QI The Book of the Dead

her round face and red hair, but it’s cleverer than that. In French La Lune Rousse also means ‘The April Moon’, one that coincides with the frosts that can destroy the shoots of young plants.

CHAPTER FIVE
     

Man Cannot Live by Bread Alone
     
     
    Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are .
JEAN ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN (1755–1826)
     
    W hat would Brillat-Savarin have made of Aristotle, who liked camel meat and fried pregnant cicadas, or Friedrich Nietzsche, who gave up alcohol and tobacco and spent a lot of time at the local pastry shop wolfing down cakes and pies?
    Trickier still would have been Pliny the Elder, whose larder contained fresh gladiator blood (as a cure for epilepsy), hare’s testicles (for relief of pain in the loins) and lynx urine (sore-throat gargle).
    Ludicrous though these remedies sound, we should be careful before we write them off. Dietetics is a more complex science than astrophysics – we know less about the effects of the food we eat than we do about the galaxies.
    Nothing brings the dead more vividly to life than finding out what they ate. It makes the famous seem more human, and shines a light on the obscure.

     
    We know very little about the life of Helena, Comtesse de Noailles (1824–1908), but we know quite a lot about her theories on food and health. Born into the English aristocracy, she had a short-lived marriage to a French nobleman and her only child died at birth. Fabulously rich but bored much of the time, Helena migrated between her houses in England, Paris, Montpellier and the French Riviera. In her fortieth year, she saw a striking portrait of a girl aged about six by the Parisian society painter Ernest Hébert (1817–1908). She asked to buy the picture but was told it had already been sold to Baron James de Rothschild. Undaunted, she decided that if she couldn’t own the painting she would acquire its real-life subject instead. She discovered that the child, Maria, had been brought to Paris by her feckless Italian father, Domenico, and that he was willing to allow her to be ‘adopted’ for two bags of gold, with which he planned to return to Italy and set up his own vineyard. He made only two conditions: that the girl would be brought up as a Catholic and that she would be treated as an equal, not a servant. The Comtesse agreed and Maria’s life changed for ever.
    It was a privileged but peculiar existence. The regulations laid down by the Comtesse dominated Maria’s whole childhood and, in due course, the lives of her English husband and their two children as well. They were kept in line by the threat of losing the inheritance promised by their ‘grandmother’, and dread forebodings passed around the family breakfast table whenever an envelope arrived from France embossed with a capital ‘N’.
    Loose clothing was one of Madame de Noailles’s iron rules. So, when Maria was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Sussex she was excused school uniform. She also had to have her own exclusive supply of fresh milk. This was provided by the Comtesse’s personal dairy herd, installed in the grounds of a large house she had bought on the nearby Downs. Each winter, the Comtesse left England for fear of catching the flu, and later instructed Maria to do the same with her children in the autumn, the climate being especially unhealthy when the leaves were falling, especially from the oak trees, of which, she said, England had too many.
    At mealtimes Helena de Noailles’s eccentricities really came to the fore. When Maria and her children came to visit, she would only eat with them if her food was served on plates hidden from view by a two-foot-high silk screen. She never revealed why.
    The Comtesse always slept with a loaded pistol beside her bed, even when she stayed in an hotel, where she also demanded that a string of fresh onions be hung on the door to ward off infection. A visitor to her bedchamber noted the silk stockings stuffed with squirrel fur wrapped around her forehead and chin to prevent the formation of wrinkles. To avoid bronchitis, she would eat plate after plate of fresh herring roe. Once Maria and her husband received a gift from the Comtesse of three dozen bottles of Bordeaux and fifty bottles of port. Along with the alcohol came instructions that they should only drink the port at sunset mixed with a little sugar. It was to be diluted with soft rainwater collected from the roof of their house by the servants, under strict