Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (12 page)

He himself was only thirty-eight when he died. He was not a very satisfactory advertisement for his treatise on the prolongation of life by the use of tea, coffee, and chocolate (
Traktat von het excellentie kruyt thee, coffi, schokolate).
Still, it would be wrong to leave the reader under the impression that Buntekuh died through taking too much of his own medicine. He perished by an accident. On January 10, 1685, he was carrying books downstairs for the Elector. The staircase was dark, he stumbled, and broke his neck.

Thus, the internal ellipse of his circulation was brought to a standstill, and there was ended all too soon a life that might have taught much more to his contemporaries. With the death of Buntekuh, caffeine disappeared for the time from Berlin.

This was only two years after Kolshitsky had discovered the beverage for Vienna and the Viennese.

A
MONG
all who envied the republic of Venice its trade with the Levant, there were no more remarkable people than the inhabitants of Marseille. Their existence was not so strange and adventurous a one as that of the Venetians, who lived in houses built on piles amid lagoons; but nonetheless the origin of the Marseille folk had been peculiar.

The settlement of Massalia or Massilia was founded about 600
B
.
C
. in Gallia Viennensis by persons of Greek stock, merchant adventurers from Phocaea in Asia Minor. These Hellenes took to themselves Gallic wives. A few centuries later, when the expansion of the Roman dominion was in progress, Roman settlers came and married the descendants of the Helleno-Celts. To mix the blood yet further, Hannibal, with Spanish and African troops, marched through Provence from the Iberian Peninsula on his way to invade Northern Italy. In the days of Marius, the Cimbri and the Teutoni, barbarians of different stocks, crossed the mouths of the Rhone on their way to and from Spain. Much later still, the blond Goths came down from the north and added to the mixture of colours on the palette of the north Mediterranean coast.

The Rhone, joined at Lyons by the Saône, and swelled by the turbulent waters of the Durance, the Gard and numerous other tributaries, becomes a mighty river which booms its way down to the sea. Accompanied by the murmur of the centuries—sometimes increased to a roar by burning towns and villages, sometimes reduced to a whisper of wind in the olive groves—Marseille waxed merrily, grew strong, loquacious, and huge. Made glorious by the Greek strain, virile through the Roman heritage, amorous from Gallic descent, inclined to trade and profit-making as had been the Carthaginians of old, the Marseillais were also heavy drinkers. They did not, like most dwellers in the South, drink merely to slake their thirst. The Nordic blood in them made them crave for the jingle that wine could produce. Their names were as various as their descent. Some had a Greek patronymic, such as Panurge or Thèopomp; others were called after Franconian knights, such as Lenthéric, Alberich, Walther, or Audibert; and Marius was one of the favourite baptismal names, given in memory of the Roman general who had crushed the Cimbri and the Teutoni.

They were merry fellows, their eyes lit up with wine. Open-air folk: oil-millers, vintners, carpenters, stone-masons, longshoremen, sail-makers, oystermen. A Marseillais could turn his hand to almost any job. One thing alone went against the grain: the thought of becoming a Frenchman! They laughed when they heard that the country north of Lyons, dissensions notwithstanding, was uniting to form France. Ere long, however, their hilarity changed to anxiety. They heard talk of that city called Paris, a petty place, far away from the sea, and on a river of no great importance. But the soothsayers declared that Paris was destined to outdo Marseille. Who could take such babble seriously? The revellers of Marseille would say to one another o’ nights, as they lurched along the Cannebière, the street lined with taverns: “Si Paris eût une Cannebière, ça serait peut-être un petit Marseille.”

But mocking laughter could not avert the peril. The power of the kings of France extended farther and farther south into the gay land of Provence. France had reached the Mediterranean coast. Still, the rulers of France left Marseille on their eastern border. New Mediterranean ports, French ports, began to flourish. The town council of the republic of Marseille looked askance. There was that infernal settlement of Aigues-Mortes, a French seacoast town, trying to rival Venice and Genoa!

The Marseillais, however, found an ally, and no city in the world has ever had a stranger one. The kings of France were but men, anointed yet mortal. Marseille’s ally was a river, or, better, a river-god. The Rhone, Rhodanus; a self-willed old fellow, equipped with immense power. He did not reach the sea by way of Marseille, his course from the Swiss Alps entering the Mediterranean many miles westward of Massilia. He had a strange habit of silting up whatever his waters touched. At a day’s march from the Mediterranean, he expanded into a delta. The land between and on either side of his many mouths was marshy plain. Nothing grew there but the weedy vegetation of salt marshes. Father Rhone had a way of thrusting the marsh land between what had been a seaport and the sea. Aigues-Mortes itself, which had carried on a brisk trade with Syria, flourished only for a century, to find itself in the end left high and dry amid the reedy lagoons.

All the better for Marseille, which, by a wise dispensation, had not been established on one of the mouths of the Rhone. It was the only first-class harbour adjoining Italy on the southern coast of Gaul. The kings of France found this undeniable, and wanted to come to terms with arrogant Marseille.

King Francis I, a thoroughgoing patriot, studied the map assiduously. He could not see any good reason why the products of his country should be shipped to the Levant from Venice, Pisa, or Genoa. He was proud to know that Turkey could not get on without French produce. The textiles made by the weavers of Languedoc and Catalonia were in demand in the bazaars of Constantinople and Alexandria. Nay more, camels bore them to Mecca, and thence to India. King Francis would hardly have believed this had he not, with his own eyes, seen accounts and bills of lading in the Italian tongue that confirmed the supposition. They taught him that in Mohammedan Egypt the pagan women loved to dress in linen from Rheims. Why should not Rheims textiles be shipped to the Levant in French bottoms?

Why not, indeed? In the year of grace 1535, no intelligent Frenchman doubted the possibility.

A century later, in 1634, a vessel engaged in the Levantine trade lay in Marseille roads. There disembarked from it a Monsieur de la Roque, a wealthy man who had just returned from Constantinople. He had a fine countryhouse in the environs of Marseille, commanding a view of the sea and of vineyards. Here, when he unpacked the baggage he had brought with him from the Levant, his astonished friends saw, among other things, a metal pot and some beans which were now roasted till they were black. From them a beverage was prepared which, in its effects, proved no less amazing to the Marseillais friends of Monsieur de la Roque.

The stock the traveller had brought with him was soon exhausted, and it was more than ten years before pack-mules laden with bags of coffee were frequently to be seen making their way from the harbour to the villas of the well-to-do. At length, in 1660, a big ship, freighted only with coffee, arrived from Egypt. Where were the bales to be consigned? To the proper place—to the drug-stores. For it was a general belief that the strange substance that could keep people awake all night was not an ordinary beverage, but a drug.

Not for long, however, did this belief prevail. In 1664 was published a widely circulated book, Jean de Thévenot’s
Relation d’un voyage fait au Levant.
Like all who have leisure and enjoy the beauties of life, the well-to-do of Marseille were great readers of history. Naturally, therefore, they read to themselves, or read aloud to one another, the chapter on coffee in Monsieur de Thévenot’s book, which showed clearly that this beverage was, in the land of its origin, an article of daily consumption, and not a mere drug.

“The Turks,” wrote de Thévenot, “have a drink that they are accustomed to consume at all hours. This drink, known as ‘cavé,’ is prepared from a black bean. They roast the bean over the fire in a metal pan; when it has been roasted, they pound it into a fine powder. To prepare the beverage, they take a metal pot which they call ‘ibrik,’ fill it with water, and raise the water to boiling-point; then they throw into the pot a large spoonful of the powdered grain. Very soon after this they withdraw the kettle or pot from the fire, for otherwise the fluid would boil over. Then they put it back again on the fire until it begins to bubble once more, repeating this process ten or twelve times. Thereafter they decant the black drink into porcelain cups, which are handed round upon a painted tray. This beverage must be consumed exceedingly hot, but only in sips, for if taken at a draught the taste is not fully savoured.

“The drink must be bitter and black, and must have a burnt taste. Another reason for consuming it in little sips is that otherwise, being very hot, it might scald the mouth. In a ‘cavéhane,’ as they call the houses where coffee is prepared and sold, the sound of sipping is continuous. The drink prevents the ordinary vapours of satiety rising from the stomach into the head; it also hinders sleep. When our French merchants have many letters to write and wish to work through the night, they would find it advantageous to drink one or two cups of cavé at about ten in the evening. As regards the taste of this beverage, although it is disagreeable the first time, the second time one drinks it one already begins to find it agreeable. It fortifies the stomach and helps digestion. The Turks also believe that it cures a number of maladies and promotes longevity. In Turkey it is drunk both by the poor and by the rich; it is one of those things which a husband is universally expected to provide for his wife.

