At the table of a well-to-do Parisian academic around 1900, the meal unfolds in service à la russe: courses follow one after another. It begins with a soup or hot entrée, then a relevé (often a fish), followed by the pièce de résistance (a meat in sauce or roasted), then a salad and a cheese platter; it ends with a sweet dessert, before coffee and liqueur served in the drawing room. The lady of the house—here Louise, Bergson's wife—orchestrates this measured progression, a mirror of the order and temperance that the intellectual bourgeoisie places at the heart of daily life.

Parisian bourgeois cuisine hinges on two gestures: fresh butter from a good dairy that binds, coats, and softens every sauce, and the patience of low heat that lets time do its work. A cuisine of passing time—which, for a philosopher of duration, is most fitting.