Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 11 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/574

550 has been employed upon the flowers. Scullery maids … An army of men has been at work, the result of thousands of working days are being swallowed up, and all this that people may come together to talk about some great teacher of science or morality, or to recall the memory of a deceased friend, or to greet a young couple just entering upon a new life.

In the middle and lower classes it is perfectly evident that every festivity, every funeral or wedding, means gluttony. There the matter is so understood. To such an extent is gluttony the motive of the assembly that in Greek and in French the same word means both "wedding" and "feast." But in the upper classes, among the refined who have long possessed wealth, great skill is used to conceal this and to make it appear that eating is a secondary matter, necessary only for appearance. And this pretense is easy, as in the majority of cases the guests are satiated in the true sense of the word,—they are never hungry.

They pretend that dinner, eating, is not necessary to them, is even a burden; but this is a lie. Try giving them, instead of the refined dishes they expect, I do not say bread and water, but porridge or gruel or something of that kind, and see what a storm it will call forth, and how evident will become the real truth, namely, that the chief interest of the assembly is, not the ostensible one,—but gluttony.

Look at what men sell; go through a town and see what men buy:—articles of adornment and things to devour. And indeed this must be so, it cannot be otherwise. It is possible not to think about eating,—to keep this lust under control only when a man does not eat except in obedience to necessity; but if a man ceases to eat only in obedience to necessity, i.e. when the stomach is full, then all this cannot be otherwise. If men love the pleasure of eating, if they allow themselves to love this pleasure, if they find it good (as is the case with the vast majority of men in our time, and with educated men quite as much as uneducated, although they pretend that it is not so), then there is no