According to another less authentic anecdote, the use of the mysterious white berries found among the stores of the defeated Turks was first pointed out by a Turkish soldier who had been working in the trenches before the besieged city, and had so fatigued himself by his ceaseless toil, that he fell asleep and slumbered on throughout the whole of the battle, undisturbed by the cavalry charges, the musketry fire, and the explosions of the artillery with its terrible sixty-pounders. When at last, after sleep had done its restorative work, the exhausted soldier woke up to find himself in the hands of the Christians, he was terribly alarmed. But his life was spared, and in return for this clemency on the part of his enemies he taught them how to make coffee. Parisians, however, pride themselves on having known coffee fourteen years earlier than the Viennese. It is said, indeed, that an enterprising Levantine started a coffee-house at Paris in the very middle of the seventeenth century, and not later than the year 1650. The name of the stimulating beverage that he offered for sale was, as he wrote it, _cahoue_. But the unhappy man had not taken the necessary steps for getting his new importation spoken of beforehand in good society; and, no one knowing what to make of the strange liquor he wished to dispense--hot, black, and bitter--the founder of the first coffee-house or café became bankrupt. The French, however, during, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were sworn friends of the Turks, whose power they played off on every occasion against that of the hated Empire. Vienna might, indeed, on two occasions have been captured, plundered, and burnt by the infidels for all France cared to do towards saving it. France, on her side, was viewed with favour by the Turks; and in 1669 an ambassador, Soliman Aga by name, was sent by the Porte on a mission to Louis XIV., at whose court he made known the virtues of the berry which long previously the Arabs had introduced throughout the East. Properly presented, coffee met in Paris with a success which elsewhere it had failed to attain, and before long it became the rage in fashionable society. When it was at the height of its first popularity, however, Madame de Sévigné condemned it, saying that the taste for coffee, like the taste for Racine, would pass away. Racine, in spite of the beauty of his at once tender and epigrammatic lines, is not much read in the present day, and is scarcely ever acted. Coffee, on the other hand, is as popular now as in the days when Pope wrote his couplet on "Coffee, which makes the politician wise, And see through all things with his half-shut eyes."