I paused, for my glance had fallen upon the face which I
had just assured Crystal was a phantom of the brain.
Heavens! It was the face of my friend Kahikatea! The lofty,
massive forehead, surrounded by his orderly-disorderly mane, his
brows slightly bent with thought, his nostrils dilated in the way I knew
so well, his lips set firm with purpose, and his eyes, full of his
inexplicable love, gazing into space and slightly raised, as if to some
distant mountain top—this was the picture of my friend, even down
to his short brown beard and moustache—this was the man whom
Crystal loved, yet had never seen in the flesh. His look recalled the
moment, when, by the false grave beneath the great rimu, I asked
him to come with me to search for Crystal, and he replied that he
had hitched his waggon to a star, that he had made up his mind to
search for Hinauri, the Daughter of the Dawn, and would not turn
aside to look for the daughter of a mortal woman.
As I gazed in silence at the face of my friend, a wicked lie rose up
out of the ashes of my heart, and threatened to gain the mastery.
Then I looked up and met Crystal’s eyes burning into mine, and felt
my love leap up again and light the way through the dark. Thoughts
crowded tumultuously through my brain, and clearest of all was the
thought that Kahikatea, worshipping his ideal as depicted in the
image of Hinauri, had renounced all other women, Crystal among
them. Therefore it would be cruel to tell her that she was in exactly
the same position as I was.
 I said, “I have the same feeling about it as you have, I will regard it
as the face of a living man. It is my love tells you this from the centre
of my heart, for my love for you is the grandest thing I have ever
known. But what should you do if, when you meet him in the flesh,
you find that his love is given to another?”
“I do not know,” she replied slowly, “but my heart tells me I should
be plunged into the dark.”
“But what if you found, as I have found with you, that he loves an
abstraction—something less real than yourself——”
She looked up quickly. “You mean if he was like your friend, who
loves the ideal woman in marble?”
Before I could reply, and while she regarded me attentively, I felt
my eyelids flutter together as if the light were too strong. Then I said,
“Yes, supposing he were like that friend of mine—would you
despair?”
“I should not attempt to stand between him and his ideal,” she
replied decisively.
I handed her back the cameo, saying, “Neither will I attempt to
stand between you and yours, while you love it as you do.”
There was a pause, in which Crystal remained looking straight
before her as if she had not heard my last words. Presently she
turned to me with a perplexed expression and asked quickly:
“Why did you compare him to your friend? Why did you start when
you saw his face? Why did you—Wanaki! there is something you are
hiding from me.”
She stood before me, her bosom heaving with emotions that
showed upon her face as pain and joy struggling together. I saw that
it was useless for me to attempt to conceal what her quick intuition
had already grasped.
“Yes,” I admitted. “I would have concealed it from you, because
you would be happier not to know it. But my tongue carried me too
far. The face you have shown me is the face of my friend Kahikatea,
who has renounced the love of woman for love of a symbol of pure
womanhood—an ideal beauty wrought upon a piece of cold marble
which he has seen, and you have seen, in the mountain cave where
you were born.”
 The struggle between joy and pain upon her face came to an end,
and joy sat there triumphant in her eyes.
“Oh! you have explained the meaning of his face. His love is far
above the world. I see in his eyes the prayers of all great men for
something more divine in woman—the demand for some higher
strength and beauty of being than has hitherto been required of us.
Ah! Wanaki, if one woman can do anything in this great world, I will
see that the prayer of the man I love shall be answered to some
extent in the hearts of women.”
On the plane of this high love she was safe, but I knew that there
would be times when her more direct and personal love for
Kahikatea would rebel against the fact that she herself was to him
merely as one in a great multitude. She did not know, neither did I
tell her, that although Kahikatea never lost sight of the symbolic
meaning he had attached to Hinauri, yet he, in his turn, had a direct
and personal love for Hinauri herself. Once, when we had been
discussing that part of the legend which told of her return in the
future he had said, “You call my fascination a piece of extravagant
poetry, a love for a mere abstraction, but I tell you, Warnock, that if
the marble Hinauri were suddenly transformed into a living woman,
she would still be my ideal, but at the same time as real to me as any
woman can be to the man who loves her.” Had I told Crystal flatly
that the man whom she loved loved another, I could not have put
more accurately what I knew; but not wishing to lessen the power of
her resolve to work her love out in the world, I merely said: “Your
nature is good and strong: you will carry out your resolve in the way
that your star directs, but for myself, you must forgive me if during
our journey north I am a sadder, if a better, man for this great love of
mine.”
