I Was Going To

type out the recipe, from the cookbook of Alexandre Dumas, for young elephant's feet. Then I said to myself, I said, "Kevin, dude -- this is the world-wide web. And your influence is enormous (needless to say). Do you really want to feel responsible should some sweet young elephant, no doubt the apple of its mother's eye, suddenly disappear, only to end up in a stockpot with two slices of Bayonne ham, half a bottle of Madeira, and fifty little pimentoes? No. No, you don't. Plus that's a lot of typing."

Enough to know that Dumas apparently did publish a cookbook -- actually it sounds more like a cooking encyclopedia, some thousand pages long, with digressions on topics like burns (how best to treat them). Come on, Penguin books: you know you want to put out a new translation of this, you know you do.

In the meantime, if you're dying to find out how to cook young elephant feet (and, let me emphasize, if you live in a country with absolutely no free roaming elephants, and where the zoos and reserves have adequate security) then you should hunt up Guy Endore's "Autobiography-Anthology" of Dumas.

Apparently the trunk is tasty, too.

~

Alas, my mental picture of Dumas appears to have been wildly inaccurate, at least in terms of height. Here's a description of him that Endore quotes "from the diary of the Goncourt brothers:"

Dumas is a kind of giant with the hair of a Negro, the salt beginning to mix with the pepper, and with little blue eyes buried in his flesh like those of a hippopotamaus, clear and mischievous; and an enormous moon-face, exactly the way cartoonists love to draw him.

"From the diary of the Goncourt brothers" is a little mysterious. Did they really keep a co-diary? Was their handwriting so similar that scholars can't distinguish who wrote which entry? Did they take turns writing alternate words, like the father and son conspirators in that Sherlock Holmes story, so that each would be equally responsible for every entry?

Or is Guy Endore merely a doofus?

~

Doofus or not, here's a passage from Endore's enconium on the Count of Monte Cristo:

But that's the dream of every man! Every man to whom life has been unjust. And which of us has never felt that injustice? Which of us has never felt that there was a secret conspiracy against us, so that born to wealth and fame, we have somehow lived in misery? Which of us has not felt robbed of a beautiful and rich bride?

And who has not dreamed of finding some great treasure? And then appearing among our false friends in an impenetrable disguise, rich as Croesus, to administer stern and well-deserved punishment upon his enemies?

Except for the "finding some great treasure" part, I can honestly say that I've never dreamed of dreaming any of those things.

Myles na gCopaleen had a great line about a man only needing (quoting from memory, here): "money, drink, and opportunities for scoring off his enemies. Give him those three things, and you won't hear much squawking out of him."

But I mean, seriously -- "Which of us has not felt robbed of a beautiful and rich bride?" Is that really a common, near-universal feeling? Do millions of grown men actually wander about the world, grumbling about how they could have married that hot wealthy chick, if it weren't for the machinations of their enemies? I'm appalled.

Endore is the author of Werewolf of Paris. I've heard of this before; it's supposed to be a classic of its kind. Now I'm tempted to read it -- if I can find a cheap paperback somewhere.