How Balzac’s Extreme Coffee Habit Fueled His Productive Writing Routine

Open Culture · Oct 27, 2026

Even now, in this age when the very reading of literature is endangered — or so the articles tell us — Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) retains a notable ability to pick up new admirers. But even though he may have a decent readership by the standards of French novelists who died in the middle of the nineteenth century, one does wonder whether he still inspires the kind of devotion embodied by William Hobart Royce. A Brooklyn bookseller’s assistant first introduced to Les Cent Contes drolatiques as an impressionable (and duly scandalized) teenager on a trip to England, Royce became not just the…