Don Fernando (Vintage Classics) by W Somerset Maugham

Author:W Somerset Maugham [Maugham, W Somerset]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2011-01-11T07:00:00+00:00

8

I MUST REMIND the reader that I am making no attempt to give an exhaustive account of the Spanish, and their manners and customs, in the Golden Age. That would need a much greater erudition than I can pretend to. I have read with a special object in view and I have not concerned myself with what could be of no use to me. When you want to write a novel set in a distant past you must acquaint yourself with the details of the daily life of the persons about whom you propose to write. You want to know when they ate their meals and what they ate, when they got up and when they went to bed, what the streets were like and how they were lit at night, not necessarily to state them, but by a reference, seemingly casual, here and there to give your reader the atmosphere of the period. Now it is just these things that authors seldom tell you because they were common knowledge and there was no need to mention them. You must glean your information from a stray remark in a picaresque novel or from a couplet in a play. So a Victorian novelist might tell you that his dashing hero took a hansom, knowing that the reader would be well aware what sort of conveyance it was, and unmindful of the fact that in two or three centuries he would have no idea. It is not often that the novelists give you such specific information on any subject as Cervantes gives us in his account of Don Quixote’s daily fare. Before he took it into his crazy head to range the world as a knight errant he was known as Alonso Quijana. He was what we should call a gentleman farmer and his household consisted of a housekeeper, his niece and a handy man. His circumstances were modest. Every day of the week but two he had for his dinner the national dish of Spain, olla podrida, which was a mess of beef and mutton, but with more beef than mutton, because mutton was expensive, with cabbages and chick peas, and onions and olives to give it flavour. To this on Sundays was added a brace of pigeons. For supper he ate a salad of chopped meat, ham and onions soused in vinegar. On Fridays, obedient Catholic as he was, he ate nothing but lentils, and on Saturdays duelos y quebrantos, of which the English is pains and sorrows. The learned have been at pains to discover what on earth this dish, so strangely named, could be, and as the learned will, some of them indulged in fanciful surmise. It was left to Don Francisco Marin in his monumental edition of Don Quixote by an examination of the contemporary translations into French and Italian of Cervantes’ immortal book, by attentive perusal of the classical plays, to discover beyond shadow of doubt that what Alonso Quijana ate on Saturdays was neither more nor less than eggs and bacon.

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