The Dedalus Book of Absinthe

by Baker, Phil

  The same correspondent, Sterling Heilig, notes a tendency for women to drink absinthe neat, which he explains as a reluctance to drink too much fluid; these women are wearing corsets, and they want to avoid bloating themselves. It may be true. The immediate ‘straight to the brain’ hit of absinthe is also comparable to the often noted affinity that many women have for cigarettes, and the clean taste of absinthe – outside the normal spectrum of fermented drinks – may have been part of the appeal for people who were not otherwise great drinkers of beer, wine or spirits. Even a glass of white wine can taste unclean after absinthe, so it fosters its own particular taste in the same way as mentholated cigarettes.

  In his memoirs of life in Montmartre, Francis Carco writes that, “Absinthe has always accentuated certain traits of the capricious temperament, of dignity, of obstinacy, of buffoonery, particularly in women.” Many people thought there was more at stake than that, as realistic anxieties about alcoholism fed into the prevailing fear of ‘degeneration’, which can be found in writers as varied as Max Nordau, Marie Corelli, and Zola. Sterling Heilig sums up the problem in sensational terms:

  What the doctors fear the most is from the ladies drinking… absinthism, in particular, is said to create a special race, both from the point of view of the intellectual faculties and physical characteristics. This race, the doctors say, may very well continue for a limited time, with all its physical deformities and vicious tendencies, even for several generations, but, exposed in every sort to accident and malady, given over to impotence and sterility, the race soon disappears. The family dies out.

  There is a less crazed picture of female absinthe drinking in Zola’s 1880 novel Nana, which traces the career of a Second Empire demi-mondaine on the make. Away from the glittering world that she inhabits professionally, Nana is now indoors with her lesbian friend Satin.

  She would chat away for hours, pouring out endless confidences, while Satin lay on her bed in her chemise, with her feet higher than her head, smoking cigarettes as she listened. Sometimes, on afternoons when they were both in the dumps, they would treat themselves to absinthe, ‘to help them forget’ as they put it. Satin did not go downstairs or even put on a petticoat, but simply went and leant over the banisters to shout her order to the concierges’s little girl, a kid of ten who, when she brought up the absinthe in a glass, would look furtively at the lady’s bare legs. Every conversation led up to a single subject: the beastliness of men.

  Unglamorous, déclassé, frowstily intimate, this private absinthe drinking provides a telling contrast to Nana’s more public champagne drinking career with men.

  Equivocal but calm – unlike the anti-absinthe hysteria that was to mount by the end of the century – Zola’s picture bears comparison with the two most famous representations of absinthe drinking by painters, Manet and Degas. These pictures retain a certain inscrutability, and if they have more than that in common it is a deliberately prosaic and unglamorous quality.

  Edouard Manet’s famous picture The Absinthe Drinker (1859) was his first major painting, starting his career off on an odd foot. His model was an alcoholic rag-picker named Collardet, who frequented the area around the Louvre. Manet thought he had a strange dignity about him, and even a kind of nobility. Manet had already been interested in drunkenness as a subject when he was studying painting under Thomas Couture. He invited his teacher to come and see his painting when he had finished it, but the response can’t have been what he was hoping for. “An absinthe drinker!” said Couture, “And they paint abominations like that! My poor friend, you are the absinthe drinker. It is you who have lost your moral faculty.”

  It is a strange picture, with its top hat and its odd jaunty foot, and it wasn’t only Couture who hated it; it went down badly with almost everybody. When Manet submitted it to the Salon in 1859, it was promptly rejected, spearheading a revolution in sensibility that would lead to the establishment of the Salon des Refusés four years later. Its aesthetics owe something to Manet’s friend Baudelaire, who believed it was necessary to find new kinds of beauty and heroism in the ‘Modern’ squalor of the contemporary metropolis, as in his poem ‘The Wine of the Ragpickers’. The top hat itself has something Baudelairean about it; Manet had depicted Baudelaire in a similar top hat. The original painting lacked the glass of absinthe, which Manet painted in later to add emphasis. The Absinthe Drinker was one of four related works that Manet referred to as “the philosophers”. Manet later put his absinthe drinker into the background of another picture, The Old Musician. As for the real man, Collardet, he was so pleased with being painted that he became a persistent nuisance at Manet’s studio.

