num_pages: 80
description: Honor de Balzacs Treatise on Modern Stimulants is a meditation on excess by a man who lived by means of excessan author very conscious of the fact that his gargantuan body of work was driven by an intake of intellectual stimulants (his bouts of writing would typically require ten to fifteen cups a day of his preferred coffee) that would ultimately shorten his life. First published in French in 1839 as an appendix to Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarins Physiology of Taste this Treatise was at once Balzacs effort at addressing what he perceived to be an oversight in that cornerstone of gastronomic literature a chapter toward his never-completed body of analytic studies (alongside such essays as Treatise on Elegant Living) that were to form an overarching pathology of social life as well as a meditation on the the role pleasure and excess play in shaping society. If the science behind Balzacs inquiry on the impact of five stimulantstea sugar coffee alcohol and tobaccoon the human body is now outdated (The future of the human race depends on mucus is but one of the memorable statements to be found in this text) his thesis in which intellectual benefit requires a corollary in bodily and societal harm highlights a thread to be found throughout his work and his life.Balzac here describes his terrible and cruel method for brewing a coffee that can help the artist and author find inspiration (not recommended for blonds of weak constitution) explains why tobacco can be credited with having brought peace to Germany and describes his first experience of alcoholic intoxication (which required seventeen bottles of wine and two cigars). Beyond its braggadocio and whimsy though this treatise ultimately speaks to Balzacs obsession with death and decline and attempts to confront in capsule form the broader implications of dissipating ones vital forces ones energies ones inspiration and ultimately ones life.Honor de Balzac (17991850) was a true monolith of French letters one of the fathers of realism and a great abuser of coffee. His Human Comedy ended up consisting of over one hundred interlinked stories and novels and featured a cast of some two thousand characters. One of the earliest components of this enormous body of work was a never-completed four-part Pathology of Social Life. Balzacs physiologies and nonfiction sociological studies read like the casebooks of a sociological Sherlock Holmes and remain the least-known components to Balzac's sprawling Comedy.An unwitting revolutionaryVictor Hugo[Balzac] groups a complete history of French society from which even in economic details  I have learned more than from all the prefessional historians economists and statisticians of the period altogetherFriedrich Engels
language: English
title: Treatise on Modern Stimulants
publisher: Wakefield Press