Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (23 page)

The sense of literary self-appreciation was equally strong in all these persons, whether they had espoused the cause of reaction, or the cause of progress. It has been usual to describe the eighteenth century as non-moral, although our most important social and progressive ideas have come down to us from it. Perhaps the reproach is justified. One reproach, however, is not justified. We have no right to decry the eighteenth century as an age of weaklings. People are apt to regard the rococo epoch as effeminate, because in its frills and furbelows, in its hooped petticoats and gallantries, it showed greater extravagance than had ever been known before. Nevertheless a gallant period is always virile—virile to excess, for gallantry is an arduous sport.

The eighteenth century excelled all previous centuries in its capacity for enjoyment. Now enjoyment is active and virile, is anything but passive. The enjoyments of those days made great demands upon body, soul, and spirit. One who regards the men of the rococo period as slothful is suffering from an illusion which is the outcome of the social consciousness of our own time. We, avowedly, can neither understand nor approve the trend of eighteenth-century activities. Gallantry was a test of patience. The eighteenth-century gallant had to key himself up to his amusements, and can no more be described as indolent than can one who, for a wager, plays dominoes for twenty-four hours at a stretch.

All that has been written about the “softness” of the rococo is belied by the characterization of the period written by the Marquise du Deffand, towards the close of her long life: “We knew in those days how to live and to die. We concealed our infirmities. If one had an attack of gout, one did not hang one’s head and proclaim the fact to the world; one was careful to conceal one’s troubles; one accepted ruin without changing countenance—just as a ‘good loser’ at the dice shows no emotion. If one had accepted an invitation to the hunt, one went thither, even though sick unto death. It was considered better to die at a dance or in the theatre than in bed. We enjoyed life; and when the hour of leave-taking struck, we felt it behoved us to say farewell with a good grace.”

These fine phrases reveal to us how much of the heroic there was behind expression, conversation, and amenity; they tell us what sort of human beings were those who were mentally and physically invigorated by the magical vapours from Araby.

The idea of shifting the centre of gravity of social life from the home to a more public
milieu
, which Coltelli-Couteau, the founder of the Café Procope, had created, was infectious. By 1720, there were three hundred and eighty coffee-houses in the town of Paris. In these numerous sluices, reservoirs, chambers of the spirit, life itself became transformed both in content and in form.

What sort of company foregathered in Parisian coffee-houses? “The coffee-houses,” we read in a pamphlet of the day, “are visited by respectable persons of both sexes. We see among them very various types: men-about-town, coquettish women, abbés, warriors, country bumpkins, nouvellistes,
¹
officers, the parties to a law-suit, drinkers, gamesters, parasites, adventurers in the field of love or industry, young men of fortune, elderly lovers, braggarts, spurious heroes, dilettantes, men of letters—in a word, an unending series of persons.” The society that frequented these places was not really a “society,” for it lacked the homogeneity which is the basic principle of such—but this very lack of homogeneity was a large part of its charm. Never before had the French assembled in such a fashion. A café was a sea of human beings, and to bathe therein was an adventure.

Among the coffee-houses that had this new feature of “being open to persons of all kinds and at any moment,” there were, of course, conventicles interspersed—coffee-houses that made special appeal to certain groups of interests. If we are to believe Alfred Franklin’s detailed study of old Paris, the Café Bourette was chiefly frequented by men of letters, the Café Anglais by actors and by the lovers of the Comédie Française, while the Café Alexandre was the meeting-place of the devotees of music. The Café des Armes d’Espagne was a favourite haunt of army officers, while the Café des Arts, then close to the Palais Royal, was frequented by opera singers and their friends. Close at hand was the Café des Aveugles, where the music was provided by an orchestra of blind performers. This was a favourite hunting-ground of prostitutes. Prudhomme, in his
Miroir de l’ancien et du nouveau Paris
relates that these wenches were in league with the flower-girls, who could sell the same bouquet eight times over before midnight. Then the partners divided the amount of which the unsuspecting country bumpkins had been cozened. There is nothing new under the sun!

