by Baker, Phil
Absinthe as we know it today is thought to have appeared only at end of the eighteenth century. It is sometimes dated to 1792, invented, so the story goes, by a Doctor Pierre Ordinaire. Fleeing the French revolution, the monarchist Ordinaire settled in a Swiss village called Couvet. Here he supposedly found wormwood growing wild, cooked up his own special recipe, and never looked back. When he died in 1821 his highly alcoholic concoction was already known as La Fée Verte, and it was regarded in the local region as a tonic. It is now known that two sisters, the Henriod sisters, were already making absinthe before Ordinaire arrived, although some versions of this story have Ordinaire giving them the recipe.
When a man named Major Dubied discovered the product he found that it cured indigestion, improved the appetite, and was good for fevers and chills. He was so impressed that he bought the recipe from the Henriod sisters and started manufacturing it himself. In 1797 his daughter married a man named Henri-Louis Pernod, and the Pernod drink dynasty began. Before long Dubied moved his operations from Switzerland to France, to save on import duty. He had an absinthe factory at Pontarlier, in the Jura region bordering Switzerland. As the drink became more popular, daily production increased exponentially from 16 litres to 408 litres to 20,000 litres. Competitors sprang up, and by the time absinthe was banned there were no less than twenty-five distilleries in the small town of Pontarlier.
Absinthes varied in quality. The best were distilled, using grape alcohol, while the inferior ones were simply macerated, or had vegetable essences added to industrial alcohol. Typically, dried wormwood (artemisia absinthium, or grande absinthe) anise and fennel would be steeped overnight in alcohol. This mixture was then boiled to produce the distillate of alcohol combined with steam distilled terpenoids from the herbs. For further refinement more herbs could then be added, such as ‘petite absinthe’ (artemisia pontica), hyssop, and lemon balm, and it could then be filtered. It could also be double-distilled, for greater smoothness and integration of contents. Processes and recipes varied, but the salient point is that strong alcohol is not created in the making of absinthe, as it is with whisky or brandy: instead, alcohol, wormwood and other herbs are simply added together, with varying degrees of refinement. The traditional green colour comes – or did come, initially – from chlorophyll, which is faded by light, hence the need for shady green bottles.
The Pernod factory was a model of efficiency, hygiene, and good industrial relations, and by 1896 it was producing a staggering 125,000 litres a day. Things ran smoothly until one Sunday, August 11th 1901, when the factory was blasted by lightning. There was so much alcohol on the premises that it took days to put the fire out, while bottles melted and exploded in the heat. It would have been far worse had one of the workers not opened the giant reservoirs of inflammable absinthe into the adjoining river, the Doubs, flavouring it for miles. Barnaby Conrad relates the unexpected benefits of this for geological research. A Professor Fournier believed that the River Loue, thirteen miles from Pontarlier, was connected to the River Doubs by an underground channel and he had tried to prove this by putting a fluorescent substance into the Doubs and tracing its progress, but without much result. Now, standing by the River Loue three days after the lightning had struck the Pernod factory, he saw the water turn that familiar milky yellow-green colour, and he could smell the alcohol fumes coming from the river, “like a drunkard’s breath”.
Absinthe drinking received a great boost with the French colonial wars in North Africa, which began in 1830 and peaked in 1844–47. French troops were given a ration of absinthe to protect then from malaria and other fevers, and to kill bacteria in their drinking water, fending off dysentery. This was felt to work so well that it became a part of French army life, from Madagascar to Indo-China. At the same time, however, the French army in North Africa became accustomed to cases of delusional insanity, known as le cafard. French colonists and expats in Algeria also took to absinthe drinking, and Arabs wanting to get some black-market absinthe could sidle up to a French soldier and hint that their camel had worms.
The colonial association was to be an enduring one: years later, as a publicity stunt, Monsieur Ricard the pastis tycoon rode a camel down the Champs Elyseés. When French soldiers of the Bataillon d’Afrique returned to France, they took their taste for absinthe home with them. Covered in glory from a largely successful war, the “Bat d’Af” made absinthe drinking a dignified and even glamorous sight on the café terraces of the Paris boulevards. Soon the habit spread into civilian life, from the military to the bourgeoisie, and the golden age of absinthe began; a shortlived period before it was seen to be a problem. People would later look back to this time nostalgically, after the character of absinthe had changed, and remind each other how it had been.
Absinthe drinking was one of the defining features of Parisian life under the Second Empire, the reign of Napoléon III that lasted from 1852 to his downfall with the Franco- Prussian war of 1870. After the revolutions of 1848 had been suppressed, the bourgeoisie ruled with a vengeance and great fortunes were made and lost on the volatile stock market. It was a gilded era of opera, high class prostitution, and conspicuous consumption.
The respectable bourgeois custom of absinthe drinking became almost universal. It was supposed to sharpen the appetite for dinner. The time between five and seven o’clock was l’heure verte, the green hour, when the smell of absinthe would be carried on the early evening air of the Paris boulevards. Given the strength of absinthe – Pernod, probably the most respectable brand, was 60 per cent alcohol or 120 degrees proof, almost twice the strength of whisky – drinking it was also a pleasantly ritual way of shutting down the day and getting into evening mode. The idea, originally, was to have just the one.
To some extent people were protected from absinthe abuse at this period by the strict times laid down for drinking it. To have absinthe before dinner was entirely acceptable, or even to have one before lunch, but to try and drink it all night would be an abject faux pas, and waiters would raise their eyebrows. Despite that, alcoholism was clearly a risk right from the start, and one that would increase as people developed a taste for the drink. Novelist and man of letters Alphonse Daudet blamed absinthe drinking for the spread of alcoholism in nineteenth-century France, and he complained to Dowson’s friend Robert Sherard that “Before those wars [the Algerian wars] we were a very sober people. “ Sherard goes on to observe that because the semi-respectable absinthe drinker was ashamed to be seen drinking too much, he would soon learn to keep moving from one café to another:
He takes his first drink at one café, his second somewhere else and his tenth or twelfth at a tenth or twelfth other café. I know a very distinguished musician who used to start off at the Café Neapolitain and finish up at the Gare du Nord…
Sherard points out that some absinthe contained up to 90 per cent pure alcohol, three times as much as brandy.
It is, moreover, an insidious drink, and the habit of consuming it grows upon its victim, who sooner or later has to abdicate all willpower in the control of his passion… As a matter of fact, one has observed the usual effects of absinthism, the hoarse, guttural absinthe voice, the wandering, glazed absinthe eye, the cold and clammy hand… in people who have never drunk a glass of absinthe in their lives. Various amers, or bitters, even the supposed harmless vermouth, will, in due course, if taken in excess, conduct their man to epilepsy, paralysis and death. Absinthe gets its work done more speedily.
Alcoholics were always going to find absinthe congenial, but it soon began to attract a wider circle of converts, and its changing image has a particular bearing on three other groups: artists and Bohemians, women, and finally the working classes.
The English writer H.P.Hugh gives a vivid report of the Green Hour in Montmartre. It already two hours long, but when it shades into the world of Bohemia it can last all night.
As the night closes in you watch with fascination the gradual streaks of light that crawl out, as avenue after avenue is lighted up, and
the whole city is lined out in fire at your feet. The red sails of the Moulin Rouge swing round, the flash light from the Tour Eiffel touches the Sacre Coeur and whitens the thousand year old church of Saint-Pierre. The other Montmartre awakens while the quiet inhabitants of the hill go to sleep. It is a strange grey study in nature, this midnight Montmartre. It is the doing and the done, and the done and the doing. Artists with hope before them, poets with appreciation of some girl only, and side by side with these the hurried anxious faces of unkempt women and tired-eyed men.
The sickly odour of absinthe lies heavily on the air. The “absinthe hour” of the Boulevards begins vaguely at half-past-five, and ends just as vaguely at half-past- seven; but on the hill it never ends. Not that it is the home of the drunkard in any way; but the deadly opal drink lasts longer than anything else, and it is the aim of Montmartre to stop as long as possible on the terrasse of a café and watch the world go by. To spend an hour in a really typical haunt of the Bohemians is a liberal education. There is none of the reckless gaiety of the Latin Quarter, but at the same time there is a grim delight in chaffing at death and bankruptcy.
Almost from the start there was a strong affinity between Bohemia and absinthe, the most powerful and seemingly cerebral of drinks. Bohemia had always had a grim and stressful side; it wasn’t so much a place as a career stage; the stage of the less well known or struggling writers and artists who might one day end up in the Académie Française, but might equally end up in the asylum, the charity ward, or the morgue. For many Bohemians this stage could continue almost permanently, or until something broke. After Henri Murger, author of Scènes de la vie de Bohème, died in 1861 at the age of 39, one of the Goncourt brothers wrote in their journal:
It strikes me as the death of Bohemia, this death by decomposition, in which everything in Murger’s life and the world which he depicted is combined: the orgies of work at night, the periods of poverty followed by periods of junketing, the neglected cases of pox, the ups and downs of an existence without a home, the suppers instead of dinners, and the glasses of absinthe bringing consolation after a visit to the pawnshop; everything which wears a man out, burns him up, and finally kills him…
Absinthe was unquestionably the career drink of intellectuals and artistic wannabes. As Flaubert said of the writing life:
Being a dramatist isn’t an art, it’s a knack, and I’ve got hold of the knack from one of the people who possess it. This is it. First of all you have a few glasses of absinthe at the Café du Cirque. Then you say of whatever play is being discussed: “It’s not bad, but it needs cutting”, or “Yes, but there’s no play there.”
Above all, said Flaubert, you must never actually write a work of your own: “Once you’ve written a play… you’re done for.”
Flaubert also gives a nicely mundane spread of Parisian clichés about absinthe when he writes an entry for it in his Dictionary of Received Ideas, which runs simply:
ABSINTHE: Exceedingly violent poison. One glass and you’re dead. Journalists drink it while writing their articles. Has killed more soldiers than the Bedouins. Will be the destruction of the French Army.
No doubt some journalists really did drink it while writing their articles.
Absinthe was, “the Green – or ‘Green-Eyed’ – Muse”. It was described as being the genius of those who didn’t have any genius of their own, but the death of any real genius for those who did. Any number of French satirical cartoons from the period play with this cliché of absinthe and inspiration (although – in the manner of most nineteenth-century cartoons – few of them are actually funny). “It’s astonishing”, says one, “I’ve drunk four absinthes and I still haven’t got the quatrain for my sonnet… Garcon! An absinthe!” Another depicts the great Montmartre poet ‘Vert-de-Gris’, who goes to look for beautiful inspirations in a café, equipped with a little frame cut from cardboard. He puts this up against his absinthe glass, and peers through it while he pours the water in, believing that he is watching the tumults of Niagara Falls. One satirical drawing tells the sad story of ‘The Decadent’, who only goes to the café so that he can make his study of manners for the book he has been researching for ten years. Unfortunately he can’t take his fifteen absinthes without becoming completely drunk; the next day, he remembers nothing, and that is why he has to go back to the café every night. Saddest of all is the dishevelled looking artist who has no money left after his seventh absinthe, because he knows it is only after the eighth that genius arrives.
† This might seem almost ironic, but it is more reasonable than it sounds, as we shall see in Chapter Eleven.
Chapter Seven
Before the Ban
William Orpen’s magnificent pen and ink drawing The Absinthe Drinker. The top hat may have seen better times.
In the course of their often grim depiction of Bohemian life, the Goncourt journals include some particularly grisly accounts of absinthe intoxication. Leon Daudet tells Goncourt about his mistress, a woman named Marie Rieu who was nicknamed Chien Vert, or ‘Green Dog’ (and became the model for Sapho in Daudet’s novel of the same name). Daudet, writes Goncourt, was:
talking about Chien Vert and his affair with that mad, crazy, demented female… a mad affair, drenched in absinthe and given a dramatic touch every now and then by a few knife-thrusts, the marks of which he showed us on one of his hands.
Plenty of drinks are routinely mentioned in the journals – wine, beer, champagne – but it is the references to absinthe that have an almost Gothic quality, like this glimpse into The Absinthe Hotel, a once great house named the Chateau Rouge:
which has become a filthy hotel where the very bedroom of Henri IV’s mistress has been turned into the ‘Mortuary’: the room where several layers of drunkards are piled one on top of another until the time comes for them to be swept out into the gutter. A hotel where the proprietor is a giant in a blood-red jersey with a couple of blackjacks and an armoury of revolvers always within reach. And in this hotel, strange down and outs of both sexes, including an old society woman, an absintheuse who ‘puts away’ twenty-two glasses of absinthe a day – that dreadful absinthe tinted with sulphate of zinc…
And this particular story gets even worse: we’re told the woman’s son, a respectable barrister, was unable to get her away from the absinthe, and killed himself out of disgrace and despair.† No less Gothic is this uncanny, flesh-creeping extract from 1859:
My mistress was lying there beside me, dead drunk with absinthe. I had made her drunk and she was sleeping. Sleeping and talking. Holding my breath, I listened… It was a strange voice which aroused a peculiar emotion akin to fear, that involuntary voice bursting forth in uncontrolled speech, that voice of sleep – a slow voice with the tone, the accent, the poignancy of the voices in a boulevard drama. To begin with, little by little, word by word and recollection by recollection, as if with the eyes of memory, she looked back into her youth, seeing things and faces emerge, under her fixed gaze, from the darkness in which the past lay sleeping: “Oh yes, he loved me all right!… Yes… they used to say that his mother had a look… He had fair hair… But it wouldn’t work… We’d be rich now, wouldn’t we?… If only my father hadn’t done that… But what’s done is done… only I don’t like to say so…”
There was something terrifying about bending over that body, in which everything seemed to be extinct and only an animal life lingered on, and hearing the past come back like a ghost returning to a deserted house. And then, those secrets about to emerge which were suddenly held back, that mystery of unconscious thought, that voice in the darkened bedroom, all that was as frightening as a corpse possessed by a dream…
Paris in the later nineteenth century was awash with substance abuse of one kind or another. Strawberries soaked in ether were a smart dessert, and morphine was popular with society women: silver and gold-plated hypodermic syringes could be obtained at upmarket jewellers. Alexandre Dumas complained that morphine was fast becoming “absinthe for women”, which is
vivid but not quite accurate; the real absinthe for women was absinthe.
Henri Balesta describes women taking to absinthe drinking as early as 1860, catching it like a disease: “Absinthomania is in effect basically contagious; it is from the man that the sickness is transmitted to the woman. Thanks to us, there are absintheuses.” And they are brazen about it, too; look on the boulevards, says Balesta, and you will see the absintheuses have as much hauteur as the absintheurs.
Changing manners meant that women were now able to drink in cafés, and absinthe was a modern drink; in its way it was as modern for women as cigarette smoking, or riding a bicycle. Doris Lanier cites an advertisement featuring a young demi-mondaine holding up a glass of absinthe and announcing that it is one of her minor vices.
An increasing number of adverts from the period show liberated women drinking absinthe and even smoking at the same time, while contemporary paintings tell a different story, with worn-out looking women staring blankly into the middle distance over their glass. Doctor J.A.Laborde wrote in 1903:
Woman has a particular taste for absinthe and if she intoxicates herself rarely with wine and alcohol, it has to be recognised that in Paris at least, she is frequently attracted by the aperitifs and, without risk of exaggeration, I would say that this intoxication has been for several years as common among women as among men. It is possible to state that clear cases of chronic absinthism occur in women at the end of eight, ten months, or a year in young women and even young girls of eighteen to twenty years old.
A New York Times correspondent reported that cirrhosis of the liver was increasing among French women, and explained their drinking as “merely part of the general tendency of the female to imitate the male, other aspects… being the boyish bob, the masculine cut in clothing, and the readiness with which they take to cigarettes.”