"There is no nobler fruit in the universe," Jean de Léry writes of the pineapple. Charles Lamb loved the fruit erotically: "Pleasure bordering on pain, from the fierceness and insanity of her relish, like a lover's kisses she biteth." Pieter de la Court professes: "One can never be tire'd with looking on it." How did these men, and so many others, become so enraptured with the pineapple?