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The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee

by Honore de Balzactranslated from the French by Robert Onopa

Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epicscale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them,but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even moreboring. Think about it: although more grocery stores in Paris are stayingopen until midnight, few writers are actually becoming more spiritual.But as Brillat-Savarin has correctly observed, coffee sets the blood inmotion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes,chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer inthe exercise of our intellects. It is on this last point, in particular, that Iwant to add my personal experience to Brillat-Savarin's observations.Coffee affects the diaphragm and the plexus of the stomach, from which it

reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape completeanalysis; that aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous fluxconducts an electricity emitted by coffee when we drink it. Coffee's powerchanges over time. [Italian composer Gioacchino] Rossini has personallyexperienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossinitold me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount oftime, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of timeduring which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amountof stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans thathave been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot

water.For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizingthe coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water,you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible,you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorousconstitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continueworking for several more days.Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that Irecommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair andskin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped

like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee,cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee fallsinto your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries ofsuckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so itattacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food anddemands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these

juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes thesebeautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexusbecomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From thatmoment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motionlike battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the

battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry ofmetaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes

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up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders,sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up;the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends withtorrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with blackpowder.

I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, whoabsolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: hethoughthe'd been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like amarried man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; heapparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part,a failure of observation.When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, thenbecome exhausted and decide that you really must have more, eventhough you make it of the finest ingredients and take it perfectly fresh,you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, andundergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen

if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counseled me to stop at this point,seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored,one must begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other whitemeats: finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns tothe relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of theretired bourgeoisie.The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach underthese magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks likeanger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience:one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomesbrusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle

character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like. One assumesthat everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid goingout in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidentsthat made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling.Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed mearguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. Thefollowing day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. Myfriends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soonenough: coffee wanted its victim.Ed. note: Transcription credit tojaybabcock.com,from which I snitchedthe essay out of nervousness that it might disappear.

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