MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESThe oldest café-glacier in Paris, where the Sicilian gentleman Procopio served iced waters, orange-blossom sorbets, and coffee in porcelain from 1686 onward. Voltaire drained forty cups here a day; Diderot forged the Encyclopédie within these walls; Danton and Marat plotted beneath the watchful eyes of the police lieutenant’s spies.
Beneath the crystal chandeliers of Paris's oldest café, Voltaire, Danton, and the ghosts of the Enlightenment conspire between draughts of black coffee and spoonfuls of Sicilian snow.
Over the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie there drifts that heavy, purplish haze peculiar to Parisian dusks, wherein the scent of damp flagstones mingles with the bitter tang of sea-coal. To cross the threshold of Le Procope is to cleave, with a single thrust of the elbow, the ordinary weave of time. Ever since the year of grace 1686, when the gentleman of Palermo, Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli, possessed the audacity to establish his counter opposite the King’s Comedians, the very same vertigo has seized every traveler who enters. In the reign of the Sun King, Paris imbibed little save insipid herbal decoctions and adulterated wines; the Sicilian, by contrast, brought both fire and ice. In vermeil goblets and vessels of white faience, he dispensed marvels hitherto jealously guarded by the princely courts of Florence and Palermo: waters scented with orange blossom and bound by frost, sorbets steeped in the essence of bergamot, and granitas of bitter almond savored with silver spoons, while upon the hearth crackled the dark roasting of beans brought from Mocha.
In this turbulent twilight of a century, coffee was no longer a mere apothecary’s cordial: it had become the very essence of civic insomnia, the black blood setting fire to the temples of the seditious. In the pantry, the apprentices bustled over copper cassolettes. The heady perfume of crushed Ethiopian beans ascended toward the master beams, borne aloft on the rich vapors of beef cheek slowly braised in Burgundy wine with melting carrots, gently simmered to revive orators left hoarse and hollow by hours at the rostrum.
At the far end of the grand salon, set against gold-banded wainscoting whose silvered mirrors still preserved the memory of powdered periwigs, stood the consecrated table. Fashioned of marble and dark wood, it was there that the man who had shaken the thrones of Europe with a single burst of laughter took his seat. Voltaire held court here, his stockings taut over nervous shanks, wrapped in a dressing gown of gilded Persian cloth, draining as many as forty cups a day of a demoniacal blend of mocha and bitter chocolate. It was from this steaming ceramic that he drew the gall required to crush the infamous thing, correcting the proofs of Irène between scalding draughts, while at the neighboring table Denis Diderot and Jean d'Alembert scattered leaves blackened with violet ink, sketching the copperplates of their titanic Encyclopédie.
Nothing escaped their notice, least of all the shifting glances of the “flies”—those spies on the payroll of the Lieutenant General of Police who, tucked behind fourfold-creased gazettes, feigned to sip glasses of ratafia while jotting down in secret notebooks the witticisms, lampoons, and blasphemies spawned in the fevered air of the room. Le Procope was an enduring tribunal where literary reputations were decapitated and where freedom of thought declared itself amid the cheerful clatter of spoons.
Yet when the tempest of 1789 broke over the city, the squabbles of men of letters gave way to the clash of steel. Le Procope, situated but two paces from the convent of the Cordeliers, turned into the bloodstained antechamber of the Revolution. A door slammed open, admitting a gust of autumn gale and a colossus with a shattered jaw: Georges Danton. The tribune demanded neither courtly ceremony nor a bill of fare. In a voice reminiscent of the rolling sea or the thunder of cannons at Valmy, he bellowed for a pitcher of bone-dry Champagne and his dish of coffee without sugar. At his side, Camille Desmoulins, fever burning in his eyes and his cravat undone, dipped a frantic goose quill into an inkhorn to draft the forthcoming issue of Les Révolutions de France et de Brabant.
Suddenly, a stooped shadow glided toward their banquette. It was Jean-Paul Marat, his complexion sickly and green, his brow bound in a vinegar-soaked kerchief to quell his ravenous migraines. He had little taste for the frosted confections that made the house’s fame; he demanded black coffee, drawn tight as a tourniquet, which he swallowed in small, convulsive gulps while hissing anathemas against the court. Glasses knocked together. Upon Voltaire’s table, maps of Paris were unrolled, blotched with tallow from sputtering candles; with a flick of a thumbnail, they traced the route of the populace marching upon the Tuileries. In an atmosphere thick with the reek of Virginia tobacco, death and glory were bartered with the same casual insolence as a plate of mutton stew.
In the quietest corner of the vestibule, a young Corsican artillery officer of sallow complexion, buttoned tight into a threadbare frock coat, surveyed the scene with the eye of an eagle. Bonaparte—for it was he, lean, obscure, and eaten alive with ambition—could not always meet his reckoning. Legend whispers that to satisfy his debts for mocha and bergamot sorbet, he was obliged one evening to leave his bicorne hat in pawn with the headwaiter, swearing he would return to claim it crowned with the laurels of victory.
Midnight sounded from the belfry of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The waitress placed a final pewter platter upon the conspirators’ table: a glistening pyramid of Italian lemon ice, crowned with crushed pistachios. This absolute contrast between the virgin chill of snow and the furnace of their speeches epitomized the entire genius of Le Procope. Danton seized his goblet, raised it toward the pitted mirrors wherein his scarred visage was cast back at him, and drank a savage toast to the coming dawn. Laughter rang out, chair legs scraped against the waxed floorboards, and as the plotters vanished into the complicit night of the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, the lingering fragrance of roasted beans remained behind—the indelible signature of three centuries of revolt and French wit.