Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (22 page)

The coffee-house keepers of Paris belonged to a guild of persons who called themselves “maîtres-distillateurs,” or, in more modern paraphrase, “refreshment-providers.” Refreshing drinks already existed in great numbers, ranging from lemonade to the stronger sorts of alcoholic liquors.

Anyone who wanted to belong to this guild, must take out a licence. The licences were already drafted when it occurred to King Louis that the Society of the Lemonade-Sellers had no fixed rules, or was in need of new rules. For the official sanctioning of this change of rules, His Majesty demanded three hundred livres. Naturally the lemonade-sellers did not pay; whereupon King Louis waxed angry and sent a sheriff’s officer to the guild-house. This official announced that next day he would unceremoniously confiscate all the maîtres-distillateurs’ supplies unless he were immediately paid one hundred and fifty livres. The lemonade-sellers gave way.

Yet the maîtres-distillateurs had good reason for resisting the new ordinance. The change of rules promulgated by His Majesty opened vast opportunities for humbug. Henceforward anyone who paid a sufficient sum to the state treasury could call himself a distillateur. He need not show any proof of capacity, any certificate of apprenticeship. The king needed money, and the money of the unskilled was worth just as much in the king’s treasury as the money of the skilled.

A certain Audiger, a “cook and confectioner by God’s grace” like many more that existed by the same title in France, writes with much bitterness: “Two hundred ignoramuses were yesterday granted the right to style themselves masters of the craft, at a fee of fifty crowns per head, though they were drawn from the dregs of the people. Had my advice been asked, I could have drafted rules for an excellent Parisian guild to which all respectable persons in the trade would wish to belong. I should have appointed one hundred masters of the art, worthy practitioners of our profession; I should have amalgamated the guild of the lemonade-sellers with the guild of the sugar-bakers. That would have brought His Majesty a sum of 100,000 francs. Now he has received much less than this, while the town has been flooded with humbugs.”

Two hundred new “distillateurs” had been added to the fifty already in existence. These two hundred and fifty had had to buy from the king a licence to practise their occupation. This licence gave them a measure of protection, for no one who was not a member of the guild could sell lemonade, liqueurs, or coffee.

“The Coffee Tree,” Leipzig. The relief above the door was commissioned by Augustus

Plan for Augsburg coffee-house in the Viennese style

Coffee and the military gentlemen

Coffee out of doors (about 1850)

While most refreshing beverages showed a seasonal consumption, the consumption of coffee went on increasing throughout the year to such an extent that His Majesty’s attention was drawn to the matter. In the year 1704 Louis XIV was once more short of funds. He looked round uneasily for a chance of raising the wind. He regretted having, a few years before, granted the lemonade-sellers a licence at fifty crowns per head. He made up his mind that every one of them should now pay him a more adequate sum, and, from the height of absolutism whence he radiated his beams, he decreed without more ado the closing down of the guild. With this thunder-clap, of course, the rights of its individual members were extinguished. The previous licensees got together, not to resist openly, since they could do nothing against the halberds and harquebuses of His Majesty. They only assembled to implore the king that he would allow them once more to buy the privileges they had previously enjoyed.

His Majesty played the ungracious. One of the rascally intendants who acted in his name declared that the crown intended to restrict the number of lemonade-sellers. This was a proposal not necessarily disagreeable to the trade, as a whole, though it might be undesirable to those who would be crowded out! For this proof of double-edged grace, which was warranted to restrict competition, the treasury must be promptly indemnified with the sum of two hundred thousand livres. The percentages payable to the intendants were not counted in. The lemonade-sellers agreed to the exaction, having no stomach for a fight. How lucrative must have been their business—especially the sale of coffee—since they could afford to put up such a sum!

