Balzac on the Dangers of Drinking Too Much Coffee

Honoré de Balzac, photograph from 1838

The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of vivacity that looks like anger: one’s voice rises, one’s gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque and ill-tempered for no apparent reason. One actually becomes that mercurial character, the poet, condemned by grocers and their like. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the best sort, and together we came upon the problem soon enough: coffee had wanted its victim.

–Honoré de Balzac, Traité des excitants modernes, ch. iii, Du café, p. 17 (1838)(S.H. transl.)