Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity (32 page)

The proprietor and the waiter showed great discrimination in their treatment of the guests. They played as if upon a piano by making delicate distinctions in their attention to this, that, and the other customer, and in the deference they showed to persons with official titles. The frequenters were appropriately flattered, a well-to-do member of the middle-class being unjustifiably addressed as “von,” an intellectual being belauded as “Professor” or “Doctor.” The “attachment” of a coffee-house keeper to his respective guests was not solely determined by material causes. It did not depend upon the amount of the particular bill. Regular visitors were those most affectionately received, and to lose a guest of long standing was and is regarded as a disaster, a misfortune, a mortification.

The affection is mutual. I know a paper-merchant whose business went down so that he had to remove to a distant quarter of the town, but he continued for twenty years thereafter to frequent his familiar coffee-house. When I asked him the reason for this strange and unpractical behaviour, he replied that he could not stomach the idea of hurting his host’s feelings by making a change. . . . The high respect paid to the coffee-house keepers of Vienna has often aroused a smile, perhaps unjustly. Assuredly a Viennese coffee-house keeper who for thirty or forty years in succession has ministered to the comfort of his fellow-citizens during the many hours they pass in public is entitled to all respect. Tokens of honour were almost too conspicuous upon the breast of Ludwig Riedl! A good many foreign princes also bestowed decorations upon the man who ran the favourite coffee-house of Emperor Francis Joseph. They would have been hard put to it to give a reason for doing so. It was the thing to do, and that was the long and short of it. The proprietor of the Café de l’Europe assembled upon his breast, as a symbol of the coffee-house industry, tokens of the reverence the Viennese feel for themselves and their peculiar type of civilization. It delighted them that a coffee-house keeper should be honoured—all the more because his business was carried on where the cathedral of St. Stephen’s throws its shadow at noon.

There were two things which primarily attracted the Viennese into coffee-houses.

The first lure was billiards. The billiard-tables were longer than those of today, furnished with very heavy legs, screwed to the floor. The game played upon these tables was not billiards, but pool. When a ball was pocketed, a bell rang. The table was lighted with candles, and on the floor was a stool which the marker could mount when the candles needed snuffing. The cost of a game of billiards was four kreuzer, the price of a couple of litres of wine. Though the charge was thus high, the billiard-tables were greatly patronized. When, towards 1810, Napoleon’s officers introduced “French billiards,” a game played upon a table without pockets, masters in the art of this cannon game developed in Vienna. The most famous resort for billiard-players was Hugelmann’s coffee-house close to Ferdinand Bridge.

The second attraction was a more notable one. It occurred to a man named Cramer to have the latest newspapers lying about on the tables of his coffee-house. He was inspired by the notion that merchants and men-of-letters, intellectuals and officials, are eager for the latest news, and that the provision of newspapers for public reading would save their pockets. Cramer did things on the grand scale. He subscribed to almost all the dailies and weeklies published in the German tongue, providing also Italian, French, and English newspapers and magazines. The cost was heavy, but the venture paid amazingly. Cramer’s Café became transformed into a reading-room, and the impatience of the incessant stream of newcomers saw to it that guests should not sit too long over their papers. Thus the goddess of curiosity had made her way into the coffee-house. There she remained. There are newspaper-addicts everywhere, but especially in Vienna. Newspapers are the opium of the Viennese.

Until recently the Parisian coffee-house keeper supplied no newspapers to his customers, and even now, except for those left there by the guests, the number of journals on the tables is scanty. Therein lies a notable distinction between a French café and an Austrian one. Although the modern Parisians drink a good deal of coffee, nowadays (unless the café is also a restaurant), their stay in the coffee-house is short. Small cafés are extremely numerous in Paris, and they supply alcoholic liquors as well as coffee. The proprietors speed the circulation of their customers by furnishing coffee and other drinks at the bar at far lower prices than are paid by persons who sit down at the tables. When you sit at a table, to avoid the possibility of dispute the enhanced price of your coffee or other drinks is often stamped on the saucer!

