‘Good God, only idiots aren’t keen on food! Being keen on food is like being keen on the arts, keen on education, keen on poetry, what have you! The sense of taste, my dear chap, is as delicate a sense, as sensitive and as reliable a sense as sight and hearing. To be deprived of taste is to lose an exquisite faculty, the capacity to discern quality in food just as in literature or in works of art. If you don’t have that, you’re deprived of an essential sense, one of the ones that constitute human superiority over animals. Without it, you’d be one of the many insensitive, lumpen, brutish kinds of creatures our race is generally made up of. To have an insensitive palate is like having a dull mind. A man who can’t tell the difference between a crayfish and a lobster, say, or a herring – that wonderful multi-flavoured fish which contains every known taste of sea-life – a man who can’t tell a herring from a mackerel, a Crassane pear from a Duchesse,4 is like a man who can’t distinguish between Balzac and Eugène Sue,5 between a Beethoven symphony and a military march, or who can’t make a distinction between the Apollo of Belvedere and the statue of General Blanmont.’6

‘Who’s General Blanmont?’

‘Oh, of course you wouldn’t know. You’re not from Gisors, obviously. Did I tell you the inhabitants of Gisors are known as the “Glorious of Gisors”? Never was the term more appropriate. But let’s finish lunch first. Then I’ll tell you all about the town as we go round it. From time to time he stopped talking to take a long slow sip of his half-glass of wine which he looked at with tenderness as he replaced it on the table.

He was quite a comical sight with his napkin knotted around his neck, his red cheeks, his gleaming eyes and his whiskers now framing beautifully his ever-busy mouth. He made me eat till I was fit to burst. Then, since I needed to get back to the station, he grabbed my arm and guided me through the streets of the town. A fine example of the provincial style, it was dominated by a fortress, one of the most curious military structures in the whole of France. It overlooked a long, green valley on whose pastureland lumbering Norman cattle grazed and chewed the cud.

‘Gisors,’ said the doctor ‘population approximately 4,000, situated on the borders of the Eure, is mentioned as early as in Caesar’s Commentaries: Caesaris ostium, then Caesartium, Caesortium, Gisortium, Gisors. I shan’t take you up to the Roman camp, the ruins of which are visible to this day.’

Laughing, I replied: ‘My dear fellow, it looks to me as though you’re suffering from a disease which as a medical man you might be interested in. It’s called parochialism.’

He stopped in his tracks.