She looked at me sorrowfully, while a tear came from the black
depths of those eyes of night and glistened in her lashes. It trembled
and fell. She turned in silence and passed out through the screen of
leaves. That tear was more to me than any words could have
conveyed.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
TE MAKAWAWA IS STARTLED.

It was a fortnight later, when after various stoppages on the way

north, we sailed down across Golden Bay towards Wakatu. Mindful
of my conclusion that Tiki had unknowingly divulged our plans to
Cazotl, I kept it to myself, but argued with Grey that it would be
better to land on the western side of Tasman Bay, proceed to Te
Makawawa’s pa, and thence to the Table Land. Grey fell in with this
proposal, and accordingly we passed down the coast, round
Separation Point, and were landed at the mouth of the river above
which the pa stood.
It was a clear, quiet morning when the boat took us in from the
ship. Dreamer Grey, the brim of his buff bush hat drawn over his
eyes to keep off the glare of the early sun, sat in the stern dreaming,
not of a forgotten past, but of the possibilities of the near future. He
flicked the ash quietly from his cigar; it fell with a hiss into the smooth
water and drifted astern.
“There is the pa, look,” said Crystal, touching his arm with one
hand, while with the other she pointed to the ridge of the cliff a mile
away on the coast.
I followed the direction of her finger and saw, standing against a
thin fleecy white cloud with a strip of summer blue beneath it, the
palisading of Te Makawawa’s pa.
“It is a good omen,” I said merrily, turning towards them; “there is
the pa; there is the fleecy cloud beyond it, and there in the further
distance is the clear blue sky.”
Grey turned up the brim of his hat and let the sun shine on his
happy face as he gazed up at the pa.
“And what is it you see in the clear blue sky, Miss Grey?” I asked,
catching the now well-known look of longing in Crystal’s eyes
beneath the shadow of her sun bonnet.
She looked across to me and smiled, while her hand slid down her
father’s coat sleeve and pressed his own on the gunwale of the boat.
Then her lips moved, and, though she said nothing, the movement
could have been only the two words, “My mother!”
“A good omen let it be,” said Grey, and threw his cigar away.
“With all my heart!” I replied, knocking the dottle from my pipe and
standing up, for the nose of the boat was running on to the sandy
shore in a convenient place to land.
With what buoyant steps we followed Tiki along the way he knew
beneath the fern palms and overhanging trees that skirted the
beach! It was one of those clear, bright mornings which, on a
shelving shore between the glistening bush and the sparkling sea,
are only to be interpreted by the liquid song of the korimako, sipping
dew and honey as he sings in the flowering trees, or by the merry
fantail’s laugh, as with tail outspread she chases the gnat, which
twists and turns in the sunlight.
“Tiki,” I said presently, “you go on ahead and tell Te Makawawa we
are coming. We can find the way all right.”
On board the ship the sailors had fitted the Maori out with a
civilised costume, and he looked supremely ridiculous, for neither
had he been made for the clothes nor the clothes for him. As he
vanished ahead of us I smiled, wondering what sort of a reception he
would get from the old chief, whose ideas were of a most
conservative nature.
“I should like to be present when Tiki stands before Te Makawawa
in those clothes,” I said. “The old chief’s a gentleman of the old
school: he will be scandalised.”
Hardly were the words out of my mouth when sounds of someone
talking fell upon our ears, and presently we turned a bend of the path
and came full upon Tiki face to face with the old chief. The latter had
so warmed up to his subject that he did not see us, and partly
shielded by the trees we stood and watched them in the open space
before us. Te Makawawa’s attitude and picturesque garb, from the
feathers in his white hair to the flowing fringe of his kaitaka, were in
themselves a rebuke to Tiki; but his words added a sting to the
rebuke, which made my poor faithful Maori look even more ridiculous
than I had thought possible.
