Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity

by H. E. Jacob

  The Marseillais, however, found an ally, and no city in the world has ever had a stranger one. The kings of France were but men, anointed yet mortal. Marseille’s ally was a river, or, better, a river-god. The Rhone, Rhodanus; a self-willed old fellow, equipped with immense power. He did not reach the sea by way of Marseille, his course from the Swiss Alps entering the Mediterranean many miles westward of Massilia. He had a strange habit of silting up whatever his waters touched. At a day’s march from the Mediterranean, he expanded into a delta. The land between and on either side of his many mouths was marshy plain. Nothing grew there but the weedy vegetation of salt marshes. Father Rhone had a way of thrusting the marsh land between what had been a seaport and the sea. Aigues-Mortes itself, which had carried on a brisk trade with Syria, flourished only for a century, to find itself in the end left high and dry amid the reedy lagoons.

  All the better for Marseille, which, by a wise dispensation, had not been established on one of the mouths of the Rhone. It was the only first-class harbour adjoining Italy on the southern coast of Gaul. The kings of France found this undeniable, and wanted to come to terms with arrogant Marseille.

  King Francis I, a thoroughgoing patriot, studied the map assiduously. He could not see any good reason why the products of his country should be shipped to the Levant from Venice, Pisa, or Genoa. He was proud to know that Turkey could not get on without French produce. The textiles made by the weavers of Languedoc and Catalonia were in demand in the bazaars of Constantinople and Alexandria. Nay more, camels bore them to Mecca, and thence to India. King Francis would hardly have believed this had he not, with his own eyes, seen accounts and bills of lading in the Italian tongue that confirmed the supposition. They taught him that in Mohammedan Egypt the pagan women loved to dress in linen from Rheims. Why should not Rheims textiles be shipped to the Levant in French bottoms?

  Why not, indeed? In the year of grace 1535, no intelligent Frenchman doubted the possibility.

  A century later, in 1634, a vessel engaged in the Levantine trade lay in Marseille roads. There disembarked from it a Monsieur de la Roque, a wealthy man who had just returned from Constantinople. He had a fine countryhouse in the environs of Marseille, commanding a view of the sea and of vineyards. Here, when he unpacked the baggage he had brought with him from the Levant, his astonished friends saw, among other things, a metal pot and some beans which were now roasted till they were black. From them a beverage was prepared which, in its effects, proved no less amazing to the Marseillais friends of Monsieur de la Roque.

  The stock the traveller had brought with him was soon exhausted, and it was more than ten years before pack-mules laden with bags of coffee were frequently to be seen making their way from the harbour to the villas of the well-to-do. At length, in 1660, a big ship, freighted only with coffee, arrived from Egypt. Where were the bales to be consigned? To the proper place—to the drug-stores. For it was a general belief that the strange substance that could keep people awake all night was not an ordinary beverage, but a drug.

  Not for long, however, did this belief prevail. In 1664 was published a widely circulated book, Jean de Thévenot’s Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant. Like all who have leisure and enjoy the beauties of life, the well-to-do of Marseille were great readers of history. Naturally, therefore, they read to themselves, or read aloud to one another, the chapter on coffee in Monsieur de Thévenot’s book, which showed clearly that this beverage was, in the land of its origin, an article of daily consumption, and not a mere drug.

  “The Turks,” wrote de Thévenot, “have a drink that they are accustomed to consume at all hours. This drink, known as ‘cavé,’ is prepared from a black bean. They roast the bean over the fire in a metal pan; when it has been roasted, they pound it into a fine powder. To prepare the beverage, they take a metal pot which they call ‘ibrik,’ fill it with water, and raise the water to boiling-point; then they throw into the pot a large spoonful of the powdered grain. Very soon after this they withdraw the kettle or pot from the fire, for otherwise the fluid would boil over. Then they put it back again on the fire until it begins to bubble once more, repeating this process ten or twelve times. Thereafter they decant the black drink into porcelain cups, which are handed round upon a painted tray. This beverage must be consumed exceedingly hot, but only in sips, for if taken at a draught the taste is not fully savoured.

