scattering his efforts in twenty different papers he was writing The
Woman of Thirty, under the guidance of Mme. de Berny, and working on
his extraordinary Magic Skin, a dramatic study with a colouring of
social philosophy, which he was greatly distressed to hear defined as a
novel. He was possessed with a sort of fever of creation, he had
already visualised nearly all the characters in his Human Comedy, and,
in spite of his driving labours and his marvellous facility at writing,
he could not keep pace with his own imagination. Meanwhile, in order to
keep himself awake and excite his productive forces, he indulged, at
this period, in a veritable orgy of coffee, cup after cup, an orgy
which was destined, after twenty years' continuance to have a
disastrous effect upon his health.

Balzac took the most minute precautions in making this coffee; he not
only selected several kinds from different localities, in order to
obtain a special aroma, but he had his own special method of brewing
it, which developed all the virtues of the blend. In his Treatise on
Modern Stimulants he has told us how he prepared the coffee and what
its effects were upon his temperament. "At last I have discovered a
horrible and cruel method," he writes, "which I recommend only to men
of excessive vigour, with coarse black hair, a skin of mingled ochre
and vermilion, squarish hands and legs like the balustrades in the
Palace Louis XV. It consists in the employment of a decoction of ground
coffee taken cold and anhydride (a chemical term which signifies
'little or no water') and on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into
your stomach, which, as you have learned from Brillat-Savarin, is a
sack with a velvety interior, lined with little pores and papillae; it
finds nothing else, so it attacks this delicate and voluptuous lining;
it becomes a sort of food which demands its digestive juices; so it
wrings them forth, it demands them as a pythoness calls upon her god,