The History of a Mouthful of Bread

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There was once upon a time a Persian prince staying in Paris, who was
taken to a very fashionable ball, that he might see a specimen of
European civilization. I am not talking about a prince in the "Arabian
Nights;" mine lived, I believe, in the time of Louis Philippe. The
beautiful dancers wheeled round, their eyes brilliant with pleasure,
in the arms of elegant cavaliers; one would have said that the whole
of this airy troop, swaying to and fro in time to the lively flourishes
of the music, was animated by one soul; everything seemed full of joy
in that large and splendidly lit hall, and mothers secretly envied
their daughters as they passed and re-passed before them. Our oriental
alone scanned with a disdainful eye this youthful enjoyment.

When it was ended,--"How is this?" said he to his conductor; "did you
not tell me that I was to see here the most distinguished families of
Paris?"

"Certainly," replied the other; "among those young ladies who were
just now dancing before you, there were at least twenty of the grandest
heiresses of France."

"Young ladies who dance! Come, come! In my country we have dancers,
but they are paid for it. Our wives are never permitted to dance
themselves. That is all very well for the common people!"

Remember, when needful, the contempt of this Persian prince, my dear
child; and let me beg of you, work for yourself. The dance of labor
is worth quite as much as that of the ball-room, when you give your
heart to it. It is even worth more, very often; and next time I will
tell you why.

LETTER XXV.

CARBONIC ACID.

We are going to make acquaintance to-day with a new personage, who
well deserves our attention. It is the child of oxygen and carbon,
[Footnote: This is the name learned men have given to Charcoal.] though
not in the same way that you are the child of your parents.

To tell you how it is made is more than I am able. It is a _gas_,
or if you like the word better, it is an _air_; for when we say
"gas," we mean "air;" only it is always a different sort of air from
the air of the atmosphere, which learned people are not in the habit
of calling _gas_. I cannot, therefore, show you _carbonic acid_ itself,
for it cannot be seen any more than the air which fills an empty glass.
But I can tell you where there is some, and you even probably know it by
its effects, although you have never heard its name.

Do you remember, on your aunt's wedding-day, that there was a sparkling
wine called champagne, at the grand breakfast? You smile, so I conclude
somebody gave you a little to taste; and if so, you will remember how
sharp it felt to your tongue. Do you remember, too, how the cork flew
out when they were opening the bottle, and how the noise of the "pop!"
startled more little girls than one? It was _carbonic acid_ which
sent the cork flying in that wild way; the carbonic acid which was
imprisoned in the bottle, in desperately close quarters with the wine,
and which accordingly flew out, like a regular goblin, the moment the
iron wire which held down the cork was removed. What sparkled in the
glass, making that pretty white froth which phizzed so gently, as if
inviting you to drink, was the carbonic acid in the wine, making its
escape in thousands of tiny bubbles. What felt so sharp to your tongue
was the same carbonic acid, in its quality of acidity, for thence it
has its name; the word _acid_ being borrowed from a Latin word
signifying the sharp pungent taste, almost _fine-pointed_ as it
were, peculiar to all substances which we call _acids_.

It is carbonic acid also which causes the froth in beer and in new
wine when bottled. It is he who makes soda-water sparkle and sting the
tongue, and ginger-beer the same, if you happen to like it; and so far
you have no particular reason for thinking ill of him. But beware. It
is with him as with a good many others who have sparkling spirits, who
make conversation effervesce with gayety, and who are very seductive
in society when you have nothing else to do but to laugh over your
glass, but whose society is fatal to the soul which delivers itself
up to them. This charming carbonic acid is a mortal poison to any one
who allows it to get into his lungs.