  “The drink must be bitter and black, and must have a burnt taste. Another reason for consuming it in little sips is that otherwise, being very hot, it might scald the mouth. In a ‘cavéhane,’ as they call the houses where coffee is prepared and sold, the sound of sipping is continuous. The drink prevents the ordinary vapours of satiety rising from the stomach into the head; it also hinders sleep. When our French merchants have many letters to write and wish to work through the night, they would find it advantageous to drink one or two cups of cavé at about ten in the evening. As regards the taste of this beverage, although it is disagreeable the first time, the second time one drinks it one already begins to find it agreeable. It fortifies the stomach and helps digestion. The Turks also believe that it cures a number of maladies and promotes longevity. In Turkey it is drunk both by the poor and by the rich; it is one of those things which a husband is universally expected to provide for his wife.

  “There are public coffee-houses, where the drink is prepared in very big pots for the numerous guests. At these places guests mingle without distinction of rank or creed; nor does anyone think it amiss to enter such places, where people go to pass their leisure time. In front of the coffeehouses are benches with small mats, where those sit who would rather remain in the fresh air and amuse themselves by watching the passers-by. Sometimes the coffee-house keeper engages flute-players and violin-players, and also singers, to entertain his guests. If anyone is sitting in the ‘cavéhane’ and sees a friend enter, it is good form for him to nod to the proprietor, signifying that the newcomer is to be served free of charge, to be ‘treated.’ The first comer receives the other as his guest. This is expressed by a word to the coffee-house proprietor. The word is ‘jaba,’ which means ‘gratis.’”

  The foregoing quotation shows clearly enough that, in the Levant, people did not get their coffee from the drug-stores. There were as many coffee-houses as there were drinking-saloons in the West. Soon after the publication of de Thévenot’s book, the first coffee-house was opened in Marseille, partly for residents and partly for sailors.

  The first coffee-house keeper found imitators, but two classes of people began to complain. To begin with, the vintners. Bacchus inspired them to wrath. Had not these disciples of Mohammed uprooted the vine along the southern coast of the Mediterranean? Now coffee had come to the northern shore—coffee, which had derived advantage from the rout of Bacchus—the Black Apollo of the barbarians had sailed hither on shipboard, into the Christian wine-bibbing city of Marseille! He was going to continue his work of destruction there. He would convert the Marseillais into disdainers of wine.

  Those were strange times, times when people ran to extremes. Every passion had an absolute ring. It was exclusive and jealous. No one dreamed that coffee could join forces with wine, and that a good coffee-drinker could also be a good wine-drinker. This experience, so familiar to ourselves, had not then been tasted.

  Thus Dionysus inflamed the wrath of vine-dressers and wine-dealers alike. They were vigorously supported by the doctors. These children of Æsculapius were enraged that coffee had escaped the restraints of their prescriptions. For several years, like other rarities, it had been consumed only by doctors’ orders. Before anyone could get coffee, he had to consult his physician, and then go to the apothecary’s shop. Now the Marseillais declared themselves independent in this matter, much to the annoyance of the faculty. The line taken by the physicians was a singular one. They declared that coffee was a poison. Amid the many onslaughts that had been made upon coffee during the centuries since its use had first begun, this was a novelty. Religious zealots and state auth
orities had persecuted it, but never before had a doctor declared coffee to be harmful. On the contrary, the Arab, Persian, and Turkish physicians had extolled its health-giving virtues, maintaining that it dispelled fatigue and melancholy, refreshing the body. The doctors of Marseille were now singing another tune. Maybe they were also moved by worthier reasons than the thought of their prescription fee. It is possible that these doctors were the first to have an inkling of the biological differences between individual human beings and particular races. Coffee might be good for Arabs living in a tropical or sub-tropical climate; it might be even better, because of its warming qualities, for the inhabitants of northern climes; and yet it might be altogether superfluous for those who dwell in a land of the golden mean. It might be superfluous or even harmful in Marseille, where the weather is neither very hot as in Mecca nor very raw and damp as in London.

  Messieurs Castillon and Fouqué, doctors of the faculty of Aix, invited Monsieur Colomb, at a public reception by the members of the Marseille faculty, to read a thesis upon the question “whether the use of coffee is harmful to the inhabitants of Marseille.”

