Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (24 page)

On a fine May morning in the year 1723, Monsieur Desclieux boarded a ship at Nantes for the voyage back to Martinique. Now began that Odyssey, that “peck of troubles,” by which fate seemed determined to prevent the transport of coffee to the New World. The captain was conveying his treasure in a glass chest, wherein the precious plant could be kept warm beneath the rays of the sun. This little portable “frame” was brought up on deck day after day. Close by it, watching, sat Desclieux. Soon he became aware that a man unknown to him (who was travelling under a false name) seemed to take a strange interest in his plant. This fellow-passenger spoke French with a Dutch accent. Once, when the ship was off the coast of Spain, Desclieux dozed for a while at his post, and, on awaking, he saw to his horror that this Dutch spy must have opened the little glass frame, for one of the shoots had been bent and broken. Had the plant been mortally injured? In truth, Desclieux’s conscience was more seriously wounded than the cutting. He vowed not to be caught napping again so long as the Dutchman was on board. Do we not see how the legend of wakefulness, which ever accompanies coffee in its progress, was at work likewise on this ship?

The Dutchman disembarked at Madeira. A day’s voyage farther west, a new danger loomed in the offing. This was one of those pests of the seas, a Barbary corsair. Desclieux’ vessel had to keep the pirate off in a sea-fight that lasted a day. Not until a Spanish galley appeared on the eastern horizon did the enemy sail away northward. But one of the yards had been splintered by the enemy gun-fire, and a splinter had broken the cover of the glass chest. Here was fresh concern for Desclieux. Would it be all right if he were to keep the plant wrapped up in his own cloak? No, it needed concentrated sunlight, and not, like an animal, the warmth of a winter coat. Desclieux, therefore, with the aid of the ship’s carpenter, had his frame remade, so that his treasure might continue to flourish in concentrated sunlight.

Now, however, it was Neptune’s turn to blow his shell-trumpet. He sent a storm like that described by Virgil to agitate the unhappy ship, so that the remade forcing-house was shattered to pieces, and its contents were sprinkled with salt. Boreas did his fell work in turn. Then, as an added plague, came the doldrums. Day after day, beneath the bell-glass of the sky, the vessel with its precious freight lay “as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.” Now the spray of the coffee-shrub had more than enough sun, but was short of water. Desclieux shared his meagre ration with his treasure. At length, however, a favourable wind came, the ship pursued its westward course, and one moonlit night, when all on board were near to perishing from thirst, the silvery leaves of palm-trees hove in sight. They had reached the Antilles. The coffee-plant had been saved.

Thus sang Esmenard of the happy event in verses that were less happy. Anyhow, the important point was that the coffee-plant was uninjured. Desclieux entrusted it to the favourable soil, and, twenty months later, was able to garner the first harvest. The coffee-beans were supplied to intellectuals, physicians, and other persons of standing; but also to the planters of the island, who were quick to realize the value of the opportunity thus provided, and to dream golden dreams. “The culture of coffee is gradually spreading here,” wrote Desclieux to Fréron, “for I have been supplying my friends with fruit from the new plants that have thriven in the shadow of the first one I imported. In course of time Guadeloupe and Santo Domingo discovered the fruitful shrub. The progress of coffee in Martinique was favoured by the extreme mortality among the cocoa-trees. This has been attributed by some to the recent volcanic eruption; by others, to the severity of the last rainy season, which continued for a whole three months this winter. Anyhow, when the planters found that the cocoa-tree had failed them as a source of livelihood, they turned to coffee-planting. Ere long this became their sole crop, and was a tremendous success. Within three years, there were many millions of coffee-shrubs on our island.” Returning once more to France on furlough, Captain Desclieux was presented to Louis XV, who appointed him governor of the Antilles.

Before he died on November 30, 1774, at the age of eighty-eight, he had become a knight of the Order of St. Louis.
L’Année littéraire
, a periodical that often attacked the destructive tendencies of the Encyclopædists, devoted a long poem to the memory of Desclieux, who had been an ardent monarchist.

A heroic idyll found its term in these verses.
L’Année littéraire
, whose express aim it was to contrast Desclieux’ aristocratic existence with the “impudent cosmopolitan ideals of a rout of philosophers,” forgot that it was not only monarchists who drank coffee, but also the apostles of the Enlightenment. These latter, above all. . . .

“Coffee is the revolution!”

Michelet, the historian, did not write the foregoing words; but he came very near to doing so when he made coffee responsible for that “explosion étincelante,” for that fulminating explosion of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century, when “l’esprit jaillit, spontané, comme il peut.” “. . . for at length the tavern has been dethroned, the detestable tavern where, half a century ago, our young folks rioted among wine-tubs and harlots. Fewer drunken songs o’ night-time, fewer nobles lying in the gutter. . . . Coffee, the sobering beverage, a mighty nutriment of the brain, unlike spirituous liquors, increases purity and clarity; coffee, which clears the imagination of fogs and heavy vapours; which illumines the reality of things with the white light of truth; anti-erotic coffee, which at length substitutes stimulation of the mind for stimulation of the sexual faculties! . . . The strong coffee of San Domingo, which Buffon, Diderot, and Rousseau drank, redoubled the ardour of their ardent souls—and the prophets who assembled day after day in the Café Procope saw, with penetrating glance, in the depths of their black drink the illumination of the year of the revolution.”

It is self-evident that intellectual movements would never have brought about the revolution unless they had been mounted upon vigorous economic steeds. Coffee, however, and the coffee-houses in which it was consumed, were meeting-points between literature and economics, were the posting-stations at which mental discontent rubbed shoulders with material. We have seen that in the cafés men of all sorts assembled. Among the frequenters, therefore, there were also men of the two privileged classes, the priesthood and the nobility. But the nobles and priests in all France did not number as many as one hundred thousand, whereas the populace, the Third Estate, comprised four-and-twenty million. Consequently the great majority of the frequenters of the Parisian coffee-houses were bourgeois, petty artisans, and manual workers, who were one and all discontented. Their fathers and their grandfathers had likewise been discontented: the fathers with Louis XV, the grandfathers with Louis XIV. What had they to expect from Louis XVI? Could he lift from their necks the fearful burden of taxation imposed by his ancestors? In those days every movement of the common man, every breath he drew, was taxed. The bankrupt towns were in despair, and despair was intensified by that of the bankrupt peasantry. What was the use of hard work? The logic of work is that one works to avoid starving. But whoever worked in the France of those days had to hand over so large a proportion of the fruit of his toil to the king, the intendants, and the tax concessionnaires, that he remained hungry when all was said and done.

Dull despair prevailed. But now the bourgeois, slow thinkers and unready talkers, came into touch with the penmen over the steaming coffee-cups; rubbed elbows with these strange types who could think, talk, and write for four-and-twenty hours a day. These glib lawyers, these authors and journalists, were not only familiar with the woes of the mute masses, but played upon their woes as musicians play upon instruments. In their orations and writings, the widespread distresses, the social and economic miseries of the time became vocal; their words were as powerful as had been Joshua’s trumpets before Jericho. The walls quaked!

The walls fell. The Bastille was stormed. It was taken as the first spoil of that explosive mixture from which our world can no longer be freed, the mixture which, as Michelet puts it, “united within itself the reality of things with the truth of the spirit.” It was a mingling of philosophic and economic thought.

The revolution was nothing other than the explosive encounter of economic unfreedom and philosophic freedom of thought.

The French monarchy was overthrown by the clubs—the clubs which were a British invention! Now these were closely connected with the coffee-houses. The Bourbons or their police, warned by their study of the history of England, realized often enough what would happen when subjects stayed awake all night instead of going quietly to bed and to sleep.

is what we read in a strophe about coffee that was sung in the streets of Paris long before the revolution. In very truth, if the pineal gland (supposed by the ancients to be the seat of the soul) could be, as alleged, stimulated by coffee, then this stimulated machine would manufacture “public opinion,” that is to say, criticism and political fervour.

The police authorities had often before been concerned about the coffee-houses. Argenson, a minister of state, appointed special inspectors to supervise what went on in them. As a rule, the authorities were easy-going enough in this matter, but from time to time they displayed remarkable energy. For instance, Denoux, the public prosecutor, was arrested in a café near the Pont Neuf and sent to the Bastille because he had “let his tongue wag too freely.” He had been denounced for this by Cardinal Dubois. However, Argenson, who was friendly with Denoux, soon released the prisoner.

The government thus knew what had been going on for fifty years in the cafés; but it almost seemed as if the authorities regarded these “talking-shops” as safety-valves which it would be inexpedient to close. Thus the state desisted from its endeavour to police the cafés, and was more concerned about early closing than about shutting them up altogether. One might have thought that since coffee-house keepers had become suspect, the number of licences would have been reduced instead of being increased. Here, however, the greed of the budget was a safeguard for the coffee-house keepers. The treasury was hard up, and could not dispense with this source of revenue.

One who studies the images of the great revolution with a seeing eye, catches glimpses of the night-life of Paris of that period. He discerns violet-tinted darkness, punctuated by the glare of torches, and relieved by faces that grow red in their light. At no other time has history been so much a product of the night. Speeches and orators, the law-courts, political discussions, and hysterical tribunes of the people—the whole revolution, the
Carmagnole
, and the
Ça Ira
, went arm in arm with insomnia. Coffee disseminated the art of being wakeful by night as well as by day. . . . As we look back it seems as if then no one could ever have gone to sleep.

There can be no doubt that in 1793, at the climax of the Terror, people drank more coffee than had been drunk ten or twenty years earlier. The Terror was already a stimulant; and the scent of blood tensed the nerves even more than did the aroma of coffee. “Liberty, brothers, is a woman with whom one cohabits best amid ruins!” This utterance of Desmoulins no longer smacks of the coffee-house. Coffee is like literature; both are in pursuit of a new order—but Desmoulins’ words threaten chaos. Now, in chaos we need no beverage.

On the night before execution, neither the public at large nor the Gironde nor the Mountain needed coffee to keep them awake. Nevertheless, perhaps they did drink it. In that supreme hour, they saw the gates of hell yawning. Let me quote once more what Homer wrote of nepenthe: “A drug to lull all pain and anger, and bring forgetfulness of every sorrow. Whoso should drink a draught of it when it is mingled in the bowl, on that day he would let no tear fall down his cheek, not though his mother and his father died, not though men slew his brother or dear son with the sword before his face, and his own eyes beheld it.”

¹
“Nouvellistes” were not writers of “nouvelles,” but people who told the latest news, moved either by vanity or by the desire of gain.

I
T
was characteristic of eighteenth-century France that the terms “coffee” and “enlightenment” were practically synonymous. When Pietro Verri, an Italian domiciled in Paris, founded a literary and philosophical periodical in the French capital, he christened it “Il Caffè” without more ado, although the contents had no concern with coffee as a beverage.

What about Germany? As if the Rhine had been wider than it is today, it was then usual in Germany to look askance at everything French. Or, to say the least, Germany’s attitude towards France was ambiguous. Modern historians are apt to tell us that at the close of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, German burghers turned their eyes longingly towards France. But why, in that case, were German pamphlets of the day so unanimously anti-French in tone? For decades the Germans remained profoundly mortified because the castle of Heidelberg had been blown up by the generals of Louis XIV; and, for the very reason that news spread slowly in those times, such a catastrophe as the devastation of the Palatinate produced greater and more enduring effects upon the popular mind. Had the Germans really been such enthusiastic admirers of France as one might gather from the fashion-plates of the period, what could account for the frenzied enthusiasm of the German nation when the troops of Frederick the Great defeated the French at Rossbach (1757)?