The Man Who Called for a Fictional Doctor

Honoré de Balzac is one of the most important novelists who ever lived. Between 1829 and 1847, he wrote roughly ninety interlocking novels and novellas — La Comédie humaine — populating them with 2,472 named characters and producing the most comprehensive portrait of French society ever committed to paper. Dickens learned from him. Dostoevsky learned from him. Marx read him for economic insight.

He wrote almost all of it between midnight and eight in the morning, wearing a white monk's robe, fueled by coffee.

Not ordinary coffee. Balzac sourced three specific bean varieties from three different streets in Paris — Bourbon from the rue de la Chaussée-d'Antin, Martinique from the rue des Haudriettes, Moka from the rue de l'Université — and brewed them into a thick, black concentrate he kept warm on his desk at all times. When that stopped working, he began eating dry coffee grounds on an empty stomach, a method he described as "horrible, rather brutal," and recommended only to men of "excessive vigor" with "legs shaped like bowling pins."

Over his lifetime, one biographer estimated, he drank fifty thousand cups.

He died at fifty-one. His heart gave out. And according to another biographer, his last recorded request was not for his wife, not for a priest, but for Dr. Horace Bianchon — his personal physician in thirty-one of his novels.

A man who had invented 2,472 people died asking one of them to save him.