  Monsieur Colomb understood what was expected of him. In Marseille town-hall, which had been lent for the purpose, clad in his academic robes, he mounted the rostrum and addressed a large assembly. He emphasized the fact that wherever coffee had made good its standing it had speedily shown itself to be a tyrant. It aroused such a passion for its use that warnings and even persecution were of no avail against it. Amid murmurs of applause, the young physician continued: “We note with horror that this beverage, thanks to the qualities that have been incautiously ascribed to it, has tended almost completely to disaccustom people from the enjoyment of wine—although any candid observer must admit that neither in respect of taste or smell, nor yet of colour, nor yet of any of its essential characteristics, is it worthy to be named in the same breath with fermented liquor, with wine!” Loud was the acclamation as these words echoed through the town-hall of Marseille. Monsieur Colomb felt himself in good vein, and, his black gown rustling as he spoke, he went on to say that certain physicians had not hesitated, at the outset, to extol coffee. “And why? Because the Arabs had described it as excellent. They had done so because it was one of their own national products, and also because its use had been disclosed to men by goats, by camels, or God knows what beasts!” These were poor reasons to influence a receptive mind. In the neighbourhood of Marseille there was plenty of fodder for goats, and no one in this part of the world had as yet thought of rearing camels. Unquestionably coffee was not a proper drink for human beings in that quarter of the earth.

  “Some assure us that coffee is a cooling drink, and for this reason they recommend us to drink it very hot. . . . But the actual truth is that coffee, in its nature, is a hot and very dry substance. I say this not only following such authorities as Avicenna and Prosper Albanus, but also because these effects are obvious to me. The burned particles, which it contains in large quantities, have so violent an energy that, when they enter the blood, they attract the lymph and dry the kidneys. Furthermore, they are dangerous to the brain, for, after having dried up the cerebro-spinal fluid and the convolutions, they open the pores of the body, with the result that the somniferous animal forces are overcome. In this way the ashes contained in coffee produce such obstinate wakefulness that the nervous juices are dried up; . . . the upshot being general exhaustion, paralysis, and impotence. Through the acidification of the blood, which has already assumed the condition of a river-bed at midsummer, all the parts of the body are deprived of their juices, and the whole frame becomes excessively lean.

  “These evils are especially noticeable in persons who are by nature of a bilious temperament, who from birth onwards have suffered from a hot liver and a hot brain; in persons whose intelligence is extremely subtle, and whose blood is already superheated. For these reasons we have to infer that the drinking and the use of coffee would be injurious to the inhabitants of Marseille.”

  Did the Marseillais thereupon abandon the use of coffee? They had, by this time, been Frenchmen far too long not to scent the ludicrous in such dithyrambs. They knew what doctors were like with their hairsplitting dissertations. In dozens of contemporary plays, physicians were represented as objects of ridicule, as would-be-learned ignoramuses. People “with no sense of humour,” for instance the English, the Germans, and the Dutch, might be imposed upon by medical bombast; but among the cheery Provençals, among the sceptics of Marseille, such froth could only arouse a spirit of contradiction.

  All the same, the adverse judgment of the Marseille doctors did a good deal of harm to coffee. Although the masses were uninfluenced by it, it made way among the learned. The great majority of French physicians at the close of the seventeenth century, influenced by Colomb’s dissertation, were opponents of coffee-drinking. They held that the fruit of this Arabian plant was only a drug, and must not be used to prepare a beverage for daily use. Various rumours were disseminated about coffee-poisoning, and found credence, though they were manifestly absurd. When Jean Baptiste Colbert died in 1683, at the age of sixty-four, seemingly from over-fatigue, it was bruited abroad that he had burned out his stomach with coffee. Liselotte of the Palatinate wrote in one of her letters that the Princess of Hanau-Birkenfeld had died of coffee-drinking. At the post-mortem examination it was disclosed that this poisonous drink had produced hundreds of ulcers in the unfortunate woman’s stomach, and that all of them were filled with black coffee-grounds! (One gathers that the princess succumbed to multiple cancer of the stomach. As we learn from the famous report of the autopsy of Napoleon, cancerous tissue looks very like coffee-grounds.)

  Other physicians, however, raised their voices to refute so preposterous a calumny. One of the most meritorious was Sylvestre Dufour, who hit upon the idea of making a chemical analysis of coffee, with the aid of two Lyons doctors. Collaborating with these, Spon and Cassaigne, in the year 1685, he penned the first quasi-modern description of the constituents of coffee, and showed what, thanks to its chemical constitution, were the effects of coffee on human beings. Coffee, said Dufour, counteracted drunkenness and nausea, and was helpful in disorders of menstruation. It promoted the flow of urine, strengthened the heart, relieved dropsy, gravel, and gout. It cured hypochondria and scurvy. It strengthened the air-passages and the voice, reduced fever and relieved migraine. Dufour must obviously have made numerous experiments on human beings. He came across some of those rare specimens of mankind who can drink coffee at bedtime and nevertheless sleep soundly—which seemed to him wonderful. He said that they must be persons who were so highly nervous that the coffee “relieved their disquiet, and removed their feeling of anxiety,” thus enabling them to sleep.

  Notwithstanding these experimental investigations, it proved very hard to eradicate from the French mind the notion that coffee had a “dessicative influence.” Dr. Duncan of Montpellier, a man of Scottish extraction, pointed out, rightly, that coffee was good for persons “whose blood circulates sluggishly, who are of a damp and cold nature.” It might have seemed an obvious inference from this that coffee would be especially useful for Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Germans; but Duncan did not draw this conclusion. Starting from the premise that the circulation of the blood of Frenchmen did not need to be accelerated, he became one of the adversaries of coffee. Well on in the eighteenth century, when coffee had already passed into general use, Dr. Tissot took the same view in his Von der Gesundheit der Gelehrten, published at Leipzig in 1769. Tissot held that Cornelius Buntekuh, the Great Elector’s physician-in-ordinary, had “corrupted the whole of northern Europe.” The mistaken belief that a sick person could usefully be given “a hundred cups of tea” had incurred the most disastrous consequences. Buntekuh’s theory concerning coffee was crazy; the quickening of the circulation was only of apparent value. “It is a foolish belief of many sick persons that their ailments are due to an excessive thickness of the blood. Owing to this fallacy, they drink the harmful beverage coffe
e. The coffee-pots and teapots that I find upon their tables remind me of Pandora’s box, out of which all evils came!”

  Like his predecessors, Tissot was willing to allow coffee “a place in the pharmacopœia”; but the daily use of the beverage was harmful and to be condemned. “The repeated stimulation of the fibres of the stomach weakens them in the end; the tough mucus which normally clings to the inner coats of the organ is washed away; the nerves are stimulated, and become unduly sensitive; the energies are dissipated; the patient suffers from a slow fever, and from other troubles whose cause often remains obscure; and these troubles affect, not only the fluid parts, but also the blood-vessels.” Of the worldwide struggle coffee was waging against the evils of alcoholism, Dr. Tissot had no idea. On the other hand, he was obliged to admit that “if coffee be drunk now and again only, it clarifies the ideas and certainly sharpens the understanding, for which reason men of letters make much use of it.” Still, he adds emphatically, “we have to ask ourselves whether Homer, Thucydides, Plato, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, and Horace, whose works will be a joy for all time, ever drank coffee.”

  These disputations were left to the learned, among whom they continued for decades; but the worthy citizens of Marseille took no heed of them. Since the Marseillais were great topers, it came easy to them to gulp down a huge draught of coffee as if it were wine. But now there was noised abroad a calumny—in print first, then whispered, then shouted from the housetops—that did more harm to coffee than either Bacchus or Æsculapius could do. It was a charge brought against the beverage by Venus.

  Few German books were then read in southern France. One German work, however, became well known, thanks to a French translation. The original was entitled Reise Adam Oelschlägers zu Moskowitern, Tataren, und Persern—the translation by Wicquefort, Relation du voyage d’Adam Olearius en Moscovie, Tartarie et Perse, having been published at Paris in the year 1666. This traveller’s tale—the journey had been undertaken with Paul Fleming, the German poet, as companion, at the instance of the Duke of Holstein—was, for the most part, true. Unfortunately, however, the author recorded a legend concerning the king of Persia, Mahomet Kosvin, who, as Oelschläger puts it, “had become so habituated to the use of coffee that he took a dislike for women. When one day the queen, looking out of the window, saw that a stallion was being emasculated, she asked why so well-bred a beast was thus shamefully handled. The men engaged in the operation told her that the stallion was too spirited and therefore troublesome, and that they were gelding it to tame it. The queen answered that they were wasting their pains, for coffee had the same influence. If they gave the stallion a sufficiency of coffee, within a few days it would become as cold as the king of Persia was towards herself, his wife.”