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Absinthe the drink

One evening this winter, at l'heure verte when the mist of Paris was just settling over Sacre-Coeur, I knew it was time to open the bottle of contraband absinthe. For the sake of ritual, I put some music by Erik Satie, another absinthe drinker, on the cassette player. On the table before me stood a tall heavy absinthe glass I had purchased in the Paris flea market. Its bottom was scratched from the hundreds of times absinthe drinkers had stirred the last bits of sugar with the trowel-shaped spoons. But when I poured two inches of the pale emerald liquor into the glass, the scratches disappeared. I marveled at the color, my nose drew in the fragrance. From a box, I took an absinthe spoon given to me by a Parisian biologist and absinthe expert, Marie-Claude Delahaye. I balanced the spoon on the rim of the glass and thought of Picasso's Glass of Absinthe of 1914. As I slowly poured water over the sugar cube and it dripped down into the absinthe, the glass turned milky green, then opalescent, just as all the poets had written. I felt as much anticipation as I had on my first communion in church.

It had a light minty, licorice taste that was slightly antiseptic but refreshing. I drank it easily and it was soon gone. I poured another and listened to the music of Satie. I had a little notebook next to me, intending to record my impressions of absinthe as Aldous Huxley did for drugs in Doors of Perception. But absinthe was nothing like hard drugs. It was a gentle thing. The music played and I mixed another absinthe. I wrote a letter to a friend in New York, then to a friend doing time in a French prison. From time to time, I looked out at the lights of Paris as night fell.

Effects of absinthe

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 cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things. One night I was left sitting, drinking alone, and very late in the Café Royal, and I had just got into the third stage when a waiter came in with a green apron and began to pile the chairs on the tables. ‘Time to go, sir,’ he called to me. Then he brought in a watering can and began to water the floor. ‘Time’s up, sir. I’m afraid you must go now, sir.’
            “’Waiter, are you watering the flowers?’ I asked but he didn’t answer.
            “’What are your favourite flowers, waiter?’ I asked again. ‘Now, sir, I really must ask you to go, time’s up,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m sure that tulips are your favourite flowers,’ I said, and as I got up and passed out into the street I felt—the—heavy—tulip—heads—brushing against my shins.”

Wormwood

Wormwood, Artemisia absinthium, is a shrub-like perennial belonging to the great family of Compositae, which are native to Europe and Asia. It is a long-lived, tenacious plant, two to four feet high with grayish-green leaves. The flowers have a greenish-yellow tint, have no pappus, and like the leaves, give off a strong aromatic odor and are bitter to the taste. The Compositae are a plant group consisting of 180 species which include tarragon (Artemesia dracunculus) as well as mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris).

Wormwood is supposed to have grown up along the path by which the serpent took exile from the Garden of Eden. Yet in some parts of Europe, wormwood is called “Girdle of St. John” and is believed to ward off evil spirits. Wormwood is mentioned in the Bible a dozen times. In the apocalyptic revelations of St. John, we find, “And the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.” (By a strange coincidence, wormwood in Russian is Chernobyl, the name of the Russian city which experienced a disastrous nuclear meltdown in 1986.)

Thujone

Distillation of wormwood oil (oleum absinthii) was apparently known as early as the sixteenth century, but the first chemical investigation of the oil was not undertaken until 1845. The principal fraction of the rectified oil, today known as thujone, was determined to be an isomer of camphor… Thujone is unquestionably a powerful drug on its own when taken in substantial amounts. Though wormwood oil was prescribed by pharmacists from France to America for certain illnesses such as fevers, as early as 1872, the British medical journal, The Lancet, stated that its principal effects were in fact epileptiform attacks. Even in France, the same year, a law was passed so that pharmacists could not sell wormwood oil without prescription from a medical doctor.

Yet there were still doubts as to which ingredient in absinthe was the culprit. Dr. J. A. Laborde who presented a paper on essences in absinthe to the French Academy of Medicine on October 1st 1889 emphasized that the “accidents characteristic of the liqueur absinthe, currently and classically documented and known as Absintheisme [sic], should also, and with good reason, be called Anisisme.”

Dr. Laborde says Magnan was mistaken in placing the blame completely on essence of wormwood because he did not make a thorough comparative study of the other essences in the drink. Indeed, tests conducted in 1957 at the Institute of Pharmacology at Bale University revealed that essence of anise, anethol, combined with alcohol made animals more excited than if the animals ingested the anethol and alcohol separately.

Historical absintheurs

One day in early March 1899, Lautrec awoke from an evening of intoxication to find himself in an unfamiliar room. The door was padlocked and the windows barred while at the foot of his bed stood a male nurse. He was in the Chateau Saint-James, a beautiful eighteenth-century mansion situated at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne which had been transformed into an asylum. In February, after he had suffered an aggravated attack of delirium tremens, his close friend Doctor Bourges and his cousin Gabriel Tapie de Celeyran had convinced Lautrec’s parents that they should commit Lautrec to the sanatorium to undergo a cure for alcoholism. He had been kidnapped while delirious outside his studio by two male nurses.

Lautrec was terrified of ending his days in confinement. Ten years earlier, looking at an engraving of a madman by caricaturist Andre Gill (a heavy absinthe drinker himself who died in an asylum), Lautrec had said to his friend Gauzi, “That’s what awaits us all.” In terror he wrote to his father to release him. “Papa, now you have the opportunity to behave like a good man. I am imprisoned, and all that is imprisoned, dies!”

Instead, Lautrec’s father took the advice of the physicians and left him where he was. The first medical examination revealed evidence of hallucinations and amnesia, accepted as typical symptoms of the heavy absinthe drinker. The prognosis was not encouraging. Desperate, Lautrec hit on an idea. If he could jog his memory, they would have to let him out, wouldn’t they? He began to draw and paint, and gradually the line and colour brought back whole sections of his life – a visit to the circus, a day at the beach with his friends. He was released in late May. Though he carefully refrained from absinthe and other alcohol, his health declined. He died at home in 1901, leaving behind the most telling record of Paris’s underbelly and the world of absinthe.