Caillard was a man of experience, taste, and knowledge. He told me the
story of his life from beginning to end, he confided to me his
principles and his affairs, and I took him to be the happiest man in the
world. "I have everything," he said, "all that I have wished for or can
wish for: health, riches, domestic peace (being unmarried), a tolerably
good conscience, books--and as much sense as I need to enjoy them. I
experience only one single want, lack only one single pleasure in this
world; but that one is enough to embitter my life and class me with
other unfortunates."
I could not guess what might yet be wanting to such a man under such
conditions, "It cannot be liberty," I said, "for how can a rich merchant
in a free town lack this?"
"No! Heaven save me--I neither would nor could live one single day
without liberty."
"You do not happen to be in love with some cruel or unhappy princess?"
"That is still less the case."
"Ah!--now I have it, no doubt--your soul is consumed with a thirst for
truth, for a satisfactory answer to the many questions which are but
philosophic riddles. You are seeking what so many brave men from
Anaxagoras to Spinoza have sought in vain--the corner-stone of
philosophy, the foundation of the structure of our ideas."
He assured me that in this respect he was quite at ease. "Then, in spite
of your good health, you must be subject to that miserable thing, a cold
in the head?" I said.
"Uno minor--Jove, dives
Liber, honoratus, pulcher rex denique regum,
Praecipue sanus--nisi cum pituita molesta est."
--HORACE.
When he denied this too, I gave up trying to solve the meaning of his
dark words.
O happiness! of all earthly chimeras thou art the most chimerical! I
would rather seek dry figs on the bottom of the sea and fresh ones on
this heath,--I would rather seek liberty, or truth itself, or the
philosopher's stone, than to run after thee, most deceitful of lights,
will-o'-the-wisp of our human life!
I thought that at last I had found a perfectly happy, an enviable man;
and now--behold! though I have not the ten-thousandth part of his
wealth, though I have not the tenth part of his health, though I may not
have a third of his intellect, although I have all the wants which he
has not and the one want under which he suffers, yet I would not change
places with him!
From this moment he was the object of my sincerest pity. But what did
this awful curse prove to be? Listen and tremble!
"Of what use is it all to me?" he said: "coffee, which I love more than
all the wines of this earth and more than all the women of this earth,
coffee which I love madly--coffee is forbidden me!"
Laugh who lists! Inasmuch as everything in this world, viewed in a
certain light, is tragic, it would be excusable to weep: but inasmuch as
everything viewed in another light is comic, a little laughter could not
be taken amiss; only beware of laughing at the sigh with which my happy
man pronounced these words, for it might be that in laughing at
him you laugh at yourself, your father, your grandfather, your
great-grandfather, your great-great-grandfather, and so on, including
your entire family as far back as Adam.
If, in laughing at such discontent, you laugh in advance at your son,
your son's son's son, and so forth to the last descendant of your entire
family, this is a matter which I do not decide. It will depend upon the
road humanity chooses to take. If it continues as it is going, some
coffee-want or other will forever strew it with thorns.
Had he said, "Chocolate is forbidden me," or tea, or English ale, or
madeira, or strawberries, you would have found his misery
equally absurd.
The great Alexander is said to have wept because he found no more worlds
to conquer. The man who bemoans the loss of a world and the man who
bemoans the loss of coffee are to my mind equally unbalanced and equally
in need of forgiveness. The desire for a cup of coffee and the desire
for a crown, the hankering after the flavor or even the fragrance of the
drink and the hankering after fame, are equally mad and equally--human.
If history is to be believed, Adam possessed all the advantages and
comforts, all the necessities and luxuries a first man could reasonably
demand.... Lord of all living things, and sharing his dominion with his
beloved, what did he lack?
Among ten thousand pleasures, the fruit of one single tree was forbidden
him. Good-by content and peace! Good-by forever all his bliss!
I acknowledge that I should have yielded to the same temptation; and he
who does not see that this fate would have overtaken his entire family,
past and to come, may have studied all things from the Milky Way in the
sky to the milky way in his kitchen, may have studied all stones,
plants, and animals, and all folios and quartos dealing therewith, but
never himself or man.
As we do not know the nature of the fruit which Adam could not do
without, it may as well have been coffee as any other. That it was
pleasant to the eyes means no more than that it was forbidden. Every
forbidden thing is pleasant to the eyes.
"Of what use is it all to me?" said Adam, looking around him in Eden, at
the rising sun, the blushing hills, the light-green forest, the glorious
waterfall, the laden fruit-trees, and, most beautiful of all, the
smiling woman--"of what use is it all to me, when I dare not taste
this--coffee bean?"
"And of what use is it all to me?" said Mr. Caillard, and looked around
him on the Lüneburg heath: "coffee is forbidden me; one single cup of
coffee would kill me."
"If it will be any comfort to you," I said, "I may tell you that I am in
the same case." "And you do not despair at times?"--"No," I replied,
"for it is not my only want. If like you I had everything else in life,
I also might despair."