Coffee literature is full of coffee quotes, quips, and anecdotes. They are the product of our passion for coffee, which expresses itself as extravagant poetic flights in praise of it. Napoleon called it “the intellectual drink” and La Roque “the King of Perfumes.”

Among the French literati, Voltaire was one of the most ardent devotees of this most stimulating drink. He reportedly consumed somewhere between 50-72 cups of coffee per day and lived to a ripe old age of 83! He, apparently, did not head his doctor’s counsel that his obsession with coffee would send him to an early grave. In fact, in reply to the blasphemous claim that coffee was a slow poison, Voltaire said: “I think it must be, for I’ve been drinking it for eighty-five years and am not dead yet.”

It was said of the other great Enlightenment philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that when he died, “he just missed doing it with a cup of coffee in his hand.”