Here we are with the priest who married us, Monsignor Wilders of St Thomas More. I don’t think that I’ve ever noticed that look in Kathleen’s eyes before; I am one lucky guy. I still have the cravat, although I’ve never worn it again. Gee I am tall, am’t I.

We celebrated, this year, at La Grenouille. Two years ago, we celebrated our twenty-fifth anniversary at a bistro in the neighborhood, with twelve friends. Tonight was somewhat cheaper, but then there were only two of us. We were treated extremely well, and the evening was both magnificent and great fun: fancy but not formal, a mode that I wish more of my countrymen knew about. The waiters were only too happy to bring us extra baguette rolls so that we could sop up the sauce of the lobster ravioli that arrived, unordered, between the first course and the second. (I took away the receipt but not the bill, so I can’t tell if I was charged for the ravioli. I don’t think that I was.) Kathleen’s mother would have been horrified by the sopping up, but she would have had an absolute stroke when a woman at the next table asked to see the ring on Kathleen’s right hand — and Kathleen took it off to show it to her.

While I can remember: An excellent Gigondas to start with and a very nice Bordeaux after, a Haut something. For starters, I had the sweetbreads special. Because it tasted better with every bite, I wished that I could just have some more. Kathleen had a risotto, but I was too besotted with the sweetbreads to ask her how it was, and, anyway, she wouldn’t have told me, because she was already eavesdropping on the ladies at the next table (one of whom would ask to see the ring). For dinner, Kathleen had Dover sole. She would have had it anyway, but her father had asked her, on the phone that afternoon, to have it “for him.” I had the pheasant special.

Pheasant special: doesn’t that sound pretentious! Something under glass! In the event, the plate held three medallions of pheasant — I’d say it was thigh, but I’m not an experienced consumer of game — wrapped in thin sheaves of cabbage and topped with a sauce that made a little bit of foie gras go a very long way. Not a bone in sight. I didn’t have to ask for a baguette to sop of the sauce this time, because there were two quennelle-shaped blimps of puréed potato to do the job.

We were asked at the start, as one always in the best temples, if we wanted a dessert soufflé. Kathleen remembered that we wouldn’t. We would have so much wine left over after the main course that we’d need a good plate of cheese to finish us off. And indeed we did. The cheeses were wonderful, but they didn’t come with labels, so I can’t tell you exactly what they were; suffice it to say that the plate offered a high-end spread of the same range that you’ll get chez moi: from chèvre to brie via bleu. The star of the plate, however, was a honeycomb. Just one each.  Neither one of us had ever eaten a honeycomb.

In the course of the evening, I spoke a bit of French and talked a bit of French politics. It ought not to have been remarkable, but in any case it did not make me any enemies. Walking down 52st Street toward Madison afterward, our arms around each other, I asked Kathleen (who had so très très bien dîné that she couldn’t wait to get into a taxi), “Which do you think they liked better, my accent aigu or my accent grave?” “Your accent both!” she burst out (pronouncing the “th” as we do).

I’m a good enough cook to know that the meal was fantastic, but not good enough to tell you how and why. Which is how I like it. As I always say, my idea of “roughing it” is staying at home. But my idea of having a good time at a restaurant seems to be something that the good people at La Grenouille knew all about without my having had to ask.

¶ Matins: “The athlete is on the floor”: listening to Warren Buffett discuss the credit crunch with Charlie Rose. The American economy is a great athlete, but it has suffered cardiac arrest. The only thing to do is to get it back up and running. That will involve convalescence in the form a two-year recession.

I piously wish that everyone in the country could listen to Mr Buffett’s remarks and, wherever necessary, have them explained just as clearly.

¶ Tierce: Brent Staples writes concisely about the flummery surrounding college-entrance exams. Schools aren’t the only institutions whose reliance on test scores is lazy.

¶ Sext: Except for brief and urgent messages, I refuse to have cell phone conversations with people who are driving. Here’s why.

¶ Vespers: David M Herszenhorn files an interesting report about senatorial dissent to the rescue package, “A Curious Coalition Opposed Bailout Bill.”  

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It is about half-past three in the afternoon, so far past morning that I’m tempted to schedule this for tomorrow morning. But who knows where we’ll all be tomorrow?

¶ La Rochefoucauld:

L’interêt, qui aveugle les uns fait la lumière des autres.

Interestedness, which blinds some people, enlightens others.

Better in French, where “interests” aren’t as detachable as they are in English.

¶ Chesterfield puts his finger on what strikes me as a pervasive distinction between the men of Anglophone and Continental upper classes:

These would be my pleasures and amusements, if I were to live the last thirty years over again; they are rational ones; and moreoever, I will tell you, they are really the fashionable ones; for the others are not, in truth, the pleasures of what I call people of fashion, but of those who only call themselves so. Does good company care to have a man reeling drunk among them? or to see another tearing his hair, and blaspheming, for having lost, at play, more than he is able to pay? or a whore-master with half a nose, and crippled by coarse and infamous debauchery? No; those who practise, and much more those who brag of them, make no part of good company; and are most unwillingly, if ever, admitted to it. A real man of fashion and pleasure observes decency: at least neither borrows nor affects vices; and if he unfortunately has any, he gratifies them with choice, delicacy, and secrecy.

