Balzac on Coffee

"Coffee is a great power in my life"

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The French author Honoré de Balzac once observed that drinking coffee was essential for doing creative work. As he put it, “coffee is a great power in my life”. Indeed, Balzac would often stay up all night, working feverishly on his interlinked series of novels, titled “La Comédie humaine”.

Legend has it that Balzac would drink up to 50 cups of black coffee per day. It’s highly unlikely, but we do know that he espoused both the power and the pitfalls that come with elevated caffeine consumption. In a short essay titled, The Pleasures and Pain of Coffee, Balzac gave a vivid description of the way he preferred his coffee, advising that for the strongest effect it should be taken on an empty stomach.

“This coffee falls into your stomach, and straightway there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move like the battalions of the Grand Army on the battlefield, and the battle takes place. Things remembered arrive at full gallop, ensign to the wind. The light cavalry of comparisons deliver a magnificent deploying charge, the artillery of logic hurry up with their train and ammunition, the shafts of wit start up like sharpshooters. Similes arise, the paper is covered with ink; for the struggle commences and is concluded with torrents of black water, just as a battle with powder.”

But Balzac also warned his readers about drinking too much coffee. He said that one day he had gotten so intoxicated on caffeine, that he found himself getting into pointless arguments and yelling like a madman. Upon reflection, he realized the coffee had made him do it:

As he put it:

“Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.”

Balzac was not just a victim of coffee, but of his creditors. He was always getting into debt, spending more than he could make on lavish furniture and expensive clothing. This meant that he was constantly changing homes, living in six different apartments over the course of just a few years. Seeing as he was being paid by the word, his coffee-consumption was also a way of trying to write his way out of debt. And so coffee brought out both the best and the worst in Balzac. By today’s standards he would have been considered quite manic.

And yet as someone who loves my daily coffee, and who cannot read or write without it, I sympathize with poor Balzac. His habit may have been excessive, but so was he. There is always something excessive about Balzac, the speed of his writing, the scope of his novels, the scale of his ambition. He was a man in a hurry, and one of literature’s great coffee-lovers.

Let us all raise our coffees to Balzac!

Julian

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