AJ Liebling eventually paid the price for his devotion to French cooking.
”I once at fifty-two, committed myself voluntarily to a slimming prison in Switzerland, but I was suffering from only temporary insanity. I soon repented, but I stayed in because I had paid two weeks’ nonboard in advance, and I didn’t want to forfeit the fee, which was rather more than four meals a day would have cost me at Pierre’s on the Place Gaillon, each with a half-bottle of Corton Charlemagne, another of La Mission Haut-Brion, and three healthful drinks of Calvados to follow.
It was like a mental hospital where, as a result of a mutiny, the inmates had taken over from the staff, and now addressed one another as “Doctor”. All the kind, fat sensible people like me, who longed for something decent to eat, were under restraining orders, while the soi-disant doctors, who were free to eat normally, chose to drink rose-hip tea and eat muck made of apple cores and wheat germ. They permitted us to eat only minuscular quantities of that. The nurses and therapists ate in the same ironically denominated Speise-sal, and except that they had larger portions than we, appeared to slop in identical slop. (Once, as a special reward for fortitude, I got three peeled hazelnuts.)
The only sane man on the place, aside from us, was the masseur, a big Swiss named Sprüdli.
”And thou, eat thou this crap?” I asked him in my imperfect but idiomatic German.
“No,” said Sprüdli, as he plucked my biceps like harp strings and let them snap. “I need my strength. I eat at home.”
“And what has thou to home yesterday evening eaten?”
“Blutwurst,” he said, “and Leberwurst.”
I wished I hadn’t asked, but masochism feeds on itself, especially when there is nothing else to eat. I had an appetite for self-inflicted pain that since then has helped me understand the submissiveness of prisoners in concentration camps.
“And what hast thou to home yesterday evening drunk?”
“Wein,” he said, “und Bier.”
He wrenched one of my knees out of joint, then put it back in the socket with the gesture of a man making a massé shot at billiards.
Tears of hunger and pain filled my eyes.
Sprüdli was, after all, like the majority of Swiss, a German. Once he knew my hurt, he made a point of telling me at each visit his menu for the previous day.
“Good morning,” he would say. “Calves’ hocks have I yesterday at lunch to home eaten, with potato dumplings, and to dinner spring chicken with another time time dumplings.” Then he would laugh, even before I winced, because he was so sure I would. Good old Schadenfreude.” (Between Meals, An Appetite for Paris, AJ Liebling)
After his release his friends called for a doctor.
” ”But the man has been starved!” he said. “His constitution has been mined! You must give him to eat – but do not commence brutally; he could not support it. A guinea hen or two the first day, and some brook trout.”
”And wine?” asked my angelic hostess. “He can have wine? He adores it.”
“He mustn’t exaggerate, Hippocrates said. “No more than two litres a day, and nothing heavy – perhaps a Mercurey. If his pulse is low, a little marc d’Arbois. No fondues until tomorrow. Then we can begin feeding him up!”
. . . I left Pontarlier pounds heavier than when I flew to Zurich to get weight off.” (Between Meals, An Appetite for Paris, AJ Liebling)