Christopher Kemp > Quotes

“At elegant dinners," wrote the French historian Imbert de Saint-Armand a hundred years later in MARIE ANTOINETTE AND THE DOWNFALL OF ROYALTY (1891), "a little guillotine is brought in with the dessert and takes the place of a sweet dish. A pretty woman places a doll representing some political adversary under the knife; it is decapitated in the neatest possible style, and out of it runs something red that smells good, a liqueur perfumed with ambergris, into which every lady hastens to dip her lace handkerchief. French gaiety would make a vaudeville out of the day of judgement.”
― Christopher Kemp, Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris