Absinthe [antikvár]

IntroductionI nineteenth-century novelist, Prosper Mérimée, once said that what he hked in history were anecdotes, "and among anecdotes I prefer those where I think that I can distinguish a true picture of the customs and characters of any given period." Nineteenth-century France was full of anecdotes about a peculiar drink that touched almost every aspect of its culture: Absinthe.Take the story of poet Alfred de Musset, one of the greatest men of letters France produced in the first half of the last century. He wrote his first brilliant work as a teenager in 1829, and at thirty-one he was admitted to the august body of the Académie française. Yet from then on, he wrote almost no poetry and frequently missed the dictionary sessions at the Academy. When it was brought to the attention of Abel François Ville-main, secretary of the Academy, that Musset "s'absent souvent" (is often absent), he repUed sourly, "Vous voulez dire qu'il s'absinthe un peu trop." (You mean to say that he absinthes a litde too much) and a new verb was born within the Academy, that sacred fortress of the French language. Indeed, like many of his generation, Musset absinthe-ed too much, dying at an unusually early age.By the turn of the century, five o'clock in the afternoon saw the cafés on the grand boulevards of Paris filled with smartly dressed men and women taking a moment to drink the milky, opalescent beverage and watch life go by. Absinthe was familiarly known as "La Fée Verte" br the Green Fairy, and so popular did it become that cocktail hour was known as l'heure verte after absinthe's pale emerald hue.One of Oscar Wilde's biographers, R.H. Sher-ard, tells an anecdote about a heavy absinthe drinker who was ashamed to be seen lingering at the same café too long: "He takes his first drink at one café, his second somewhere else, and his tenth or twelfth at some tenth or twelfth other café. I know a very distinguished musician who used to start off at the Café Napolitan and finish up at the Gare du Nord." It sets the mind thinking about the cafés of Paris, of the brilliance that flashed and wasted itself there.What were the effects of absinthe? Oscar Wilde, who had a taste for absinthe, gave his impressions to John Fothergill, who recorded it in his book. My Three Inns:"The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruelVlll