The History of a Mouthful of Bread. Jean Macé
you can form no idea.
Have you noticed that when you want to take hold of anything (a piece of bread, we will say, as we are on the subject of eating), have you noticed that it is always the thumb who puts himself forward, and that he is always on one side by himself, whilst the rest of the fingers are on the other? If the thumb is not helping, nothing remains in your hand, and you don't know what to do with it. Try, by way of experiment, to carry your spoon to your mouth without putting your thumb to it, and you will see what a long time it will take you to get through a poor little plateful of broth. The thumb is placed in such a manner on your hand that it can face each of the other fingers one after another, or all together, as you please; and by this we are enabled to grasp, as if with a pair of pincers, whatever object, whether large or small. Our hands owe their perfection of usefulness to this happy arrangement, which has been bestowed on no other animal, except the monkey, our nearest neighbor.
I may even add, while we are about it, that it is this which distinguishes the hand from a paw or a foot. Our feet, which have other things to do than to pick up apples or lay hold of a fork, our feet have also each five fingers, but the largest cannot face the others; it is not a thumb, therefore, and it is because of this that our feet are not hands. Now the monkey has thumbs on the four members corresponding to our arms and legs, and thus we may say that he has hands at the end of his legs as well as of his arms. Nevertheless, he is not on that account better off than we are, but quite the contrary. I will explain this to you presently.
To return to our subject. You see that it was necessary, before saying anything about the mouth, to consider the hand, which is the mouth's purveyor. Before the cook lights the fires the maid must go to market, must she not? And it is a very valuable maid that we have here: what would become of us without her?
If we were in the habit of giving thought to everything, we should never even gather a nut without being grateful to the Providence which has provided us with the thumb, by means of which we are able to do it so easily.
But however well I may have expressed it, I am by no means sure, after all, that I have succeeded in showing you clearly, how absolutely necessary our hand is to us in eating, and why it has the honor to stand at the beginning of the history of what we eat.
It still appears to you, I suspect, that even if you were to lose the use of your hands you would not, for all that, let yourself die of hunger.
This is because you have not attended to another circumstance, which nevertheless demands your notice—namely, that from one end of the world to the other, quantities of hands are being employed in providing you with the wherewithal to eat.
To go on further: Have you any idea how many hands have been put in motion merely to enable you to have your coffee and roll in the morning? What a number, to be sure, over this cup of coffee (which is a trifle in comparison with the other food you will consume in the course of the day); from the hand of the negro who gathered the coffee crop to that of the cook who ground the berries, to say nothing of the hand of the sailor who guided the ship which bore them to our shores. Again, from the hand of the laborer who sowed the corn, and that of the miller who ground it into flour, to the hand of the baker who made it into a roll. Then the hand of the farmer's wife who milked the cow, and the hand of the refiner who made the sugar; to say nothing of the many others who prepared his work for him, and I know not how many more.
How would it be, then, if I were to amuse myself by counting up all the hands that are wanted to furnish—
The sugar-refiner's manufactory,
The milkmaid's shed,
The baker's oven,
The miller's mill,
The laborer's plough,
The sailor's ship?
And even now is there nothing we have forgotten? Ah, yes! the most important of all the hands to you;—the hand which brings together for your benefit the fruits of the labor of all the others—the hand of your dear mother, always active, always ready, that hand which so often acts as yours when your own is awkward or idle.
Now, then, you see how you might really manage to do without those two comparatively helpless little paws of yours (although there is a thumb to each), without suffering too much for want of food. With such an army of hands at work, in every way, to furnish provision for that little mouth, there would not be much danger.
But cut off your cat's fore paws—oh dear! what am I saying? Suppose, rather, that she has not got any, and then count how many mice she will catch in a day. The milk you give her is another matter, remember. Like your cup of coffee, that is provided for her by others.
Believe me, if you were suddenly left all alone in a wood, like those pretty squirrels who nibble hazel-nuts so daintily, you would soon discover, from being thus thrown upon your own resources, that the mouth is not the only thing required for eating, and that whether it be a paw or a hand, there must always be a servant to go to market for Mr. Mouth, and to provide him with food.
Happily, we are not driven to this extremity. We take hold of our coffee-biscuit between the thumb and forefinger, and behold it is on its road—Open the mouth, and it is soon done!
But before we begin to chew, let us stop to consider a little.
The mouth is the door at which everything enters. Now, to every well-kept door there is a doorkeeper, or porter. And what is the office of a well-instructed porter? Well, he asks the people that present themselves, who they are, and what they have come for; and if he does not like their appearance, he refuses them admittance. We too, then, to be complete, need a porter of this sort in our mouths, and I am happy to say we have one accordingly. I wonder whether you know him? You look at me quite aghast! Oh, ungrateful child, not to know your dearest friend! As a punishment, I shall not tell you who he is to-day. I will give you till to-morrow to think about it.
Meanwhile, as I have a little time left, I will say one word more about what we are going to look at together. It would hardly be worth while to tell you this pretty story which we have begun, if from time to time we were not to extract a moral from it. And what is the moral of our history to-day?
It has more than one.
In the first place it teaches you, if you never knew it before, that you are under great obligations to other people, indeed to almost everybody, and most of all perhaps to people whom you may be tempted to look down upon. This laborer, with his coarse smock-frock and heavy shoes, whom you are so ready to ridicule, is the very person who, with his rough hand, has been the means of procuring for you half the good things you eat. That workman, with turned-up sleeves, whose dirty black fingers you are afraid of touching, has very likely blackened and dirtied them in your service. You owe great respect to all these people, I assure you, for they all work for you. Do not, then, go and fancy yourself of great consequence among them—you who are of no use in any way at present, who want everybody's help yourself, but as yet can help nobody.
Not that I mean to reproach you by saying this. Your turn has not come yet, and everybody began like you originally. But I do wish to impress upon you that you must prepare yourself to become some day useful to others, so that you may pay back the debts which you are now contracting.
Every time you look at your little hand, remember that you have its education to accomplish, its debts of honor to repay, and that you must make haste and teach it to be very clever, so that it may no longer be said of you, that you are of no use to anybody.
And then, my dear child, remember that a day will come, when the revered hands that now take care of your childhood—those hands which to-day are yours, as it were—will become weak and incapacitated by age. You will be strong, then, probably, and the assistance which you receive now, you must then render to her, render it to her as you have received it—that is to say, with your hands. It is the mother's hand which comes and goes without ceasing about her little girl now. It is the daughter's hand which should come and go around the old mother hereafter—her hand and not another's.
Here again, my child, the mouth is nothing without the hand. The mouth says, "I love," the hand proves it.