The furnishing of the coffee-houses was, to begin with, extremely simple. The only adornment was to put up on the walls a few mirrors with rococo frames. But even this seemed splendid for those days. When, subsequently, the voice of Rousseau reached Vienna from France, demanding a “return to nature,” and when the Viennese discovered the Prater, they built among rustling trees three coffee-houses which became centres of social life. The distance between them and the distance from the town became symbolical of distance in general. People took note of the time required to reach the first coffee-house. On the way to these resorts, the Viennese learned how to ride and to drive. Furious driving, originally a Hungarian practice, now became one of the favourite sports in Vienna.

The final defeat of Napoleon brought wealth to the Austrian bourgeoisie, which had hitherto lived frugally. One of the outcomes of the consequent expansion was, in the year 1820, the opening of the Silver Coffee-House in the Plankengasse. The host, Ignaz Neuner, provided silver utensils and table-service, and even had the hangers for hats and overcoats made of silver. There were three rooms in the café. One of them was for billiard-players, the second for chess-players, and the third (how great an innovation!) was a ladies’ room. Prior to 1840, very few Viennese ladies entered a coffee-house. Only through much reading of foreign literature could they be brought to this emancipation and to adopting so masculine a practice. At Neuner’s, however, they were to be found—in the famous Silver Coffee-House which was, above all, the café of Austrian poetry. Grillparzer and Lenau were among its frequenters. We are told of Lenau that for more than twelve years he was to be seen every day at Neuner’s, sometimes in melancholy mood, sometimes genial, sometimes manfully fighting down his inward disquiet. He was a fine billiard-player. He held his billiard cue like St. George’s spear, though the dragon was invisible. It was far from his beloved coffee-house that the dragon of lunacy at length claimed him for its own.

B
EETHOVEN
U
RGES
G
RILLPARZER TO
S
EEK
H
IM AT THE
C
OFFEE
-H
OUSE
(“Opposite the Golden Pear—but alone and without a tiresome appendix”)

Of course the Viennese coffee-houses were not exempt from the old-standing enmity of governments against the political activities of coffee-house frequenters. We find again and again in history that the “spirit of the coffee-houses” becomes especially powerful after defeat. Political agitators are stimulated by the overthrow of national armies in war. Thus, very soon after the retreat of Kara Mustafa from Vienna, somewhere about 1690, the coffee-houses of Constantinople were closed, as being centres of agitation. For centuries, coffee has been a support to citizens in their revolts against authority. The Madrid revolution began in the Café Lorenzoni; and in Northern Italy the revolts against Austrian rule at Venice, Padua, Verona, and other towns were almost always the outcome of coffee-house conspiracies. In one of her Italian novels,
Federigo Gonfalonière
, Ricarda Huch describes the program of the young Milanese intellectuals in the year 1820. It contains the following demands: gas-lighting in the houses and streets, newspapers, public baths, and, above all, “coffee-houses, in which newspapers shall be provided, and where interesting persons can exchange ideas.” Coffee “dilates the blood-vessels.” It sounds like a joke, but is true, that Baptista d’Andrade, the Brazilian chemist, was able to distil from one hundred litres of coffee-berries ten grammes of explosive, a variety of nitromannite.

The idea of awakening, of a “rising”—the notion of the Italian revival, the “risorgimento,” is physiologically coincident with the chemical effect of coffee upon the human organism.

Even in the gentler climate of Vienna, an explosive mood prevailed against Metternich. The discharge occurred in 1848. A year before, the Café Griensteidl had been founded. This promptly became the headquarters of the malcontent nationalists and democrats, who were opposed to the conservative supporters of the government, frequenters of the Café Daum, hard by. The Austrian police were so suspicious of the Griensteidlians, that they bribed one of the waiters at the café, a man named Schorsch, to act as a spy upon the habitués, and to report many of their incautious utterances. When this transpired, there was an internal revolution in the Café Griensteidl. Schorsch was promptly given the sack, and the comic papers of Vienna made fun of the matter. In 1862, when one of the north-German governments was secretly recruiting volunteers in Vienna to help in the invasion of Denmark, there were again troubles in the Café Griensteidl; and once more, in 1870, there were feuds between francophils and germanophils. But the police soon put a stop to the attempts of these factions to re-fight the Battle of Sedan in the cafés!

