Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (14 page)

Through their visits to the Turkish ambassador, although he was out of favour with the Roi Soleil, the former was kept informed as to what was going on at court, was told about French armaments, French manufactures, officers’ commissions, regiments, and what not. He learned about alliances, about new schemes that were forming themselves in His Majesty’s brain—and he was told these things by persons who never realized that they were giving away important secrets. He wove the threads together, as if weaving a Bukharan carpet. Soon he became aware that he must not take King Louis seriously. France needed the Turks only in order to round off her own frontiers, by using the prospect of a Turkish alliance as a bogy to frighten the Germans. If the sultan were to dispatch another army to besiege Vienna, King Louis would not send so much as an auxiliary corps down the Swabian Danube!

A V
IZIER
D
RINKING
C
OFFEE
(Middle of the seventeenth century)

It was with the aid of coffee that Suleiman Aga enticed this gossip out of his distinguished lady visitors. Thrown off their guard by the un-accustomed stimulant, they prattled away without knowing what they were saying. They wanted to draw out Suleiman Aga, and to extract information about Turkish manners and customs. Above all, they wanted to know more about this strange beverage whose aroma filled the air of the room.

Their host, sitting on a cushion among them, was ready enough to tell them anything they wanted to know. His black eyes, inscrutable as the black drink, lit up when he was talking about the national beverage.

He told them how, centuries ago, two Arabian monks had discovered the coffee-tree. Prayers to their memory were still offered up. One of them had been named Al Shadhili, the other Abd Al Aidrus. The inhabitants of Algiers, it was true, did not agree that the pious Al Shadhili had been an Arab. They claimed him as one of their own people, and for that reason in Algeria coffee was also known as “shadilye.”

Distant and almost fabulous lands loomed before the eyes of the ladies when Suleiman Aga was thus speaking. As he stroked his black beard, he admitted that he himself did not believe the legend. It was doubtful whether Al Shadhili and Abd Al Aidrus had really been the discoverers of coffee. Certainly the latter had known very little about the preparation of the beverage, for he had thrown away the grounds, which were the best part of it. It had taken a long time to discover the most satisfactory way of preparing coffee. In many parts of the Turkish empire, people added ginger and spices. This was wrong and almost sinful. Just as there was but one Koran, so there was but one coffee.

He said this with an emphasis that inspired belief. While violet foam, tinged with orange and every other colour of the rainbow, formed on the surface of the fluid that was boiling in the metal pot, Suleiman went on extolling the virtues of coffee. He had himself visited plantations in southwestern Arabia, a countryside favoured by sunshine and moisture. To protect the precious coffee-trees from locusts, they were surrounded by hedges of tamarisk, and by tall spreading carob trees. Many old men in Araby had such a fondness for coffee that they made a paste of ground coffee and butter, and swallowed it. Although that might seem foolish, it must not be forgotten that religion, bodily strength, and good morals were buttressed upon coffee. A pious teacher, Achmet Ben Jadab, had declared: “He who dies with coffee in his body will not suffer the fires of hell.” Coffee was a stimulus to goodness, and favoured works of piety. The word “k’ahwah” denoted “energy,” and, by drinking coffee, the Moslems could enjoy the delights of Paradise before death.

Thus did the ambassador talk to his lady visitors, and, when he let his memory dwell upon the coffee-growing regions of the land of Yemen, he was too ready to forget the business for which he had come to this far western land, was too ready to forget politics and Paris. He had moved towards the other pole of Moslem nature, towards the contemplativeness of a sufi. A few years later, the Turks were defeated near Vienna without Louis XIV having moved a soldier across the Rhine to assist them—or to repel their onslaught, as might have been expected of the Most Christian King. Ranke opined that the reason the French monarch did not take up arms against the Turks on this occasion was that he hoped they would advance as far as the Rhine and capture Strasbourg. Then he would have hurled his forces against the Mohammedans, and, as the saviour of Christendom and Germany, have been able to assume the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. However that may be, the Osmanlis returned to the Balkans. But coffee, “the wine of Islam,” had by that time conquered Vienna and Paris.

Conquered? Hardly yet. It was still too dear for widespread consumption. Coffee-beans were to be bought only in Marseille, where they cost eighty francs a pound, so that none but the wealthiest of the wealthy could have supplies sent to them from Provence. Only they could spend such vast sums on behalf of their “Turkomania.”

