Honoré de Balzac: The Patron Saint of Coffee
Coffee is the name of the essay and it appears in Anne Fadiman’s new book At Large and At Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist published by Alan Lane in the UK.
Fadiman is fully caffeinated the entire time she is researching and writing the essay, sharing the same caffeine buzz experienced by the literary giants who populate her essay.
Who knew that it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “who had swallowed oceans of coffee in his younger days and regretted his intemperance,” who first summoned a chemist to see what the magic ingredient was in coffee beans.
and that Honoré de Balzac, “the model for every espresso- swilling writer who has followed in his jittery footsteps,” was a slave to the almighty bean, drinking up to 40 cups a day!
“What hashish was to Baudelaire,
opium to Coleridge,
cocaine to Robert Louis Stevenson,
nitrous oxide to Robert Southey,
mescaline to Aldous Huxley,
and Benzedrine to Jack Kerouac,
caffeine was to Balzac.”
The Guardian has the essay in its entirety.
My head is spinning from all the possible Starbucks tie-ins.
Image above via Wikipedia a painting after a photographic done in 1842 by Louis-Auguste Bisson