“Eta! you have not the dignity that belongs to our race. What have
you done with it? Exchanged it for that pair of trousers, and they are
put on wrong way now. What have you done with the mana of your
ancestors? Given it away for that old coat, and it’s splitting under the
arm. What have you done with the bravery and prowess of your
tribe? Traded it for that shirt without any buttons, that collar fastened
with a piece of flax, that hat which makes you look so beautiful. What
have you done with the blood of the Rangitane which runs in your
veins—of Toi our ancestor, and of Kupakupa, who made us Maori? I
expect you have bartered it all for a bottle of waipiro. Eta! did our
ancestors make scarecrows of themselves like this? Did they go to
such foolishness to frighten the birds? Tiki, you’re a big fool. You’re
like the stupid ones, trying to bring about the time when the Maori
cannot hold up his head at all. You’re weak in the knees, and you put
those trousers on to hide it. I think your whole backbone would
scarcely make one good fishhook.”
“What a contrast,” whispered Crystal, who had understood the
chief’s words perfectly. “I like the old fellow, even if he did steal my
father and mother and myself. But don’t you think Tiki has had
enough?” The poor Maori was trembling beneath the scorn of the
aged one.
“I think so, yes,” I replied. “You stay here till I call you.” And I
stepped out into the open space.
“Te Makawawa!”
He turned on the instant and came towards me. “He Pakeha!” he
said, “the Friend of the Forest Tree. I saw the canoe coming in and
came down to meet it. You have found the little maiden, Keritahi
Kerei—good! Where is she?”
“O Chief! I have found the little maiden, and I have also brought
the man who has forgotten the faces that he knew.”
I called to them, and they came from behind the trees.
Crystal stood before him looking like a mountain lily in her white
dress. As soon as Te Makawawa’s bright eyes rested upon her he
started, and, drawing back the step he was taking, remained in an
attitude of astonishment. His eyes wandered from her face and form
to me, and there was a question, a perplexity, almost a doubt written
on the lines of his rugged visage.
“Friend of the Forest Tree! is this wild white swan, such as a man
sees once in a lifetime, the little maiden?—or have you deceived
me?”
“The Friend of the Forest Tree does not deceive,” said Crystal,
before I could speak. “If you are Te Makawawa I am the little maiden
of many moons ago whom you carried on your shoulder. Do you not
remember the heitiki round my neck, and the little kaitaka of kiwi
feathers I wore? See! my black eyes and hair! do you not remember
them?”
She threw off her sun bonnet as she spoke, and stood facing him,
as if half conscious of her sculpturesque loveliness.
The question, the perplexity, the almost-doubt deepened upon his
face.
“Eta!” he said, turning to Grey; “is this your daughter with the eyes
and hair of ancient night? Speak, O Man-who-has-forgotten; does Te
Makawawa dream in the daytime?”
Grey, knowing nothing of the language, turned to me and we
spoke together, while the chief gazed long at Crystal.
“O Chief,” I said at length, “the Man-who-has-forgotten says this is
the little maiden left by Tiki in his hut while he slept. But why do you
doubt my word, O Tohunga? Do you think the little white Children of
the Mist have changed the child? Kahikatea and his friend have ever
spoken the truth to you.”
“I do not doubt,” he replied quietly, showing me his palm. “These
last days are full of dreams to me. My eyes are growing dim, and I
see strange things against the setting sun. O people of the Great
Tribe, take no heed of an old man’s dreams. Tiki!”—he turned to the
be-trousered one with a return of his indignation—“hasten to the pa
and bid them prepare a feast, and tell my maidens that a mountain
lily will take root among them. Go, O Tiki, and tell them not to waste
their time in laughing at a man who was once a warrior, with the
blood of the Tane-nui-a-Rangi in his veins, but is now a thing that
has been hatched from an egg like a bird.”
Tiki did not wait for the point of this piece of satire. He and his
trousers vanished in all haste, and Te Makawawa, bidding us follow,
strode before in silence.
