Coffee and its damned memories: The brew that enchanted de Balzac, Mahmoud Darwish, Jacques Prevert, Sartre, Voltaire and Rousseau

Perhaps one of the hardest changes we face in everyday life is being forced to give up a habit we have lived with for years. Age, a doctor’s advice or the demands of work may leave us little choice. It might be giving up smoking, or something seemingly less dramatic, like giving up coffee. Recently, I found myself facing just such a choice: either stop drinking coffee altogether or settle for decaffeinated coffee, as my doctor advised. The prospect did more than alarm me. It stirred my curiosity about what this dark, aromatic drink, whose name in Arabic was once associated with wine, can do to a person, and how deeply it can become part of one’s temperament and daily habits. How can someone accustomed to coffee begin the morning without a pot brewing nearby, filling the air with its familiar aroma? How can someone who wants to write a short story, an article or anything at all, or simply sit down with a book, as I often do, manage without this dark beauty keeping him company? How can friends meet at a café without cups of coffee decorating their table? And how can they chatter away without its distinctive fragrance teasing their senses? For that matter, how can a traveller visiting a European city, whether Paris, Rome or Madrid, walk through its streets in the morning without being greeted by the smell of freshly brewed coffee drifting from the cafés, bringing the day pleasantly to life? Such is coffee, that damned, beloved drink, adored by people everywhere. We are all in love with it, perhaps without quite realising how deeply. Poets and writers may have understood this affection better than the rest of us. They have celebrated coffee, written about it and made it a companion to their solitude, their long nights and their thoughts. The French novelist Honoré de Balzac was not merely fond of coffee. He was devoted to it, relying on it to sustain the long hours he spent writing his novels. He even wrote an essay about the pleasures and pains of coffee, describing its effects on the mind and body. Legend has it that he drank as many as fifty cups a day, although the figure is probably more literary myth than established fact. What is certain is that coffee was part of his writing ritual, and perhaps part of his suffering as well. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish gave coffee a different place in his world. In his book Memory for Forgetfulness, he wrote that coffee should never be drunk in a hurry, describing it as the sister of time. For Darwish, coffee was not simply a means of waking up. It was a ritual that demanded patience and solitude, a moment in which a person could listen to himself. Perhaps that helps explain our attachment to coffee. We are not always searching for its taste, but for the time it gives us, or the time we imagine it gives us. In his famous poem Breakfast, the French poet Jacques Prévert turned a cup of coffee into the centre of a quietly heartbreaking scene. A man pours coffee into a cup, adds milk and sugar, stirs it with a small spoon, drinks it and puts the cup down without speaking to the woman sitting opposite him. He then lights a cigarette, puts on his coat and leaves in the rain, without a word or a glance. The woman is left alone, crying. It is a simple poem, requiring no grand language to convey the coldness that has settled between two people. The cup of coffee remains at the heart of the scene, a silent witness to the end of a love affair. Writers did not confine their coffee drinking to their homes. Many turned cafés into offices, meeting places and second homes. Perhaps this was one of coffee’s greatest contributions to cultural life: it drew writers out of their solitude and gave them a small table where they could write while watching the world go by. In Paris, for example, the history of certain cafés is inseparable from the history of French literature and philosophy. At Café de Flore in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir regularly gathered to write, work and meet friends. The café was far more than a place to drink coffee. Sartre recalled how they would work there from morning until noon, return after lunch and spend the rest of the day talking with friends. They felt entirely at home. Also in Paris stands Le Procope, a café whose history dates back to the seventeenth century and whose tables were associated with figures such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. Imagine sitting at a table in a café where these philosophers once debated the ideas of the Enlightenment. The coffee you drink today may taste much like coffee served elsewhere, but the place itself carries memories that give the cup a flavour no coffee bean can provide. Near the Paris Opera stands Café de la Paix, opened in 1862, another witness to the city’s rich literary past. Oscar Wilde was among its famous visitors, along with Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant and Victor Hugo. Ernest Hemingway also immortalised the café in his novel The Sun Also Rises. I had