Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity
Page 16
While most refreshing beverages showed a seasonal consumption, the consumption of coffee went on increasing throughout the year to such an extent that His Majesty’s attention was drawn to the matter. In the year 1704 Louis XIV was once more short of funds. He looked round uneasily for a chance of raising the wind. He regretted having, a few years before, granted the lemonade-sellers a licence at fifty crowns per head. He made up his mind that every one of them should now pay him a more adequate sum, and, from the height of absolutism whence he radiated his beams, he decreed without more ado the closing down of the guild. With this thunder-clap, of course, the rights of its individual members were extinguished. The previous licensees got together, not to resist openly, since they could do nothing against the halberds and harquebuses of His Majesty. They only assembled to implore the king that he would allow them once more to buy the privileges they had previously enjoyed.
His Majesty played the ungracious. One of the rascally intendants who acted in his name declared that the crown intended to restrict the number of lemonade-sellers. This was a proposal not necessarily disagreeable to the trade, as a whole, though it might be undesirable to those who would be crowded out! For this proof of double-edged grace, which was warranted to restrict competition, the treasury must be promptly indemnified with the sum of two hundred thousand livres. The percentages payable to the intendants were not counted in. The lemonade-sellers agreed to the exaction, having no stomach for a fight. How lucrative must have been their business—especially the sale of coffee—since they could afford to put up such a sum!
The elderly tyrant’s appetite for money was only stimulated by his easy victory. In July 1705 he repealed the edict of 1704, and demanded from the guild payment for a third charter. To mask his rapacity, he conceded to the lemonade-sellers certain new privileges: they might sell gin, might supply cocoa and vanilla, might offer chocolate in cups. The members of the guild agreed, but they were deceived in their calculations. By the year 1706 they still owed the king as much as forty thousand livres. There were fresh reprisals and visits from sheriff’s officers. But the amount needed was not forthcoming. Then His Majesty again broke his royal word, and proceeded to issue a new type of licence, making the occupation hereditary. Well, it would have been only decent to pay back to the lemonade-sellers the one hundred and sixty thousand livres he had already had from them. He looked round for an intermediary, who could get a share of the profits from the new licences if he would put up the money that was immediately needed. His Majesty had in mind to issue five hundred licences. But the fish were shy. It had been bruited abroad that the monarch intended to suppress the trade; those who were engaged in it sought other occupations; and, instead of the expected five hundred lemonade-sellers, only one hundred and forty were to be found. The guild no longer existed, and the new licences were unsaleable. Anyone to whom the guild had been indebted now dunned individual members. Things went ill with those from whom the sunshine of the king’s favour had been so manifestly withdrawn. At length, around Christmas 1713, a royal edict re-established the old position, and the guild was once more put upon a legal footing.
This story of the lemonade-sellers (they were mainly, though not exclusively, coffee-house keepers) was dug up from the archives by Alfred Franklin, who gathered such a wealth of information concerning old-time Paris. It gives us an instructive cross-section view of the position of the bourgeoisie. We see in it one of the thousand causes of the French Revolution—not the principal cause, of course, but a typical and significant one.
13
The Literary Century
THE eighteenth century may be described as the literary century.
In this epoch it happened for the first time that the domain of literature ceased to be restricted to the world of books, extending its realm unresisted through every sphere of life.
During the eighteenth century the conquest of literature in all departments of existence was effected with the suddenness and violence of a volcanic eruption. Every love-letter was penned in a literary style; every scientific discovery was presented in a literary form. The physician, while taking his patient’s pulse at the bed-side, conversed in the tongue of letters. Religion became literature. The revolution that was approaching heralded its coming not only in the field of social transformation but also, and above all, as literature.
Hence the significance of coffee for the eighteenth century. People living in this unmystical period (in contradistinction to those of the baroque era) were prone to self-mockery, frequently drawing attention to the fact. Coffee, declared the cynics, equips with intelligence vast numbers of persons who would otherwise have never committed their thoughts to paper:
To those of little wit
Coffee is a brightener.
The most barren of authors
Is thereby made fertile.
It has in it a virtue
Strengthening the memory,
So that a pedant can talk,
Without rhyme or reason,
Spouting fable and history.
Coffee works a miracle,
Sharpening the brains of the stupid.
No author refreshed thereby
Need languish in silence.
Coffee’s strength and virtue
Double the memory.
Every drop empowers us
To gabble without pause,
And, discarding the crutches of rhyme,
To spout fable as history.
In his Lettres persanes, Montesquieu writes sarcastically: “Great is the vogue of coffee in Paris. In the houses where it is supplied, the proprietors know how to prepare it in such a way that it gives wit to those who drink it. At any rate, when they depart, all of them believe themselves to be at least four times as brainy as when they entered the doors.”
The aspect of the eighteenth century is summarized for us in the word “rococo.” It is a basic fact of the literary century that all those who lived in it were under the spell of the rococo. With them it had become a primary article of faith that a thing did not begin to exist until it existed in the reason, and until it could be expressed in black upon white. Could there have been two persons more obviously different than Louis XV and Voltaire? What a contrast there was, once more, between a cocotte who picked up her customers at a coffeehouse and the Marquise de Pompadour. Yet the four of them had this much in common, that restrained expression (of which the book is but a symbol) was dominant in every gesture of their lives. Just as in earlier epochs religion had been supreme, its sap rising into the finest ramifications of daily life, so in this century of the rococo did the aroma of literature overpower all others. Historians declare that members of the French nobility must have been extraordinarily foolish not to take warning when they watched a performance of Beaumarchais’ Le mariage de Figaro. But the historians are wrong. Notwithstanding the severance of the classes that this drama pointed out, all members of Beaumarchais’ audience were united in the recognition that they were contemplating the performance of an extremely witty play, a fine piece of literature!
The rococo created an outlook on life that unified even those who were greatly at odds as regards their several views on politics or philosophy. The Encyclopædists, though they were looking forward to the coming of a generation of rationalists and were trying to guide their contemporaries into new paths, were likewise men of the rococo, wearing knee-breeches, pigtails, and swords. Love of God and atheism, monarchical loyalty and republicanism, wore the same clothes and rubbed shoulders amicably one with another. Expression, conversation, and amenity were for all. The magical fumes emanating from the kitchen of the Black Apollo mitigated the clash of conflicting opinion, and thus wrought the aforesaid miracle. All the sayings of the period had the strange aromatic flavour of coffee:
This gentle vapour that rises in clouds
Will develop for us, la, la,
Our imagination, tum, tum,
To produce a fine work.
The sense of literary self-appr
eciation 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:
The god who from his chariot shines in our skies
Is the same Apollo who reigns in the east.
When his eyes were looking upon Arabia Felix,
He saw the birth of this famous plant.
Quaffing long draughts of the fuming decoction,
He felt the effect of its conquering power.