XIV
How Heraclius All but Devoured a Dish of Beautiful Ladies of a Past Age
When lunch time came, the Doctor went into the dining room, sat down at the table, tucked his napkin into his coat, and set the precious manuscript open beside him. But as he was about to lift to his mouth a little wing of quail, plump and savoury, he glanced at the holy book and the few lines on which his eyes fell glittered more terribly before him than did those famous words suddenly written on the wall by an unknown hand in the banqueting hall of the celebrated King Belshazzar.
This is what the Doctor saw:
“Abstain from all food which once had life, for in eating flesh you are eating your own kind: and he who, having fathomed the grand metempsychosic truth, kills and devours animals that are nought else but men in their inferior forms, shall be graded with the ferocious cannibal who feasts upon his vanquished foe.”
And on the table, fresh and plump, held together by a little silver skewer and giving out an appetising smell, were half a dozen quails.
The fight between mind and stomach was terrible, but be it said to Heraclius’ glory, it was short. The poor man, quite overcome and afraid lest he would not for long be able to resist such fearful temptation, rang for his servant and in a broken voice enjoined her to remove forthwith the abominable dish and to serve henceforth only eggs, milk and vegetables. Honorine almost collapsed on hearing this surprising statement. She would have protested, but before the inflexible eye of her master she hurried off with the condemned birds, consoling herself, however, with the agreeable thought that, generally speaking, what is one person’s loss is not everyone else’s.
“Quails, quails! What could quails have been in another life?” the wretched Heraclius asked himself as he sadly ate a superb cauliflower à la créme, which seemed to him on this occasion disastrously nasty. “What sort of human being could have been elegant enough, delicate and fine enough, to pass into the exquisite little bodies of these roguish, pretty birds? Ah, doubtless it could only have been the adorable little mistresses of bygone times” … and the Doctor grew even paler at the thought of having eaten for his lunch every day for more than thirty years half a dozen beautiful ladies of a past age.