THE HISTORY OF COFFEE. IT 



ineffectual, and the government was at length contented to re- 

 strain its use merely by rigid sumptuary laws. Coffee was 

 taxed, and the black draught was allowed to be drunk in secret. 

 But ere long another Mufti arose, of a less antiphlogistic turn, 

 and he pronounced coffee not coal, but a right remunerative 

 item of government tax. At a later day, when too much free- 

 dom of political discussion took place in the Oriental coffee- 

 houses, they were suppressed by the Grand Vizier; yet the 

 beverage continued to be almost universally used, some persons 

 taking even twenty dishes of it in a day the dishes, however, 

 were small. The lower classes also actually begged money for 

 coffee ; and it is added by the chronicler of the time, that " the 

 refusing to supply a wife with coffee was admitted in law as a 

 valid cause of divorce." From the " city of the Sultan " it passed 

 to Western Europe, but at what precise time, historians have 

 not positively determined. It is believed to have been intro- 

 duced into Venice about the year 1615. In 1644 it was known 

 at Marseilles, M. de la Haye having taken with him some of the 

 coffee-beans from Constantinople, with vessels and an apparatus 

 for making the beverage. 



The traveller Thevenot was among the first to introduce into 

 Paris the custom of taking coffee after dinner ; but he had few 

 imitators until ten years after, about 1668, when the coffee 

 parties of the Turkish ambassador at Paris brought the bever- 

 age into fashion. " The brilliant porcelain cups," says Disraeli, 

 " in which it is poured, the napkins fringed with gold, and the 

 Turkish slaves, on their knees, presenting it to the ladies, seat- 

 ed on the ground on cushions, turned the heads of the Parisian 

 dames," the exotic soon became a subject of general conver- 

 sation, and a cafe was opened for the sale of the beverage, in 

 1671, by an Armenian of the name of Pascal. The enterprise 

 did not succeed, however, on account of the heterogeneous com- 

 pany that met there. A few years later, Procope, a Florentine, 