“What a lordly savage,” said Grey, as we followed on; “but why did
he seem so startled at the sight of my daughter?”
“He seemed to doubt my identity,” said Crystal.
 “Perhaps it was his way of demanding proof,” I suggested, but I
could not conceal from myself that there was something to be
cleared up in his strange behaviour.
When we reached the pa on the high cliff Grey and I were allotted
a house to ourselves, while Crystal was handed over by Te
Makawawa to the charge of the maidens of highest rank, who were
forcible in their expressions of joy when they found she could speak
their own tongue. I caught sight of her standing among a little group,
like a fair white queen among her dusky maidens. I saw by the
gestures of the Maori girls that they were asking her to let down her
hair. She hesitated a moment, then, withdrawing the pins, let it fall
and shook the long, heavy masses out over her shoulders, till they
rippled down almost to her knees. Loud cries of admiration came
from the girls as they took up the loosened tresses in their hands
and stroked and patted them tenderly, likening them to the
undulating seaweed called rimu rehia, long, shining, glistening; and
again to the darkness of the furthest caves, where the winds were
bound by Maui. Thus they lifted it up and stroked and talked to it,
while it awoke their simple hearts to poetry. Then, as Crystal
gathered it all together again and fastened it up, they stood wide-
eyed, with many expressions of wonder that pakeha women should
do this strange thing.
As a result of a private talk with the old chief, I learnt that Ngaraki
had paid him a visit some days before, and had told him strange
things. The Great Tohungas of the Earth had spoken to him, saying
that the return of Hinauri was near, and that he must lay the
foundations of a new priesthood in the temple, and gather the tribes
upon the Table Land. Messages had been sent to many tribes, and
some had already settled upon the high plain under the rule of
Ngaraki. Te Makawawa assured me they were gathered for peace,
and not for war. Within the space of a few days his own tribe would
journey on to the Great Tapu.
“And what is your plan for restoring Keritahi Kerei to her mother?” I
asked.
“Listen, Pakeha!” he replied, lowering his voice. “The Great
Tohungas do not speak to Ngaraki only. I too have heard their words
—when all the world was dark and still. I will guide you and the
maiden, and the Man-who-has-forgotten to the white cave where the
woman still lives. But I would not meet the eye of Ngaraki, for he is
fierce and terrible, and I could not explain this thing to him. Because
of these things, friend, we must wait until Ngaraki goes into the
islands of the south to gather together the men to whom he will teach
the ancient wisdom. That will be on the morning after the full moon,
for you must know, O son, that an ancient rite of the temple requires
the presence of the priest on the night when the moon is full. We
shall set out then on the third day from this, so that we shall reach
the Table Land as Ngaraki leaves it.”
I agreed to this plan, and it was settled. In the meantime it
occurred to me that, unknown to Crystal, I might take a journey to
the hut of Kahikatea. Accordingly, early on the following day, I set out
and arrived at the hut just as my friend was preparing for a journey.
“Have you found her?” were his first words as he came down the
slope in front of his hut to meet me.
“Yes,” I replied; “she is at the pa, and I want you to come and see
her. Then we could all journey together to the mountain—with Te
Makawawa as a guide.”
“When are you going to start?” he asked.
“The day after to-morrow.”
“That’s too late,” he said; “I’m going to start now, as soon as I can.
I’ve almost worked my way through the rock, but ran out of powder,
and had to go across the bay for more.” The look in his eyes was far
away and abstracted as he added: “It’s a strange undertaking,
Warnock, and it is a strange madness that has laid hold of me; but
there’s method in it, and I mean to see that perfect face and form
again.”
I saw that the desire of the poet for the symbol of his dreams was
still strong within him, but nevertheless, I fulfilled the object of my
visit.
“If you wish to see a perfect face and form,” I said, “come back to
the pa with me. I cannot imagine anyone more perfect than Crystal
Grey. Come back and let us all go together. The ‘way of the fish’ is
easier than the ‘way of the spider.’ My dear Kahikatea, long solitude
has made dreams and visions too real to you.”