MONTREAL - We have been madly in love with chocolate for a very long time.

More than 1,000 years ago, the Mayans were already crushing the beans of the cacao plant and mixing them up with water for hot chocolate.

The Aztec emperor Montezuma, they say, drank 50 goblets before getting it on in his harem. It provoked “lustful desires,” he told the Spanish conquistadores who stole it back to Europe, where it quickly became a sensation among the rich and powerful in the 1600s and 1700s. In Italy, Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova, the fabled romantic and insatiable womanizer, made a habit of consuming chocolate before lovemaking. “It aids seduction,” he boasted in his journals.

Englishman Richard Cadbury made chocolate synonymous with Valentine’s Day, sending generations and generations of lovers in search of heart-shaped boxes filled with chocolate. His family, devout Quakers, were making a name for themselves in the 1860s by creating “fancy chocolates” rich with cocoa butter and sugar. A healthier alternative to gin, they believed. Richard applied his artistic talents to designing ornate silk-lined, heart-shaped boxes, which quickly became popular Valentine’s Day love tokens.

Sensualists say chocolate’s everlasting appeal is in its mouthfeel, in the slow and tantalizing way it melts on the tongue. Scientists point to the hundreds of chemical compounds found within chocolate, many of which induce feelings of pleasure and excitement in the brain.

But for Geneviève Grandbois, the Montreal chocolatier who began making artisanal chocolates in her tiny shop on St. Viateur St. 15 years ago, the magic of chocolate is more ethereal.

“It takes us back to childhood pleasures, to our earliest cravings for sweetness and comfort. It is sweet and smooth and silky and generous,” she says. “It feeds body and soul.”

Whatever it is, lovers and others across North America spend nearly one billion dollars a year on Valentine’s chocolates.