Many of these coffee-houses had a history, as well as a circle of regular customers. This remark applies, for instance, to the Café Bourette, whose proprietress, Charlotte Bourette-Curée, was a literary phenomenon. Under the title
Muse limonadière
, she published two volumes of verses, which contained, not only dedicatory poems, but also the answers to these penned by persons of high station. For example, Madame Bourette-Curée sent an ode to Frederick the Great. “When I was composing it,” she wrote, “I was seized by such a frenzy of poetic vigour that I transcended myself. Enthusiasm is the author of these lines, rather than myself. In return for this successful masterpiece I received from the distant north such flowery compliments as are heard more often in the Orient than here.” The “flowery compliments” consisted of a gold-brocade handbag sent her by the King of Prussia. Grimm, the Encyclopædist, was a trifle annoyed about the matter. “We have here a cafetière whose head has been turned by a craze for writing verses. She indites poems to all and sundry, but unfortunately they are almost invariably bad. An exception may perhaps be made of her ode to the king of Prussia, which contains some of the best verses she has ever penned. Some of them, indeed, seem so good that one doubts that she herself composed them.” When we learn that Fontenelle bestowed upon this Madame Bourette-Curée the complete edition of his works, that the Duke of Sèvres became godfather to her child, and that Voltaire one day presented her with a costly decanter with the accompanying goblets (he had paid sixty livres for it), we cannot but suspect that these gentlemen were trying to purchase immunity from the lady’s flattering verses! Voltaire, cynical as usual, said as much in a letter.

Now let us turn to the Café des Boucheries, where the theatrical managers could recruit their casts, for the place was a sort of actors’ exchange. “Here one can hire queens, and lovers of both sexes; noble heads of families who believe it to be incumbent upon them to speak the live-long day with tears in their voices and with tremulous hands; here can be found the impudent lackey, with features to fit his part; here, too, can be found the modest confidant, as useless in real life as he is in the bad plays that he makes still worse by his acting. . . .”

The frequenters formed a strange mishmash, if we are to believe Mercier, who has given rather a spiteful account of the history of this café. Mediocrities plumed themselves like peacocks, telling of the salvos of applause “earned last October in an out-of-the-way corner of France where the inhabitants hardly knew how to speak French.”

How cordial were the greetings exchanged when old friendships were renewed—though the cordiality often rang false! One had come by diligence from Roubaix, another from Marseille and “was leaving next morning for Strasbourg, where he expected to earn a better salary.” Two hours later, gnashing his teeth, he accepted the pitiful offer made him by a manager from Toulouse. “Why the devil,” he would ask himself that evening in his hotel, “since my destination was Toulouse, did I come all this way north to Paris?”

The Café Cuisinier was frequented by connoisseurs and persons of taste, who tried various blends. At the Café Defoy, near the Palais Royal, ices were served as well as coffee. The Café Frary, in the rue Montmartre, was famous. The Café Hardy was extolled for its déjeuners. The most celebrated of all the Parisian cafés of this period was the Café Parnasse, run by the Widow Laurent. This café vied with the Café Procope for the honour of having the largest number of poets among its regular guests. “He regards himself as a person of importance because he goes every day to the Procope,” said Voltaire maliciously of a nincompoop called Linant.

The Café de la Régence was a favourite haunt of Saint-Foix, Rousseau, Marmontel, Le Sage, and Friedrich Melchior Grimm; it was renowned for its tranquillity and its contemplative atmosphere. “There,” writes Le Sage, “in a large mirrored hall, you will find a dozen or so of persons who, with deadly earnest, are playing draughts or chess. They are seated at marble-topped tables, and are surrounded by silent spectators who watch them closely. So profound is the silence that it is broken only by the gentle click of the pieces when they are moved. To my way of thinking such a café might well be called the Café Horus, for the first impression a newcomer gets of the place is that it must be a vast solitude, although, when he looks more closely, he sees there may be as many as sixty persons present.”

The gift for cynical but vigorous scrutiny that was characteristic of the rococo always inclined the adepts of the epoch, when matters which they regarded as serious were at stake, to draw upon the treasures of classical mythology. Now for them coffee was a serious matter—one of the few sacred things that were still venerated by the apostles of
L
’
homme machine
. Le Sage, whose long life extended from the baroque into the rococo, had good reason for comparing coffee to the “Sun of the Underworld,” to Horus, the falcon-headed deity of the Egyptians, winging his way with a mirror through the silent realm of thought.

Apollo and Horus may be identified. Limojon de Saint-Didier, who wrote an epic poem in praise of coffee, proclaimed the identity of the god who dwells in coffee and of the god who shines on us from the heavens:

Whereas the court of Louis XIV shunned coffee, being (altogether in the spirit of the periwig period) influenced by medical warnings against it, under Louis XV the beverage established itself in court circles. Louis XV, indeed, had a passion for coffee, and liked to do honour to his friends by making coffee for them with his own hands. Lenormand, head gardener at Versailles, had planted a dozen coffee-shrubs in the hot-houses of the palace, and from these every year six pounds of berries could be harvested. Louis XV had the coffee-beans dried and roasted, and served his guests with coffee of his own making. Madame du Barry had herself painted as a sultana drinking coffee.

Lazare Duvaux, court jeweller, kept a diary that bears witness to the king’s passion for coffee. In January 1754, Louis ordered “a golden coffee-pot, chased and polished.” Duvaux was to provide it with “a spirit-lamp, furnished with wick and extinguisher”; and in March of the same year we read of another “golden coffee-pot, with a spirit-lamp and a small steel pan, having gilt feet.”

These entries show that the coffee was brought to the boil over a spirit-lamp. In fact, the requisite quantity of water having been added to the ground coffee, the coffee-pot was brought to the boil a dozen times in succession, being removed from the flame the instant it began to bubble. In 1763, L’Ainé, a tinsmith, made a new kind of coffee-pot, in which the ground coffee was treated like tea, being placed in the bottom of the utensil and then having freshly boiled water poured upon it. But this method of preparation did not catch on.

The coffee that Louis XV drank was French coffee, grown on French soil, though in hot-houses. Rousseau and Diderot, Maupertuis and d’Alembert, also drank French coffee, though not that which was grown in His Majesty’s forcing-houses. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the French colonies were already supplying the homeland with all the coffee they needed.

The story of the introduction of coffee into the French Antilles is one of those touching and heroic vignettes in which the eighteenth century abounds. Gabriel Mathieu Desclieux, captain of infantry, stationed in Martinique, a natural hot-house among the West Indian islands, had a good deal of spare time on his hands. He was a great reader, learning from his books, and doubtless from travellers as well, that the Dutch had transferred from Arabia to the East Indies the cultivation of a plant most useful to mankind. Desclieux was aware that the fan-palm with which he had become familiar in the Antilles grew also in the East Indies. There was, therefore, a kinship between the air and soil of the two regions, the warm, salt-laden atmosphere that blew across the East Indies and the West Indies from the tropical seas. Both alike were volcanic, agitated by earthquakes, frequently devastated by eruptions and tidal waves. Surely, then, the coffee-shrub of Arabia and the Dutch Indies must be found in the French Antilles as well? Desclieux explored Martinique in every direction without finding that of which he was in search. Not one of the plants he discovered corresponded to the description of coffee.

Consumed by the desire to grow coffee in Martinique, Desclieux went home to France on furlough. He found that everyone drank coffee; but it was Arabian coffee, or else coffee from the Dutch East Indies brought to Europe round the Cape of Good Hope. True, in 1714, the mayor of Amsterdam had made Louis XIV a present of a coffee-shrub, and Monsieur de Jussieu, a famous botanist, had planted it in one of the royal hot-houses. But Jussieu and his friends had such a craze for rarity that it was years before they were willing to part with a shoot. At length, however, Desclieux explained to the king’s physician-in-ordinary that he had sound patriotic reasons for wishing to grow coffee in Martinique, and, behind the backs of the botanists, the doctor secured for him a cutting of the coffee-shrub and permission to export it.