The greatest satirist of the day was Molière. When, in 1670, he wrote
Le bourgeois gentilhomme
—a satire which he had to tone down before it was produced at court—he depicted Turkomania as the climax of absurdity. Suleiman Aga, the ambassador, had spent at least a year in Paris, and was still the rage among persons of quality. Molière, therefore, staged a crowd of urchins decked out as Turks, who danced round Monsieur Jourdain, declaring they would make a Turkish prince of the foolish burgher:

This skit must have opened the eyes of many of the Parisians, must have made them recognize that the “Oriental fashion” was more than a little ridiculous. It must have made them recognize, at any rate, that they were silly to think themselves Turks because they dressed up in turbans and pseudo-Oriental robes.

Thus coffee fell into disrepute among persons who were critical of the follies of the mode in the French baroque epoch. Those who made a cult of its use were somewhat ludicrous. A level-headed woman, Madame de Sévigné, was moved to protest. In May 1676, she congratulated her daughter for having given up drinking coffee. “Mademoiselle de Méry, too, has expelled it from her house in disgrace; after two such mishaps, it will not easily come into favour again!” The mother went on to say she was convinced that all heating beverages must have undesirable effects as compared with those which refreshed the blood. She held that the constitution of the lymph was closely dependent upon the heat of the intestines. Internal ablutions with Vichy water, in conjunction with a fruit diet, were much more wholesome than coffee.

The writer was speaking from experience. Her enmity to coffee was not that of a woman at war with fashion, but that of an anxious mother. She wrote, perhaps, the most affectionate words ever penned by a mother to a daughter: “On my knees, dear, I implore you with tears, by the affection you have for me, not again to write me so long a letter as the last one. If I had to regard myself as the cause of your sense of weakness and exhaustion, then, my child, I should feel partly responsible for your illness and perhaps for your death!” The Countess of Grignan had then long outgrown her childhood, but her delicate health was a perpetual anxiety to her mother. Thus, on Wednesday, November 8, 1679, Madame de Sévigné wrote: “I recently met Dr. Duchêne. He is sincerely attached to you, and I regard him as more conscientious than other doctors. He is greatly distressed to learn how much you have been losing weight. . . . He recommends that instead of milk, you should take plenty of porridge and of chicken broth, for, unless the condition of your blood improves, the consequences may be serious. Duchêne is also of opinion that coffee heats the blood and makes it circulate too quickly—that it is a beverage to be recommended only to persons who suffer from catarrh or consumption. He says he would never recommend it in anyone of so thin a habit of body as yourself. Do not be too slow to realize, my dear daughter, that the strength that coffee appears to give you is fallacious. It comes only from the quickening of the circulation, which ought not to be quickened, but rather the reverse. Do not forget, my daughter, that Dr. Duchêne gave me all this advice for you in the friendliest way possible.” We see that coffee was still regarded as a medicine rather than a beverage.

At the St.-Germain Fair (set for a play)

London coffee-house in the eighteenth century

The “Bourse” in Lloyd’s Coffee-house (about 1798)

In the days of Suleiman Aga, when the French nobility were taking sides for and against coffee, the bourgeoisie had no chance of drinking it. It was consumed only occasionally in the houses of distinguished persons, whose family economy was self-contained. Members of good society in Paris did not then visit houses of public entertainment.

The first attempt to convert the general public into consumers of coffee was made by a man whose only resemblance to Suleiman Aga was his Oriental origin. This was an Armenian named Pascal, who, in 1672, opened the first French coffee-house in the market-place of Saint-Germain. Even then it was not a genuine coffee-house, being no more than the dependency of a fair.

At that time, in Saint-Germain market-place, there was held every September a huge fair, which was an exhibition as well as a pleasure-resort. The booths of the fair were erected in nine streets, and in one hundred and forty of the booths, the products of industry were exhibited. The Parisians flocked thither, thus reinforcing the local patrons. In the brightly lit Luna Park, which was an annex to the fair, one could see dwarfs and fat women, dromedaries and camels. Amid this noisy jumble of exhibitions and side-shows, Pascal the Armenian established his “Maison de Caova” as an interrogation-mark to the French, asking them whether they would like coffee. His café was a replica of a Constantinople coffee-house with which Pascal had been acquainted, and, by its Turkish style, attracted the petty-bourgeois crowd. The most amazing thing was that they could afford to pay for their coffee. It was sold at no more than three sous a cup. Pascal, having a good head for business, realized that coffee could not become a popular beverage unless it was sold as cheaply as wine. With this end in view, the shrewd Armenian cut out the middleman, and imported his coffee direct from the Levant.