You remember what a violent headache your servant suffered from the
other day after ironing all those clothes you had in the wash? She
owed that headache entirely to this work which she did for you. She
had remained too long standing over the coals over which her flat-irons
were being heated. You know already that when charcoal burns, it is
from the carbon uniting with the oxygen of the air; from this union
proceeds that mischievous child, carbonic acid gas, in torrents, and
the poor girl was ill, because she had breathed more of this than was
good for her health. Observe well, that the room-door was open to let
in the fresh air, and that there was a chimney, to allow the carbonic
acid to escape. It was on this account that she got off with only a
headache. Unhappily, there have sometimes been miserable people who,
weary of life, and knowing this, but not knowing or thinking about the
God who overrules every sorrow for good, have shut themselves up in
a room with a brazier of burning charcoal, after taking the fatal
precaution of stopping up every opening by which air could possibly
get in; and when at last, in such a case, uneasy friends have forced
open the well-closed door, they have found nothing within but a corpse.
Then, too, there are those frightful accidents of which we hear so
often, of workmen groping their way down into long disused wells, who
have died as they reached the bottom; or of sudden deaths in coal-pits.
In general these have been owing to the poor victims encountering the
long pent-up carbonic acid gas, whose poisonous breath blasted and
destroyed them at once.

You may well ask why I am telling you such horrible stories, and what
I am coming to with my carbonic acid? But you have more to do with it
than you think, dear child. You, and I, and everybody we meet, nay,
and the very animals themselves, since their machines are of the same
sort as ours, are all little manufactories of carbonic acid. The thing
is quite clear. Since there is a charcoal fire lit in every part of
our body, there always arises from the union of the oxygen brought by
the blood with the carbon it meets in our organs, that mischievous
child we have been talking about; and our throat is the chimney by
which he gets away. He would kill us outright were he to stop in the
house.

This is how it comes about: In proportion as the blood loses its oxygen,
it picks up in exchange the carbonic acid produced by combustion, so
that it is quite loaded with it by the time it returns to the lungs.
There it takes in a fresh supply of oxygen, and discharges at the same
time its overplus of carbonic acid, which is driven out of the body
by the contractions of the chest, pell-mell with the air which has
just been made use of in breathing. You are aware that this air is not
the same at its exit as at its entrance to the body, and that if you
try and breathe it over again it will no longer be of the same use to
you. That is because it has lost part of its oxygen and brings back
to you the carbonic acid which it had just carried off. If you take
it in a third time, it will be still worse for you; and in case you
should continue to persist--the oxygen always diminishing, and the
carbonic acid always increasing in quantity--the air which was at first
the means of your life will at last become the cause of your death.
Try, as an experiment, to shut yourself up in a small trunk, where no
fresh air can get in; or even in a narrow closely-shut closet, and you
will soon tell me strange news. There will be no occasion to light a
charcoal fire for you in there. Enough is kept burning in your own
little stove, and you will poison yourself.

You see now that the dreadful stories I was telling a short time ago
have something to do with you, and that it is a good thing to be warned
beforehand. And now tell me, when a hundred people--or I ought to say,
a hundred manufactories of carbonic acid--are crowded together for a
whole evening, sometimes for a whole night, in a space just big enough
to allow them to go in and come out; tell me, I say, if that is a sort
of thing which can be beneficial to the health of little girls whose
blood flows so fast, and who require so much oxygen; and whether, on
the contrary, it is not one's duty to keep them away from such scenes?

There may be amusement there, I know; but the best pleasures are those
for which one does not pay too dearly. I have seen the very wax lights
faint and turn pale all at once, in the very midst of those murderous
assemblies, as if to warn the imprudent guests that there was only
just time to open the windows.

And this reminds me of a point I had nearly forgotten. Wax-candles arc
like ourselves. In order to burn, they must have oxygen, and, like us,
they are extinguished by carbonic acid. But like us also--and indeed
to a greater extent, because they consume much more charcoal at
once--they manufacture carbonic acid. Hence that very illumination
which affords the company so much pleasure and pride is plainly an
additional cause of danger. Each of those wax-lights which is spread
around with such a prodigal hand, the only fear being that there may
not be enough of them, is a hungry intruder employed in devouring with
all his might the scanty amount of oxygen provided for the consumption
of the guests.

