Coffee Kills

I love coffee, but not as much as French writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), who had a genuine coffee addiction. According to Lapham's Quarterly, "He would consume up to fifty cups a day...and when desperate, would chew on the beans themselves." Before dying at age 51 from "the effects of caffeine poisoning" (now there's a way to go), he wrote an essay entitled "The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee". For those of you too sleepy to click on that, I offer this brief quotation from Monsieur de Balzac, author of La Comédie humaine:

"The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like....[S]parks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes 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 with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder."

Today, he would have been a crack addict, I fear.

(via Popular Coffee News)