T
HE
nineteenth century had a different relationship towards coffee from that which had respectively obtained in the two preceding centuries.

Whereas the seventeenth century valued coffee for the most part as a medicament, as a quickener of the circulation and as an anti-Bacchic remedy, the eighteenth century looked upon it as an intellectual stimulant. Coffee, said Montesquieu, sometimes enables very stupid people to do clever things.

The attitude of the nineteenth century was a much more comprehensive one. For it, coffee was primarily, secondarily, and all the time an energizer. The nineteenth century was the epoch of unparallelled achievement. The industrial era, in great measure inaugurated by the Continental System and continuing to flourish abundantly when that system had been overthrown, demanded, in theory at least, a twenty-four-hour working day. This could only be realized through the aid of coffee, which was therefore consumed freely by the masses. During the nineteenth century, the working-classes drank coffee. Coffee, often very badly prepared, was a prerequisite to the activity of factories and workshops.

Indeed, during the nineteenth century, coffee began to show a new visage. It speciously presented itself as competent “to solve the social problem.” It came to be regarded as the antagonist of hunger. During the dispute which those who imported coffee into Europe carried on for so long against the high tariff imposed upon this staple, it was again and again declared that: “Coffee is a popular nutrient, and must therefore not be highly taxed.” From the medical standpoint, the statement is false. Coffee has no nutritive value whatever, and one who should try to live upon it would soon starve to death. Sociologically considered, however, there was something to be said for the argument. Coffee produces a fallacious sense that hunger has been satisfied. It “helps people to bear scarcity of food.” Coffee alleviates the pangs of hunger. Napoleon was one of the first men of note who recognized the widespread importance of coffee in war-time. Throughout the nineteenth century, coffee was “the soldiers’ drink.” A beleaguered fortress in which there was no coffee was foredoomed to destruction just as if there had been a shortage of ammunition. During the war of 1914–1918, the beleaguered fortress of Germany became painfully aware of this.

Coffee, then, though not a nutrient, is valuable, nay indispensable, to the worker as an energizer of the labour process. As soon as this became recognized, it was natural that coffee should be one of the chief pawns in the game of financial speculation, which loves to play with the necessities of life, or with articles that are believed to be such.

Coffee had become one of the necessities of life!

In the years when the Continental System was in force, and when no coffee could be imported, such small quantities as were in store or could be smuggled in commanded fantastic prices. Throughout the nineteenth century, the memory of this remained alive in the minds of speculators, who were aware that, given certain conditions, a fortune could be made out of coffee. Its price on the exchanges depended upon the relation between supply and demand. Prices soared in times of scarcity.

A good example of jiggery-pokery in such matters, of the way in which speculators turned passing political conditions to account, is furnished by the remarkable story of the tension between France and Spain in the year 1823.

At the beginning of this year, war was imminent in western Europe. Why? The Spaniards, a strange people, prone to swift vacillations, sometimes fervent on behalf of the Catholic cause, and sometimes eager for revolution, had, for years, been in an uproar. To begin with, inspired by their Christian sentiments, they fought against Napoleon, the antichrist of the North. They took up arms on behalf of the pious king, Ferdinand of Bourbon. Yet hardly was Ferdinand back in the country, than they changed their minds. Now they were zealous for the confiscation of ecclesiastical estates, for a declaration of the Rights of Man, for popular liberties, parliamentary government—in a word, for everything that the French revolution, which they had so strenuously resisted, had brought into being northward of the Pyrenees. Now Europe, which had been contemplating Ferdinand and his Spaniards with scornful amusement, was horrified. Was there not something in the wind which recalled the great revolution of 1793? Was the monarch about to be arrested, deposed, perhaps executed? Tsar Alexander was especially concerned. He was farthest away from the seat of disturbance, but had the most sensitive nerves. Alarmed again and again by reports from Metternich, he considered it incumbent upon him to save monarchy in Spain, to fight once more against the revolution, to maintain the legitimist principle, to send a Russian army to Madrid. At the meetings of the monarchs in Troppau, Laibach, and Verona, where intervention in southern Europe (for there were disturbances in Italy as well) was discussed, it was unanimously agreed to suppress the Spanish revolution.