In wittiness it might have surpassed the chats in the celebrated Paris salon of Mme. On that same date in 1920, the Chicago entrepreneur Alphonse Al Capone shot his mob coworker James Big Jim Colosimo. None of Capone s intimate circle was a gifted conversationalist on the order of Arnold, Riley, or the habitu s of Recamier s salon. In fact, on at least one occasion the snappish Capone approached a man seated at table and bashed him to Hades with a baseball bat. That sort of table talk was no substitute for wit, but even wit at table can be hurtful.
History contains the record of many a deipnosophistic squabble.
At a dinner party in London, the writer Arnold Bennett attempted to start a conversation with his table companion by complaining about the hanging of some pictures in the National Gallery in London. There was an icy silence, followed by the revelation that the fellow guest to whom Arnold was speaking was W.G. Constable, the gallery s assistant director. Al Capone never spoke thus. In 1953, Winston Churchill hosted a dinner at 10 Downing Street for the Italian prime minister Aleide de Gasperi. Seated across from Mme.