The Devil's Cup

by Stewart Lee Allen

  It was at the cafés of the Palais Royal that, on July 12, 1789, Camille Desmoulins leaped upon a table and urged the mob to take up arms against the aristocracy. It had been done a million times before, but this time, after a debate over what the most appropriate color for the revolution would be (green for renewal or red for blood?), the café’s customers actually got out of their seats, went outside, and overthrew the French monarchy, incidentally ending government as it was then known.

  Some social critics of the time portrayed coffee as the stimulant that helped set off both the Enlightenment and Europe’s first democratic revolution. “For this sparkling outburst,” wrote Michelet, “there is no doubt that honor should be ascribed in part to the great event which created new customs and even modified human temperament—the advent of coffee…which brings forth the sparkle and sunlight of truth.”2 Historian Nar-cisse-Achille Salvandy put it in black and white: “No government can go against the sentiment of the cafés. The Revolution took place because they were for the Revolution. Napoleon reigned because they were for glory.”

  Pretty enough stuff, and perhaps even true. But there is another less celebrated role that Old Man Java played in the July revolution, one that again takes us deep within the Gallic digestive system: to wit, that belonging to the notorious Marquis de Sade. At the time, our dear marquis was imprisoned in the Bastille. On July 2, ten days before Desmoulins hopped on his table at Café Foy, the marquis had done a little rabble-rousing himself. Following a disagreement with his jailer, he’d grabbed the funnel used to empty his chamber pot into the moat and, using it as a megaphone, had started screaming out his cell window that the government was “cutting the prisoner’s throats” in the Bastille. A crowd gathered outside. As the prison guards struggled to open his cell door, the marquis urged the mob to rescue the “political prisoners” locked within. Then the guards subdued him.

  Historians have long puzzled over why the revolutionaries stormed the Bastille. Everyone knew it held only a few imprisoned aristocrats, like the Marquis de Sade. Well, it appears that within hours of the marquis’s outburst rumors spread that the government had moved all its political detainees into the Bastille and was slitting their throats. The rumors grew. Ten days later the fortress was stormed. The rebels found no political prisoners. In fact, there were only three captives in the entire place. They did, however, stumble upon a huge cache of weapons, without which, it is generally agreed, the French Revolution would have failed.

  But what had the marquis been so outraged about? It was those old “unblocking” problems again. After twelve years of being locked up, the marquis was corked tight as a bottle of Dom Perignon, “puffy, overweight and suffering formidable gastritis,” according to Sade, the definitive biography by Maurice Levenger. He constantly demanded “appropriate” breakfasts and grew furious when Lossinoette, “the dirtiest and most insolent of valets,” took away his “rump cushion.” Coffee, of course, was famous for its prowess in these areas, and though the records of his coffee-drinking habits are sketchy, there’s little doubt that its lack, played a key role in his intestinal distress. His cries of torment were without a doubt what eventually drew the mobs to the Bastille on July 14, 1789.

  IT WAS ALL DOWNHILL FROM THERE, AS WE GET INTO WHAT some fools call the Golden Age of the French café. You know the cast. There was our old friend Arthur Rimbaud, the coffee merchant cum poet of Harrar, who used to hang out with that icon of decadent café society, Paul Verlaine, at Café Rat Mort. These two were the Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten of the 1800s. Rimbaud asks Verlaine to put his hands on the table and then slits the man’s wrists; Verlaine returns the compliment by shooting Rimbaud. That kind of thing. Later, there were the existentialists like Sartre and Camus at Café Flore, the Americans at Café Lipp and La Coupole, cubists like Picasso at Le Lapin Agile, dadaist Guillame Apollinaire and surrealist Andre Breton at the Rotonde. There was even a group called Incoherents at Le Café des Incoherent. People like Alexandre Schanne and Henri Murger made a career doing exposes on “les cafés decadent.” The owner of Café Momu complained that “our waiter was reduced to an idiot in the prime of his life, as a result of the conversations he had to listen to.”

  As fond as I am of these lounge lizards, I have to point out that they only talked a revolution. Desmoulins and his crew at the Palais Royal threw one.

  No, the most significant legacy of this lot stems from their Herculean efforts to stretch a single espresso twelve hours. Sartre, in particular, has much to atone for in this area. According to the proprietor of Café Flore, Paul Boulal, our lofty existentialist was “the most awful client…sitting from morning to night over a single drink that was never refilled.” Thanks to such behavior, the world’s café capital is now the most expensive place in the world to sit and enjoy a cup—up to seven U.S. dollars, compared to Vienna’s four or Amsterdam’s two. Small wonder that the French are avoiding cafés like the plague. In 1960 Paris boasted 252,000 small cafés. By 1982 there were about 180,000, a number that has now decreased almost 50 percent. Another 6,000 are expected to close this year. Old favorites disappear each visit.

  “Oh, yes, it is all changed,” agreed Monsieur Balitrand. “For many reasons—McDo [McDonald’s] and the fast food is so popular. But there have always been cafés, and they will always be here. Really, they are the history of the French people.”

  1 Our friend was also credited with curing miscarriages, headaches, rheumatism, consumption, scurvy, gout, dropsy, kidney stones, eye sores, and, of course, the common cold. But it was particularly popular as a digestive aid.

  2 Michelet goes so far as to categorize the French Enlightenment by the changing coffee supply. When the lighter beans of Yemen were available, the lighthearted cafés and salons of the aristos dominated. The medium-strength bean of Bourbon brought on the “sparkling verse of Voltaire.” When the “full, coarse” coffees of the Caribbean became the norm, the age turned dark and violent.

  the Sultan’s Earache

  At breakfast Beethoven drank coffee, which he usually prepared himself in a percolator. Coffee seems to have been the nourishment with which he could least dispense and in his procedure with regard to its preparation he was as careful as the Orientals are known to be. Sixty beans to a cup was the allotment and the beans were often counted out exactly, especially when guests were present

  Anton Schindler

  BEHIND THE EXPLOSIVE growth in Europe’s coffee consumption during the 1700s lay the tedious principle of supply and demand. In the late 1600s Louis XV reportedly spent the equivalent of fifteen thousand dollars a year to feed his daughter’s coffee habit. By 1740 the price had dropped to fifty cents a cup, and even the lowliest of lumpens could afford a buzz. Coffee was now flourishing in European colonies on three different continents. The first major transplant had been Baba Budan’s legendary smuggling of the bean to India. A more important one came in 1616, when a Dutch sea captain named Pieter Van Der Broecke stole a dozen plants from Mocha and planted them in Java, thus changing coffee’s nickname from mocha to mocha-java. But by far the pivotal feat of these colonial drug cartels was the smuggling of the bean to the New World by a French aristocrat named Gabriel De Clieu in 1720.

  When I read De Clieu’s story in Paris I was instantly reminded of the Viennese spy Kolschitzky. It was as unlikely as a Tom Clancy novel, so full of pirates and spies and shipwrecks that it couldn’t possibly be true. A quick bit of research showed that De Clieu’s claim rested largely on a letter he himself wrote in 1774. A little more digging turned up any number of counterclaims, including the unlikely story of a French doctor who was supposedly given sixty coffee plants for having cured the sultan of Yemen’s earache. There were also accounts of the Dutch planting coffee in Surinam, South America, in 1714, six years before De Clieu, as well as the story of a Portuguese officer who was given a bouquet of coffee flowers after servicing an adulterous French countess. Our old friends the Capuchin monks had even staked a claim.

  What it came do
wn to was that nobody knew how the plant had arrived in the New World, and De Clieu had been given credit because he had cooked up the best story. I tried to find out more about the French sailor, but after a week of poking about the French National Library, I knew only that De Clieu had been born in a town called Anglequeville around 1686. He later became governor of Guadeloupe. No one, however, knew where he was buried. When I tried to track down Anglequeville, I discovered there was no such place. My only clue I had was that Anglequeville had been located in the state of Seine-Inferieure, on the French North Atlantic coast near Normandy.

  I needed to find out if De Clieu’s claim was valid, so when it became clear that the French postal service was never going to find my Rajasthani paintings, I grabbed a train heading for Normandy. It was a lovely ride. Green hills dotted with cream-colored sheep. Apple trees heavy with fruit. Oddly autumnal, I thought, as the train whizzed along, but nice. The city of Rouen went by. Then a place called Auffay. Then Longueville-sur-Scie, Malanvay L’Home, and Victoire L’Abbaye. Funny how the smaller the village, the longer the name. We were now in Seine-Inferieure. Still no sign of Anglequeville. I noticed a sea tang in the air, and the train came to a halt. End of the line, Dieppe. I found a cheap room above a bar and started to explore.

  My method was not quite as idiotic as it sounds. True, I had no idea where Anglequeville was located, but the name suggested a contraction of Anglais Ville, “English Town.” Since De Clieu was a sailor and lived in a town associated with England, it almost had to be one of Seine-Inferieure’s ports, of which there are only twenty or so. All I had to do was go from port to port and barhop until I found someone who had heard of the family.

  Dieppe proved to be a delightfully small Norman fishing village. People were grilling herrings on the street. There was a little market by the church. Everybody was over forty-five and tipsy.

  “Le poisson pêche,” a man in blue overalls was muttering at my first research stop, a harborside bar called Café Le Crystal. “Alors, nous pêchons les pêchons, pêchons on frères, non? Nous sommes tout les pecheurs.” This roughly translates as, “The fish fish; we fish. Therefore the fish are our brothers because we are both fisherman, no?”

  I ordered a beer.

  “Fish the fish,” continued the man, apparently addressing me. “Don’t you see? If the fish fish for fish, they are fishermen, ah? So we fish for fishermen. But we are fishermen too! So we are eating our own brothers, eh?”

  “Ooh là là,” interjected the twitchy blonde behind the bar. “Not at all. Fish who eat fish are cannibals. So if we kill cannibals, what’s so wrong with that, eh? Cannibals are disgusting and deserve to die.”

  “Besides, my friend,” said a bald fellow in a leather jacket, “a fish who fishes for fish is not a fisherman; he is a fisherfish. Totally different.”

  “No. Those who fish the sea are all brothers, no matter what,” said Blue Overalls. “If a policeman eats another policeman, is he not a cannibal?”

  Bald took a sip of his beer. “Not if the other policeman is a pig, he’s not.”

  This caused a pause. I asked if anybody had heard of a De Clieu or Anglequeville.

  “Ask the fish,” said Overalls. “They know everything.”

  “De Clieu?” repeated the bartender. “No, never.”

  “It’s an old name,” I persisted. “I’m not sure—”

  “I don’t know,” she snapped suddenly. “Thank you, sir, and good-bye.”

  Someone put a hand on my shoulder. It was Baldie. “Look, mon ami, I don’t know of a family named De Clieu,” he said. “But there is an Avenue De Clieu down by the train station. Perhaps they live there.”

  I went back down to the station, and there it was, nailed to the wall of a pharmacy. Avenue De Clieu. I celebrated my luck with a meal at a tacky harbor restaurant. Sautéed flounder with frites, salmon pâté, crème caramel. I chatted with the waitress about the book I was reading. (“Ah, yes, I know this P. G. Wodehouse”.) After a few glasses of white wine I decided to marry her. We would live in Dieppe. Like everyone else, I would fish the sea. In the summer, the tourists would come. Gigot and I would have many children, many, and they would have children of their own and so on and so on and so on.

  “YES, YES, I AM GABRIEL DE CLIEU’S GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-great-great-great-granddaughter.” Madame Catherine de Beaunay-Cotelle started counting on her fingers. “I am not sure, there might be one more.”

  By an amazing stroke of luck, Dieppe was not only where De Clieu had been born,1 it also contained his sole direct descendant, this middle-aged, no-nonsense French lady shod in black-and-white wingtips. The day after I arrived in Dieppe she had picked me up at a café and chauffeured me to her office in the neighboring village of Derchigny-Graincourt, where for the last three years she had been documenting her ancestor’s feat.

  “No, there is no question who carried the plant,” she said, bringing out a pile of papers. “It is historically proven fact. There is even a book written on the subject.”

  Catherine handed me a slender yellow volume entitled Gabriel De Clieu: Hommage au chevalier. It was written by Catherine de Beaunay-Cotelle.

  “But you wrote this!” I objected.

  “Of course. Who would better know than his only descendant?”

  She had a point. She also had letters attesting to De Clieu’s feat from Louis XV, the governor of Martinique, various colonial bureaucrats, and an American biologist who’d named an entire species of the coffee plant after De Clieu. She even had a copy of De Clieu’s coat of arms, an eagle, beak open in a battle cry, on a field of silver and crowned with three grains of sand. I told her she looked a bit like the old chevalier, a portrait of whom adorned the front of her book. He was an old white guy in a wig with sea-gray eyes. Genial, but not the kind of grandfather you want to play pranks on. Actually, Catherine seemend pretty sober herself.

  “It is something I am very passionate about,” she said, observing my glance. She definitely had the chevalier’s eyes. “It has become my life’s work.”

  Aside from documenting De Clieu’s voyage to the New World, she was trying to open a museum on coffee’s role in French history. She had recently formed the Association De Clieu (I am its 251 st member) and convinced seventeen nearby villages to buy the chevalier’s abandoned château to house her museum.

  According to Catherine, her family was made part of the aristocracy by Charles VI. Gabriel was born in Dieppe around 1687 and joined the navy around 1702. For the next fifteen years he’d lounged about the French Caribbean, winning various honors, getting married, but essentially being a bum. Around 1717 he apparently heard about a Michel Isambert who had perished trying to transplant three coffee plants to the Antilles. Gabriel took up the cause, succeeded, and was rewarded with the gov-ernership of Guadeloupe and by being made Commander of the Order of St. Louis, not to mention the hero of coffee lovers everywhere.

  “He died poor, in Paris, despite having been the governor,” she said. “But he was a good governor, they say. When he was poor, the people of Guadeloupe offered to send him a hundred and fifty thousand livres [francs]. He refused, of course.”

  “But he still owned land here?”

  “Oh yes. His family’s descendants today control about eighty hectares all around us. Yet he died destitute. It was typical of the time after the Revolution.” She put away her notes. “But there is no question about my ancestor’s gift to the world. Think about it! That one man should have brought so much happiness.”

  “Yes, amazing.” I paused, unsure how to express my skepticism. “The story, you know, of the voyage. It seems so incredible. Is it true?”

  “Ah, it is amazing, no? Come.” She led me to a large building filled with flowers. “You see?” she said, gesturing to the plants. I looked around in puzzlement. Then I saw it, behind the ferns and flowers, a huge mural depicting De Clieu’s Odyssey. There were the pirates and mermaids, and sailors dying of thirst. There was a terrible storm. The last panel showed the
paradise of Martinique, where De Clieu’s wife, a monkey on her lap, was being served a cup of coffee by an African slave. The colors were beginning to fade.

  “It was his destiny, you see,” she said. “I had his horoscope drawn. He was born in the house of Saturn, indicating perseverance, and Mercury, which means long voyages. His sign in the Thebaique calendar is of a man with a basket in his right hand and seeds in his left. It means, they say, he was destined to sow great seeds across the world.”

  “What sign was he?” I asked.

  “We think he was born June 30, 1687. Sign of Cancer.”

  “Really? That’s my sign.”

  “Ah, you know, I don’t completely believe in these things,” she scoffed. “But if you are going to take the same route as my ancestor, you should be sure to bring some bottled water.”

  ACCORDING TO CATHERINE COTELLE, DE CLIEU SET SAIL SOME twenty miles south of Dieppe, in Rochefort. When I went there to arrange passage on a freighter, however, there was nothing available. In fact, working for passage on commercial freighters is a thing of the past, at least in Europe, where freighters are booked in advance. The only vessel I could find was a tramp ship leaving from the northern Italian port of Genoa. And I would have to pay; not much, but it would have to be cash, and they would not guarantee a date of departure. Nor was it going to Martinique, but to the famous Brazilian coffee port of Santos.

  The next few weeks were rather complicated. So I won’t mention the day that I arrived in Genoa to discover that my freighter, the SS Venezia, was delayed. Nor shall I tell of the day the authorities changed the date of departure three times in twenty-four hours. Neither shall I detail the weeks I spent idling about Rome and Naples; the countless Cellinis, the endless Michelangelos, the pre-Raphaelites, the post-Raphaelites, and the pre-post-but-indisposed Raphaelites. Let us instead proceed to the day four weeks later when I again stood upon the docks of Genoa waiting to board. It wasn’t the SS Venezia, which had mysteriously disappeared, but the SS Pisa. Same difference. As long as it floated I could not have cared less.