“There are public coffee-houses, where the drink is prepared in very big pots for the numerous guests. At these places guests mingle without distinction of rank or creed; nor does anyone think it amiss to enter such places, where people go to pass their leisure time. In front of the coffeehouses are benches with small mats, where those sit who would rather remain in the fresh air and amuse themselves by watching the passers-by. Sometimes the coffee-house keeper engages flute-players and violin-players, and also singers, to entertain his guests. If anyone is sitting in the ‘cavéhane’ and sees a friend enter, it is good form for him to nod to the proprietor, signifying that the newcomer is to be served free of charge, to be ‘treated.’ The first comer receives the other as his guest. This is expressed by a word to the coffee-house proprietor. The word is ‘jaba,’ which means ‘gratis.’”

The foregoing quotation shows clearly enough that, in the Levant, people did not get their coffee from the drug-stores. There were as many coffee-houses as there were drinking-saloons in the West. Soon after the publication of de Thévenot’s book, the first coffee-house was opened in Marseille, partly for residents and partly for sailors.

The first coffee-house keeper found imitators, but two classes of people began to complain. To begin with, the vintners. Bacchus inspired them to wrath. Had not these disciples of Mohammed uprooted the vine along the southern coast of the Mediterranean? Now coffee had come to the northern shore—coffee, which had derived advantage from the rout of Bacchus—the Black Apollo of the barbarians had sailed hither on shipboard, into the Christian wine-bibbing city of Marseille! He was going to continue his work of destruction there. He would convert the Marseillais into disdainers of wine.

Those were strange times, times when people ran to extremes. Every passion had an absolute ring. It was exclusive and jealous. No one dreamed that coffee could join forces with wine, and that a good coffee-drinker could also be a good wine-drinker. This experience, so familiar to ourselves, had not then been tasted.

Thus Dionysus inflamed the wrath of vine-dressers and wine-dealers alike. They were vigorously supported by the doctors. These children of Æsculapius were enraged that coffee had escaped the restraints of their prescriptions. For several years, like other rarities, it had been consumed only by doctors’ orders. Before anyone could get coffee, he had to consult his physician, and then go to the apothecary’s shop. Now the Marseillais declared themselves independent in this matter, much to the annoyance of the faculty. The line taken by the physicians was a singular one. They declared that coffee was a poison. Amid the many onslaughts that had been made upon coffee during the centuries since its use had first begun, this was a novelty. Religious zealots and state authorities had persecuted it, but never before had a doctor declared coffee to be harmful. On the contrary, the Arab, Persian, and Turkish physicians had extolled its health-giving virtues, maintaining that it dispelled fatigue and melancholy, refreshing the body. The doctors of Marseille were now singing another tune. Maybe they were also moved by worthier reasons than the thought of their prescription fee. It is possible that these doctors were the first to have an inkling of the biological differences between individual human beings and particular races. Coffee might be good for Arabs living in a tropical or sub-tropical climate; it might be even better, because of its warming qualities, for the inhabitants of northern climes; and yet it might be altogether superfluous for those who dwell in a land of the golden mean. It might be superfluous or even harmful in Marseille, where the weather is neither very hot as in Mecca nor very raw and damp as in London.

Messieurs Castillon and Fouqué, doctors of the faculty of Aix, invited Monsieur Colomb, at a public reception by the members of the Marseille faculty, to read a thesis upon the question “whether the use of coffee is harmful to the inhabitants of Marseille.”

Monsieur Colomb understood what was expected of him. In Marseille town-hall, which had been lent for the purpose, clad in his academic robes, he mounted the rostrum and addressed a large assembly. He emphasized the fact that wherever coffee had made good its standing it had speedily shown itself to be a tyrant. It aroused such a passion for its use that warnings and even persecution were of no avail against it. Amid murmurs of applause, the young physician continued: “We note with horror that this beverage, thanks to the qualities that have been incautiously ascribed to it, has tended almost completely to disaccustom people from the enjoyment of wine—although any candid observer must admit that neither in respect of taste or smell, nor yet of colour, nor yet of any of its essential characteristics, is it worthy to be named in the same breath with fermented liquor, with wine!” Loud was the acclamation as these words echoed through the town-hall of Marseille. Monsieur Colomb felt himself in good vein, and, his black gown rustling as he spoke, he went on to say that certain physicians had not hesitated, at the outset, to extol coffee. “And why? Because the Arabs had described it as excellent. They had done so because it was one of their own national products, and also because its use had been disclosed to men by goats, by camels, or God knows what beasts!” These were poor reasons to influence a receptive mind. In the neighbourhood of Marseille there was plenty of fodder for goats, and no one in this part of the world had as yet thought of rearing camels. Unquestionably coffee was not a proper drink for human beings in that quarter of the earth.