Let's go eat ...

... as Hunter Pence would say: Book Review: Balzac's Omelette - WSJ.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

... the man himself had the strangest eating habits. His bulging cheeks and prodigious girth suggest a glutton. But when Balzac was working, he would get up in the middle of the night and write for 18 hours at a stretch, subsisting on water, fruit and, most famously, strong black coffee. Aided by coffee, he said, "great ideas swing into action like battalions in the Great Army on a battlefield." He drank it, Ms. Muhlstein says, "by the potful, by the bucketful, despite the terrible cramps wringing his insides, the nervous eye twitches, and the burning in his stomach."