La Physilogie du Goût appeared at the beginning of December 1825 only two months before the death of its author. This was not a cookery manual but a work of fashionable science and digressive reminiscence influenced by a wide number of Brillat-Savarin's friends and acquaintances, among them the mathematician Etienne Montucla the only acknowledged source in Brillat's book who, before he died in 1799, had planned a dictionary of gourmand biography. The author's godson, Anthelme Richerand, published Eléments de la Physiologie in 1801 while the Almanach des Gourmands of Grimod de la Reynière, a wholly novel work on food, had appeared in 8 volumes between 1803 and 1813. Reading Brillat's book some two years after its publication, Grimod called it a work of higher gastronomy, and expressed the sad misgiving that its author could only have met his untimely death as a result of indigestion (see Giles MacDonogh Brillat-Savarin, 1992, p. 215). Further editions of the work appeared in 1829, 1834, 1835, 1838 and 1839, and it has never since been out of print.