From each of those cheerful flames--the suns, as it were, of the festive
assembly--shoots out a strong jet of carbonic acid, contributing by
so much to swell out the already formidable streams of poisoned gas,
exhaled to the utmost extent by the dancers. And wait--there is still
something else I was forgetting. You dance. And I told you last time
at what cost you have to dance. You have to make the fire burn much
quicker than usual, that is, to consume a great deal more oxygen at
once, and so you double and treble the activity of the carbonic acid
manufacture: and this just at the moment when it would be so convenient
that it should go on as slowly as possible! After this, you need not
be surprised that people should look fagged and exhausted next morning.
What astonishes me is that they are not obliged to lie in bed
altogether, after treating their poor lungs to such an entertainment.
And even if you have spared your legs, you are not much better off,
as you are sure to find out in time, especially if the thing is repeated
too often.

When I told you just now that the dance of labor was worth as much as
the dance of the ball-room, was I right or wrong? What do you say
yourself?

I could repeat the same of theatres--places of entertainment specially
adapted for impoverishing the blood, and ruining the health of the
happy mortals who go there, evening after evening, to purchase at the
door the right of filling their lungs with carbonic acid, not to speak
of other poisons. You must see clearly that such places as those are
not fit for little lungs as dainty as yours; and this may help you to
submit with a good grace when you see people going there without you.
Grown-up people escape moreover, because the human machine possesses
a strange elasticity, which enables it to accommodate itself--one
scarcely knows how--to the sometimes very critical positions in which
its lords and masters place it without a thought. But to do this, it
is well that it should be thoroughly formed and established; for you
run a risk of injuring it for ever, if you misuse it too early in life.
Tell this to your dear schoolboy brother, when he wants to smoke his
cigar like a man. If his lungs could speak, they would call out to him
that it was very hard upon them, at their age, to be so treated, and
that he ought at any rate to wait till they had passed their
examinations!

But I must not get into a dispute with so important an individual, by
throwing stones into a garden which is not under my care. For you, my
dear child, the moral of this day's lesson--which to my mind is much
more alarming than a hobgoblin tale, since it concerns the realities
of every-day life--is clear; and it is this:

Seek your amusements as far as possible in the fresh air. In the summer,
when the lamp is lit, bid your mamma a sweet good-night, and go to
bed. In the winter do not wait till there is a great quantity of
carbonic acid in the room where the grown-up people are sitting, before
you retire to your own like a reasonable girl, anxious not to do
mischief to that valuable and indefatigable servant, the poor blood!
Not to mention that if she were to injure him too much, she would have
to bear his grumbling for the rest of her life. We cannot change him
as we change other servants.

LETTER XXVI.

ALIMENTS OF COMBUSTION.

We have spent a very long time, my dear child, over the little fire,
which goes on burning secretly in every one of us, quietly devouring
what little girls eat with such a good appetite, quite unsuspicious
of what they are doing it for. However, if I mean to finish the history
of our mouthful of bread, I must push on to its last chapter.

The _whole_ of what we eat is not burnt, as you may easily suppose; for,
if it were, what would the blood have left to feed the body with, and to
repair in due proportion the continual destruction or waste which goes
on in our organs? Our food, or "_aliments_" as the general collection of
different sorts of food is called, are divided into two very distinct
sets: some, which are destined to be burnt, and which are called
_aliments of combustion_; others, which are destined to nourish the
body, and which are called _aliments of nutrition_. I have to tell you
now about these last, and you will find their history by no means
uninteresting.

Learned men having detected, beyond the possibility of a doubt, the
existence of these two sorts of aliments, one is tempted to think they
ought to have made it known to the cooks, and that ever since so
important a discovery, the dishes on all well-regulated tables should
have been arranged accordingly; aliments of combustion on one side,
aliments of nutrition on the other. It cannot be enough merely to give
your guests a treat; you ought to provide them with everything necessary
for the proper fulfilment of the claims within; and if you give some
nothing but combustibles, leaving the others no share of fuel, how
will they be able to manage? Nobody thinks about this, however; not
even cooks, to begin with, who, as far as fire is concerned, find they
have had quite enough to do with it in their cooking; and as for the
guests, when they have had their dinner they go away satisfied, as a
matter of course, quite as well provided for as if the mistress of the
house had made her calculations, pen in hand, while writing out the
bill of fare, with a view to combustion and nutrition. Now, how is
that?

It is because the two sorts of aliments are, for the most part, met
with together in everything we eat, so that we swallow them at once
in one mouthful; and have therefore no need to trouble ourselves further
on the subject. There is our bit of bread, for instance. What is bread
made of? Of flour. Bread, then, must contain all that was previously
in the flour. Very good. Now I will teach you how to discover in flour
the aliment of combustion on the one hand, and the aliment of nutrition
on the other.

Take a handful of flour, and hold it under a small stream of water;
knead it lightly between your fingers. The water will be quite white
as it leaves it, carrying away with it a fine powder, which you could
easily collect if you were to let the water run into a vase, where the
powder would soon settle to the bottom. That powder is starch--the
same starch as washerwomen use for starching linen, and which our
grandfathers employed in powdering their wigs. You had some put on
your own hair one day when you were dressed up as a court-lady of olden
time. Now, starch is an excellent combustible. People have succeeded,
by means which I will not offer to detail here, in ascertaining almost
exactly what it is made of, and they have found in it three of our old
acquaintances, oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, combined together in such
proportions that 100 ounces of starch contain as follows:

Ounces.
Carbon 45
Hydrogen 6
Oxygen 49
---
100
I give you the calculation in round numbers, so as not to burden your
memory with fractions; and I will do the same with the other sums I
shall have to go through to-day, this being, let me tell you, an
arithmetical day. Besides, I could scarcely take upon myself to warrant
the absolute correctness of those very precise fractions people
sometimes go into. Even our learned friends squabble now and then as
to which is right or wrong over the 100th part of a grain, more or
less, in making out their balance, and you and I will not offer to
decide between them. I always think we have accomplished wonders in
getting even _near_ the mark, and with their permission we will
stop there.

Starch, then, of whose weight carbon constitutes nearly one-half, is
of course a first-rate combustible. Indeed, one may almost consider
it the parent, as it were, of at least half our aliments of combustion,
for if (in consequence of a certain operation, which nature has the
power of performing for herself, in certain circumstances) it loses
a portion of its carbon, so that there remain but 36 ounces of it in
the 100 of starch, our starch is turned into something else; now can
you guess what that something is? Neither more nor less than _sugar_!
Witness the grand manufactories at Colmar, in France, where bags of
starch are converted into casks of syrup by a process of nature alone;
so that the inhabitants of the neighborhood sweeten their coffee at
breakfast with what might have been made into rolls, had it been left
alone. And this is not all. Give back this starch-sugar into the hands
of Nature once more by putting it into certain other conditions, and a
new process begins in it. About a third of its carbon will unite itself,
of its own accord, with the two-thirds of its oxygen, so as to make
carbonic acid, (you are acquainted with that gentleman now) which shall
fly off and away, and there will remain--what do you think?--_Alcohol_,
that other combustible we talked about, and which burns even better than
sugar and starch, since in a hundred ounces it contains as follows:--

Ounces.
Carbon 53
Hydrogen 13
Oxygen 34
---
100

All this astonishes you. What would you say then if I were to tell you
that your pocket-handkerchief is composed of entirely the same materials
as starch, and in the same proportions too, and that if a chemist were
to take a fancy, by way of a joke, to make you a tumbler of sugar and
water, or a small glass of brandy out of it, he could do so if he
chose. Wonders are found, you see, in other places besides fairy tales;
and since I have begun this subject I will go on to the end. Know then
that from the log on the fire, to the back of your chair, everything
made of wood, is in pretty nearly the same predicament as your
pocket-handkerchief; and if people are not in the habit of making casks
of syrup and kegs of brandy out of the trees they cut down in the
woods, it is only, I assure you, because such sugar and brandy would
cost more to make than other sorts, and would not be so good in the
end. Should some one ever invent and bring to perfection an economical
process for doing it thoroughly well, sugar-makers and spirit-distillers
will have to be on their guard!

But we are wandering from our subject. If I have allowed myself to
make this digression, however, it is because I am not sorry to accustom
your mind early to the idea of those wonderful transformations which
nature accomplishes, and of which I could give you many other instances.

To return to our flour. As soon as all the starch is gone out of it,
there remains in your hand a whitish, elastic substance, which is also
sticky or _glutinous_, so that it makes a very good glue if you choose;
and hence its name of _gluten_, which is the Latin word for glue.

When dried, this _gluten_ becomes brittle and semi-transparent.
It keeps for an unlimited time in _alcohol_, putrefies very soon
in water exposed to the air, and is easily dissolved in a wash of soda
or potash. Finally 100 ounces of it contain as follows:--

Ounces.
Carbon 63
Hydrogen 7
Oxygen 13
Nitrogen 17
---
100

Observe the last material named. It is a new arrival, of which I shall
soon have something to say.

But where am I leading you? you will ask, with all these uninteresting
details about glue.

Wait a little and you shall hear.

You have probably never seen any one bled, which is a pity, as it
happens; for if you had, you might have noticed (provided you had had
the courage to look into the basin), that after a few seconds, the
blood which had been taken away separated itself of its own accord
into two portions; the one a yellowish transparent liquid, the other
an opaque red mass floating on the top, and which is called the
_coagulum_ of the blood or _clot_. This _coagulum_ owes its color to an
infinity of minute red bodies of which we will speak more fully by and
by, and which are retained as if in a net, in the meshes of a peculiar
substance to which I am now going to call your attention.

That substance is whitish, elastic and sticky; and when dried becomes
brittle and semi-transparent. It keeps for an unlimited time in alcohol,
putrefies very soon in water exposed to the air, and is easily dissolved
in a wash of soda or potash. Finally 100 ounces of it contain as
follows:--

Ounces.
Carbon 63
Hydrogen 7
Oxygen 13
Nitrogen 17
---
100

This substance is called _fibrine_. It goes to form the fibres of those
muscles which are contained in a half formed state in the blood.

You are laughing by this time I know, and I also know the reason why.
I have told you the same story twice over. You have not forgotten my
wearisome description of _gluten_, and here I am, saying exactly
the same thing of _fibrine_! You conclude I am dreaming, and have
made a mistake!

But no, I am wide awake, I assure you, and mean what I say. And if
these details are the same in the two cases, it is for the simple
reason that the two bodies are one and the same thing; _gluten_ and
_fibrine_ being in reality but one substance, so that were the most
skilful professor to see the two together dried, he would be puzzled to
say which came from the flour, and which from the blood. I mentioned
that our muscles existed in a half-formed state in the blood. Here is
something further. The _fibres_ of muscles exist previously in full
perfection, in the bread we eat; and when you make little round pills of
the crumbs at your side, it is composed of fibres stolen from your
muscles which enable the particles to stick together; and I say _stolen
from your muscles_, because they are the _gluten_ which you ought to
have eaten. I hope the thought of this may cure you of a foolish habit,
which is sometimes far from agreeable to those who sit by you.

This, then, is the first great _aliment of nutrition_, and you
may make yourself perfectly easy about the fate of those who eat bread.
If little girls should now and then have to lunch on dry bread, I do
not see that they are much to be pitied. There is the starch to keep
up their fire, and the gluten for their nourishment, and that is all
they require. The porter above is the only one who finds fault. And
in these days porters have become more difficult to please than the
masters themselves.

Then as to babies who drink nothing but milk, you perhaps wish to know
where they get their share of fibrine.

And I am obliged to own there is none in the milk itself; but, I
daresay, you know curdled milk or _rennet_? The same separation into two
portions has taken place there which occurs in the blood when drawn from
the arm; underneath is a yellowish transparent liquid,--that is the
_whey_; above a white curd of which cheese is made, and which contains a
great part of what would have made butter. By carefully clearing the
curd from all its buttery particles you obtain a kind of white powder
which is the essential principle of cheese, and to which the pretty name
of _casein_ is given because _caseus_ is the Latin for cheese. I shall
not trouble you now with details about _casein_; but there is one thing
you ought to know. A hundred ounces of _casein_ contain as follows:--

Ounces.
Carbon 63
Hydrogen 7
Oxygen 13
Nitrogen 17
---
100

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