Dr Johnson would have complained that the Continentals want candour.

¶ In Moby-Dick, two chapters of almost grotesque padding, even if the chapters themselves are not very long (the second one doesn’t fill a page). “The Advocate” argues that whalers “don’t get no respect.” The climax of this silliness is that whale oil is used to annoint monarchs.

But the only thing to be considered here, is this — what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, not macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?

Sorry, Herman, but it not only can be olive oil but is. Whale oil! The idea!

¶ Chapter XXII of Don Quixote is noteworthy for two things. First, our hero finds his helmet, in the guise of a barber-surgeon’s brass bowl. Second, as translator Edith Grossman lets us know in a footnote, he summarizes the plot of the standard chivalrous romance quite perfectly. When Sancho asks why they’ve got to poke about in Spanish backwaters instead of finding adventure in war, Don Quixote outlines the drill, which prevents him from trying to serve a king or an emperor until he can boast of many valorous deeds. Just as well!

Sancho is quick to note that, for his own sake, Don Quixote had better not abduct any fair princesses, because then he won’t be awarding any of his angry father-in-law’s fiefdoms to his faithful squire. I see that Sancho’s foil isn’t that he’s any wiser than Quixote, but only that he’s absolutely not a dreamer.

¶ I read a lot more of Squillions today than I meant to do. That’s because I fell into Coward’s correspondence with Enid Bagnold, author of National Velvet and The Chalk Garden, which Coward starred in in 1956. The “correspondence” consists of several long letters from Bagnold, and none from Coward. Will someone please remind Barry Day of the title of his book? It really ought to have been called, Noël Coward: A Life in Letters (and Chatty Antinote). There was also the now-famous letter to Edward Albee in which Coward makes this enviable claim:

I have enjoyed sex thoroughly, perhaps even excessively all my life but it has never, except for brief wasteful moments, twisted my reason.

¶ Today’s chapter of After the Edwardians is an elegant and engrossing composition on the popularity, in inter-War Britain, of puzzles and mystery novels. It crosses quite impalpably across the theme bridge of English Elegy to a discussion of the non-modernist painting of Stanley Spencer and John Piper. One would have liked a little more about John Cowper Powys.

¶ Matins: Mayor Bloomberg’s third term: an endlessly interesting question that won’t be answered until (a) Mr Bloomberg fails to win the term by one means or another, or (b) long after his third term. Michael Barbaro and David W Chen report.

¶ Tierce: A word about credit:

In 1929, Meyer Mishkin owned a shop in New York that sold silk shirts to workingmen. When the stock market crashed that October, he turned to his son, then a student at City College, and offered a version of this sentiment: It serves those rich scoundrels right.

A year later, Mishkin was out of business: no workingmen customers. “It” served him wrong, and it’s likely that a similar credit crunch today would have the same impact on ordinary Americans who have never actively invested in anything except a house. (The story was told by Mishkin’s grandson, a former Federal Reserve Board member, to David Leonhardt.)

¶ Sext: Wanting to see what Le Figaro had to say about Belgium’s breakup (the latest on which I read about at Joe.My.God), I came across something far more amusing: Are American writers too ignorant for the Nobel Prize? Horace Lundgren, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy (which awards the Nobel) seems to think so.

(Ha! Now that I read Joe’s update, I understand why there was nothing about Belgium at Figaro to keep from scrolling all the way down to Mr Lundgren.)

¶ Vespers: I have a new crush — and it’s very educational. Sarah Sherborne is the moderating voice on the latest crop of Teach Yourself language courses from Hodder & Stoughton. I felt the first flutter of attraction in Teach Yourself Arabic, but before Teach Yourself Turkish Conversation was halfway through, I was besotted. I’ve now added Chinese, Chinese Conversation, and Dutch to my collection, and I’m longing for Portuguese.

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¶ A maxim for our times from La Rochefoucauld:

Nous promettons selon nos espérances, et nous tenons selon nos craintes.

We make promises according to our hopes, but we hold back according to our fears.

¶ Lord Chesterfield writes to his son about the importance of paying attention: a favorite theme. The advice is all very paternal, but the close is quite sweet: (more…)

I fiddled with the format this week, and will probably fiddle some more in the coming weeks. I think that the colors that I’ve chosen to code fiction titles are all wrong. But, hey, I lost my Internet connection last night and am still working without WiFi.

Just when I think I can’t go on reviewing the Book Review, I discover a new reason to forge ahead. I want to use this feature to forge an idea of what a humanist reading list would look like today. Of course, I’ve got to define “humanist,” and I’m working on that as well. Although I have a working definition to hand, I’m going to let my decisions about the Book Review‘s choices polish the finer points.

If you’re looking for a good book about humanism and education, Anthony T Kronman’s Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life is worth looking into. It has the feel of a classic, and I hope that its popularity on conservative campuses (if its achieved) doesn’t harm Mr Kronman’s reputation. His argument is lucid, persuasive, and scolding-free.