The History of a Mouthful of Bread by Jean Macé (great novels to read txt) 📕

of your being tempted to put too many things into it. For as you fill it, it expands, and enlarges itself like an indian-rubber ball, which, though only the size of an egg to begin with, becomes as big as your head if you blow hard into it. Then, as it gets empty, it recovers itself, diminishing gradually in size in plait-like contractions.

When people remain too long without eating, they have, as they say, twinges in the stomach. This is because the stomach, becoming by degrees quite empty, and contracting more and more, the surrounding parts which were sustained by it, lose their support, and strain at their ligaments, which now have all the weight to bear. Careless people, who do not think of such things, are reminded by the twinging pains that it is time to eat, just as a careless servant is called to order by the bell of which his master has pulled the string.

In your case, my dear child, such warnings are soon attended to, and you have not always even to wait till they come. But there are hundreds of miserable beings who are warned to no purpose, who cannot obey the master when he calls for his rations, because they have nothing to give him; and when this forced disobedience lasts too long, they end by dying of it. In cases like these, when human beings thus cruelly perish, the stomach is found to be contracted till it is scarcely bigger than one's finger.

On the other hand, a man once died suffocated from excess of food, after one of those great public dinners, which last four, six, or more hours-one can scarcely say correctly how long-and the doctors who examined him found his stomach so prodigiously enlarged that it alone occupied more than one-half of his inside. As you perceive, therefore, the stomach has, properly speaking, no fixed size. Its size depends upon what there is in it. It is like those men whose manners go up and down with their fortunes; who seem very grand people when their pockets are well filled, but become very small ones when their purses are empty. There is, nevertheless, this difference between them, that such men are fools, because they are men, and not bags ; whereas the stomach is a sensible bag, fulfilling with intelligence the duties of its character as a bag. It is very fortunate for us that it is ready to change its size, according to the caprices of our appetite; and dressmakers would do well if they could get a hint from it how to improve their style of pockets, which certainly cannot have cost their inventors any very great effort of imagination!

The way in which this extraordinary pocket empties itself is not less curious than the rest. As long as digestion is going on, the stomach is firmly closed at each end; at the upper one by the last ring of the
aesophagus , and at the lower by another ring of the same kind, only stronger; the watchful guardian of the passage which leads to the intestines. This ring is called the pylorus .

For once, here is a name which agrees with our method of describing the human machine, and I have much pleasure in translating it to you, although it is a Greek word. Pylorus is the Greek for a porter; and our ring is indeed a porter like the one of which we have already said so much, and which I called last time the porter up above , in anticipation of his colleague below.

The porter up above presides at the entrance; the one below at the exit, and both for the same purpose, namely, to taste. [Footnote: It would be absurd to say so in the common acceptation of the term; but according to No. 1 of Mr. Mayo's "Classification of the impressions produced by substances taken into the fauces," viz., "Where sensations of touch alone are produced, as by rock-crystal, sapphire, or ice," the word taste may be applied to the discriminating faculty of the Pylorus .-TR.]

It may well astonish you, that you should have in your inside a taster who is not accountable to you; who experiences sensations of which you know nothing, and cannot even form an idea. Yet thus it is. The
pylorus actually tastes the paste which is in the stomach, and if it is not to his taste, that is to say, if the work of digestion has not sufficiently transformed it for use, he keeps the door relentlessly closed.

The porter up above has a thousand different tastes. He makes his bow to meringues, and admits wings of chickens. Fries, roasts, stews, things tender or crisp, sweet and salt, oily, greasy, or sour; amongall kinds he has friends whom he welcomes in succession; and it is well for us that he does so, for we share in all his pleasures.

The porter below, who works for himself alone, obscure and unknown down in his black hole, the porter below, I say, has but one taste, knows but one friend-a gray-looking paste, semi-liquid, with a very peculiar unsavoury smell, disagreeable enough to any one but himself, which is called the chyme , I scarcely know why, but it is what everything one eats turns into, without exception, be it delicate or coarse by nature. The great lord's truffle-stuffed pullet makes, as nearly as possible, the same chyme as the charcoal-burner's black bread; and though the palate of the former may be better treated than that of the latter, the pylori can enjoy but one and the selfsame sauce. Equality is soon restored in this case, therefore, as you see.

To be free to pass through then, the contents of the stomach must be reduced to the condition of chyme, the only substance which finds favor with the pylorus: and as, in the endless varieties of food which go to form our nutriment, some sorts turn into chyme much more quickly than others, it follows, that by the aid of its discriminating tact (which is not easy to elude) the pylorus allows some to pass, while it turns back others, until all in succession are converted into chyme. For example, in the case of a mouthful of bread and meat swallowed at once, the bread passes away on its travels long before the meat has done dancing attendance in the stomach, awaiting that transformation without which the pylorus will never allow it to slip through.

This ought to make you seriously reflect on the danger of carelessly swallowing things, which, by their nature, are not susceptible of being converted into chyme, particularly if they are too large to hide in the general paste, as a cherry-stone will sometimes do, so mixed up with other food as to pass unperceived by the pylorus, over whose decisions we have no control, remember. It bangs the door to, be assured, in the very face of anything obnoxious without hesitation, and the poor stomach would find itself condemned to retain them for an indefinite period, unless by dint of prayers and supplications they should contrive to soften the stern guardian, who may at last get accustomed to their approach, and, perhaps, in a weak moment, allow them to pass as contraband goods; like a custom-house officer on a foreign frontier who will occasionally shut his eyes to a country friend's packet of tobacco. But the poor stomach has had to suffer a martyrdom meantime, while the dispute was pending, and before the intruder has been winked at by the porter.

I shall remember all my life the history of a peach-stone, which was related to me in 1831. I was at the time a youngster at the Stanislaus College, and (aided perhaps by the Revolution of July, which had recently occurred), it was just then discovered to be a proper thing to set about teaching the laws of nature to children. Consequently, for the first time in the history of schools, a professor of natural history was added to the instructors of Latin and Greek. I leave you to judge how we opened our ears to his lessons. When we arrived in the course of our new studies at the pylorus, of which we had none of us ever heard before, our professor, in warning us, as I have done you, of the dangers of imprudent gluttony, related, as an instance, the case of a lady who had inadvertently swallowed a peach-stone. For two years she suffered agonies in her stomach without any cessation or relief. The luckless peach-stone, repelled by the walls of the stomach, which its very touch irritated, was incessantly thrown against the entrance of the pylorus, but in vain. As to turning itself into chyme, such a thing was not to be thought of, it was far too hard a substance for that. Round and round it went, causing in its relentless course such renewed suffering to the poor patient, that she was visibly sinking from day to day.

The doctors, finding all their treatment of no avail, began to despair of her life, when one fine day she was suddenly, and as if by enchantment, relieved of her tormentor. The peach-stone had bribed the porter, with whom, in the course of the two years, it had scraped up a sort of friendship. It had cleared the terrible barrier, had been allowed to slip out, and the lady was saved; but it was only just in time.

I do not know, my dear, that this story, which is certainly well calculated to cure you of any fancy for swallowing peach-stones, willmake as much impression on you as it did on me five-and-twenty years ago. The idea of telling it to you occurred to me quite by chance. It has carried me back to the time when, as is now the case with you, the mysteries which lie hidden in our internal organization were beginning to be revealed to my mind; and you will one day know with what delight one recalls the remembrance of these first dawnings of the intellectual life-that delightful infancy of the growing mind-more rich in recollections, and more interesting a thousand fold than the infancy of the body. I have allowed myself the little treat of this episode, and if I have had the good fortune to amuse you at all during our progress, you must not cavil at this piece of self-indulgence. And now we have done just what the peach-stone did; we, too, have passed the barrier, and are out of the stomach, but still we have not yet come to the end of our tale.


LETTER X.

THE INTESTINAL CANAL.

I venture to hope, my dear child, that more and more light is dawning upon your mind, as we gradually proceed on our little journey. You must by this time have some idea how the food, which has been masticated and softened in the mouth, cooked, kneaded, and decomposed in the stomach, and transformed into a soft, semi-transparent kind of paste, will soon be ready to mix with the blood, in order to repair the waste that the life-stream is continually undergoing in its ceaseless course through all parts of the body.

You have perhaps thought it a sad degradation for a truffle-stuffed fowl to turn to chyme. But when you consider that by this means it becomes part and parcel of a human body, the change is not to be despised. It was necessary, to begin with, that materials destined to the honor of being incorporated into