The effect of coffee is that we are bothered less by unpleasant experiences and become more able to conquer difficulties; therefore, for the feasting rich, it makes intestinal work after a meal less evident and drives away the deadly ennui; for the student it is a means to keep wide awake and fresh; for the worker it makes the day’s fatigue more bearable.

The coffee houses became the gathering places for wits, fashionable people, and brilliant and scholarly men, to whom they afforded opportunity for endless gossip and discussion. It was only natural that the lively interchange of ideas at these public clubs should generate liberal and radical opinions, and that the constituted authorities should look askance at them. Indeed the consumption of coffee has been curiously associated with movements of political protest in its whole history, at least up to the nineteenth century. 

Coffee has promoted clear thinking and right living wherever introduced. It has gone hand in hand with the world’s onward march toward democracy.

One of the most interesting facts in the history of the coffee drink is that wherever it has been introduced, it has spelled revolution. It has been the world’s most radical drink in that its function has always been to make people think. And when the people began to think, they became dangerous to tyrants and to foes of liberty of thought and action. Sometimes the people became intoxicated with their newfound ideas, and, mistaking liberty for license, they ran amuck and called down upon their heads persecutions and many petty intolerances.

Charles B. Reed, professor in the medical school of Northwestern University, says that coffee may be considered as a type of substance that fosters genius. History seems to bear him out. Coffee’s essential qualities are so well defined, says Dr. Reed, that one critic has claimed the ability to trace throughout the works of Voltaire those portions that came from coffee’s inspiration. Tea and coffee promote a harmony of the creative faculties that permits the mental concentration necessary to produce the masterpieces of art and literature.

Voltaire and Balzac were the most ardent devotees of coffee among the French literati. Voltaire, the king of wits, was the king of coffee drinkers. Even in his old age, he was said to have consumed fifty cups daily.

To the abstemious Balzac, coffee was both food and drink. In Frederick Lawton’s Balzac we read: “Balzac worked hard. His habit was to go to bed at six in the evening, sleep till twelve, and, after, to rise and write for nearly twelve hours at a stretch, imbibing coffee as a stimulant through these spells of composition.”

In his Treatise on Modern Stimulants, Balzac thus describes his reaction to his most beloved stimulant:

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.

In his novel Ursule Mirouët, Balzac describes how Doctor Minoret used to regale his friends with a cup of “Moka,” mixed with bourbon and Martinique, which the doctor insisted on personally preparing in a silver coffee pot. It is Balzac’s own custom that he is detailing. He would only buy his bourbon in the rue Mont Blanc (now the chaussé d’Antin), the Martinique in the rue des Vielles Audriettes, and the “Moka” at a grocer’s in the rue de l’Université. It was half a day’s journey to fetch them.