Robespierre at the table

At the Duplays', the Parisian cabinetmakers who housed Robespierre, meals were taken punctually and without ostentation, following the modest order of a late 18th-century bourgeois and artisan dinner: first the soup to whet the appetite, then the boiled beef and its vegetables forming the main course, finally some fruit. No service of large dishes in succession, but an honest table where frugality was almost a civic virtue. Coffee was taken separately, standing or at the club; oranges, however, were nibbled at any hour.

Robespierre remains famous for his passion for oranges: his contemporaries reported the piles of peels left near him. A luxury fruit shipped from the South of France and Spain, it was his only true gourmet pleasure amid an austere life — hence its presence as a red thread, from the raw fruit to the keepable marmalade.