 He reconciled with his mother, who was saved from the guillotine through his connections, and began a series of mock-funeral dinners.As the first public critic of cooking, the first reviewer of the ambitious restaurants that cropped up in Paris in the later eighteenth century and flowered under the Napoleonic regime, his name is a by-word on a par with Brillat-Savarin and an equally rich source of quotations in French gastronomic literature through the eight volumes of his annual "L'Almanach des gourmands", which he edited and published from 1803 to 1812.