Jacques. Apply to your steward here, who will dish you up something good for little money.

Harpagon. Enough! I wish you to answer me.

Jacques. How many people are to sit down?

Harpagon. We shall be eight or ten; but you must not count upon more than eight. If there is enough for eight, there is enough for ten.

Valère. That needs no comment.

Jacques. Very well! we must have four first-rate soups and five small dishes. Soups … Entrées …

Harpagon. What the devil! there is enough to feed a whole town.

Jacques. Roast …

Harpagon (putting his hand over Jacques’ mouth). Hold! wretch, you will eat up all my substance.

Jacques. Side-dishes.

Harpagon (putting his hand over Jacques’ mouth again). What! more still?

Valère (to Jacques). Do you intend to make every one burst? and think you that master has invited people with the intention of killing them with food? Go and read a little the precepts of health, and ask the doctors whether there is aught more prejudicial to man than eating to excess.

Harpagon. He is right.

Valère. Learn, Master Jacques, you and the like of you, that a table overloaded with viands is a cut- throat business; that, to show one’s self the friend of those whom one invites, frugality should reign in the meals which one offers; and that according to the saying of an ancient, we must eat to live, and not live to eat.

Harpagon. Ah! how well that is said! Come here, that I may embrace you for that saying. This is the finest sentence that I ever heard in my life; one must live to eat and not eat to li … No, that is not it. How do you put it?

Valère. That we must eat to live and not live to eat.

Harpagon (to Master Jacques). That is it. Do you hear it? (To Valère). Who is the great man who has said that?

Valère. I do not recollect his name just now.

Harpagon. Just remember to write down these words for me: I wish to have them engraved in letters of gold on the mantelpiece of my dining-room.

Valère. I shall not forget it. And as for your supper, you have but to leave it to me; I shall manage everything right enough.

Harpagon. Do so.

Jacques. So much the better! I shall have less trouble.

Harpagon (to Valère). We must have some of these things of which people eat very little, and which fill quickly; some good fat beans, with a potted pie, well stuffed with chestnuts. Let there be plenty of that.