The elderly tyrant’s appetite for money was only stimulated by his easy victory. In July 1705 he repealed the edict of 1704, and demanded from the guild payment for a third charter. To mask his rapacity, he conceded to the lemonade-sellers certain new privileges: they might sell gin, might supply cocoa and vanilla, might offer chocolate in cups. The members of the guild agreed, but they were deceived in their calculations. By the year 1706 they still owed the king as much as forty thousand livres. There were fresh reprisals and visits from sheriff’s officers. But the amount needed was not forthcoming. Then His Majesty again broke his royal word, and proceeded to issue a new type of licence, making the occupation hereditary. Well, it would have been only decent to pay back to the lemonade-sellers the one hundred and sixty thousand livres he had already had from them. He looked round for an intermediary, who could get a share of the profits from the new licences if he would put up the money that was immediately needed. His Majesty had in mind to issue five hundred licences. But the fish were shy. It had been bruited abroad that the monarch intended to suppress the trade; those who were engaged in it sought other occupations; and, instead of the expected five hundred lemonade-sellers, only one hundred and forty were to be found. The guild no longer existed, and the new licences were unsaleable. Anyone to whom the guild had been indebted now dunned individual members. Things went ill with those from whom the sunshine of the king’s favour had been so manifestly withdrawn. At length, around Christmas 1713, a royal edict re-established the old position, and the guild was once more put upon a legal footing.

This story of the lemonade-sellers (they were mainly, though not exclusively, coffee-house keepers) was dug up from the archives by Alfred Franklin, who gathered such a wealth of information concerning old-time Paris. It gives us an instructive cross-section view of the position of the bourgeoisie. We see in it one of the thousand causes of the French Revolution—not the principal cause, of course, but a typical and significant one.

T
HE
eighteenth century may be described as the literary century.

In this epoch it happened for the first time that the domain of literature ceased to be restricted to the world of books, extending its realm unresisted through every sphere of life.

During the eighteenth century the conquest of literature in all departments of existence was effected with the suddenness and violence of a volcanic eruption. Every love-letter was penned in a literary style; every scientific discovery was presented in a literary form. The physician, while taking his patient’s pulse at the bed-side, conversed in the tongue of letters. Religion became literature. The revolution that was approaching heralded its coming not only in the field of social transformation but also, and above all, as literature.

Hence the significance of coffee for the eighteenth century. People living in this unmystical period (in contradistinction to those of the baroque era) were prone to self-mockery, frequently drawing attention to the fact. Coffee, declared the cynics, equips with intelligence vast numbers of persons who would otherwise have never committed their thoughts to paper:

In his
Lettres persanes
, Montesquieu writes sarcastically: “Great is the vogue of coffee in Paris. In the houses where it is supplied, the proprietors know how to prepare it in such a way that it gives wit to those who drink it. At any rate, when they depart, all of them believe themselves to be at least four times as brainy as when they entered the doors.”

The aspect of the eighteenth century is summarized for us in the word “rococo.” It is a basic fact of the literary century that all those who lived in it were under the spell of the rococo. With them it had become a primary article of faith that a thing did not begin to exist until it existed in the reason, and until it could be expressed in black upon white. Could there have been two persons more obviously different than Louis XV and Voltaire? What a contrast there was, once more, between a cocotte who picked up her customers at a coffeehouse and the Marquise de Pompadour. Yet the four of them had this much in common, that restrained expression (of which the book is but a symbol) was dominant in every gesture of their lives. Just as in earlier epochs religion had been supreme, its sap rising into the finest ramifications of daily life, so in this century of the rococo did the aroma of literature overpower all others. Historians declare that members of the French nobility must have been extraordinarily foolish not to take warning when they watched a performance of Beaumarchais’
Le mariage de Figaro
. But the historians are wrong. Notwithstanding the severance of the classes that this drama pointed out, all members of Beaumarchais’ audience were united in the recognition that they were contemplating the performance of an extremely witty play, a fine piece of literature!

The rococo created an outlook on life that unified even those who were greatly at odds as regards their several views on politics or philosophy. The Encyclopædists, though they were looking forward to the coming of a generation of rationalists and were trying to guide their contemporaries into new paths, were likewise men of the rococo, wearing knee-breeches, pigtails, and swords. Love of God and atheism, monarchical loyalty and republicanism, wore the same clothes and rubbed shoulders amicably one with another. Expression, conversation, and amenity were for all. The magical fumes emanating from the kitchen of the Black Apollo mitigated the clash of conflicting opinion, and thus wrought the aforesaid miracle. All the sayings of the period had the strange aromatic flavour of coffee: