Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove (1914)

Marcel Proust’s Within a Budding Grove (1914)

Proust’s Within a Budding Grove [aka In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower] is sometimes remembered for young Marcel’s picnics on the bluffs at Balbec, a fictional town in Normandy. (Proust does not use pique-nique because this is an outdoor meal.) With a...
Jean Jacques Rousseau’s  Emile (1762)

Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762)

Rousseau was not thinking of a pique-nique when he wrote, “The turf will be our chairs and table, the banks of the stream our side-board, and our dessert is hanging on the trees.” He knew that pique-nique was an indoor meal for which friends shared the...
Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

Goldsmith does not use the word picnic, but two such episodes in The Vicar of Wakefield exist. They are so obvious that in English Picnics, Georgina Battiscombe credits with the first “picnics” in English literature. If only he had used the word! Goldsmith...
Samuel Foote The Nabob (1772)

Samuel Foote The Nabob (1772)

Samuel Foote’s comedyThe Nabob, now obscure, is the first linkage of picnic with the euphemism “nick-nack.” He used in the sense of dining en piquenique, which suggests familiarity. The alliterative corruption is meant to be humorous for those in the...

Oliver Goldsmith’s “Retaliation” (1774)

Goldsmith’s “Retaliation” left unfinished at his death, alludes to dining “en piquenique” with mentioning the word. Motivated for being slighted by his friends, Goldsmith decided to get even at the dinner table. Attempting to get even with slights endured from...
Francisco Goya’s Merienda a orillas del Manzanares (1776)

Francisco Goya’s Merienda a orillas del Manzanares (1776)

Merienda a orillas del Manzanares [Picnic At the Edge of the Manzanares River] is a painting for a tapestry intended for the dining room of the Prince and Princess of Asturias in the San Lorenzo Palace in Madrid. Goya described the subject as a merienda, a snack, or a...
Touchard-Lafosse’s Pique-Nique Manqué (1776c)

Touchard-Lafosse’s Pique-Nique Manqué (1776c)

Oeil-de-boeuf is Touchard-Lafosse’s pseudonym used to sign off on his gossip reports about Louis XIV’s court and Parisian society Oeil-de-boeuf is a circular window, often indoors, above a doorway. As a metaphor, it suggests gossip that is sexually tinged or...