  William Orpen’s 1910 picture The Absinthe Drinker† is like a junior relative of the Manet, with its top-hat and in particular the odd angle of the foot, which looks like a reference to the earlier work. More Gothic than the Manet, with its cobwebby shading, it still catches an air of decayed contentment. Orpen was a great admirer of Manet, and the year before he had painted a picture entitled Homage to Manet.

  Orpen’s other great absinthe picture, his 1912 Café Royale, contains no less than five glasses of absinthe discreetly dottedabout. If his Absinthe Drinker was a homage to Manet, then the Café Royale is his homage to Degas, Orpen’s other great influence and enthusiasm: the photographic-style composition, with people coming and going at the edges, has a particularly Degas-like quality. The man sitting at the back is Oliver St.John Gogarty, who appears in James Joyce’s Ulysses. He is drinking an absinthe with a glum-looking Nina Hamnet, the famous model: she lived on to be a derelict character in 1950s Soho, still telling people, “Modigliani said I had the best tits in Europe”. As for the caryatid columns and mirrors, they are just as Enoch Soames might have known them.

  Edgar Degas’s famous picture L’Absinthe, originally entitled Dans un Café (1876), with its miserable looking couple, was even more unpopular than the Manet. It has been suggested that the man of the pair is Verlaine. He is not, but there is still a resemblance, which may have influenced the composition of three later photographs of Verlaine by Jules Dornac, sitting behind a white marble table with his back to a mirror. The man in the painting is a friend of Degas called Marcellin Desboutin, who was an artist himself and had studied under Couture. Desboutin is not even drinking absinthe: the brown drink in front of him has been identified as black coffee in a glass tumbler, a so-called ‘Mazagran’. The absinthe drinker in this case is the woman, an actress and model named Ellen Andrée, and it is her blank, inscrutably burned-out expression that gives the painting its power. The two figures are dislocated from each other and bleakly isolated in a way that suggests the work of Edward Hopper. The viewer could be forgiven for feeling “if this is Bohemia, you can keep it”.

  The café they are in is La Nouvelle Athènes, which stood at 9 Place Pigalle. It is vividly remembered by George Moore as the place of his education. “I did not go to either Oxford or Cambridge,” he says, “but I went to the Nouvelle Athènes”:

  With what strange, almost unnatural clearness do I see and hear – see the white face of that café, the white nose of that block of houses, stretching up to the Place, between two streets. I can see down the incline of those two streets, and I know what shops are there; I can hear the glass door of the café grate on the sand as I open it. I can recall the smell of every hour. In the morning that of eggs frizzling in butter, the pungent cigarette, coffee and bad cognac; at five o’clock the fragrant odour of absinthe…

  The usual marble tables are there, and it is there we sat and aestheticized till two o’clock in the morning.

  The popularity of La Nouvelle Athènes as a Bohemian venue was due to Desboutin himself, who had led his cronies there from a café called the Café Guerbois. Barnaby Conrad adds that despite his wretched appearance Desboutin – who had at one time been very rich – was an ardent monarchist, with the most courtly manners. Desboutin’s biographer Clement- Janin was annoyed at the reputation this painting gave his subject, and he denied that D
esboutin was an absinthe drinker: the title should, he said, really have been La Buveuse d’Absinthe et Marcellin Desboutin.

  Degas’s picture caused controversy after it made its way to England, where Ronald Pickvance has traced its career. It was bought by a collector named Henry Hill, who lent it to a Brighton exhibition in 1876. The sober and neutral catalogue entry read only A Sketch at A French Café , and the Brighton Gazette critic called it “The perfection of ugliness… The colour is as repulsive as the figures; a brutal, sensual-looking French workman and a sickly looking grisette; a most unlovely couple.” As Pickvance says, it is the figures which are causing the repulsion “not the absinthe, which hasn’t yet been spotted.”

  It went quietly back into Hill’s collection after the exhibition, and didn’t cause any disturbance until it was sold at Christies in 1892. It now appeared as Lot 209, Figures at a Café, and the public hissed at it as it sat on its easel. Nonetheless it was bought, and in 1893 it was lent to the Grafton Gallery, a new gallery which aimed to rival the Grosvenor (the ‘greenery-yallery’ gallery). Now the picture was simply entitled L’Absinthe, giving the critics their cue. At first they were largely favourable, after a fashion: “The big head of the man”, said the Pall Mall Budget, “a romantic, easy-going dreamer, is dashed in with a touch of instantaneity worthy of the greatest master.” And as for his companion:

  The woman, apathetic, heavy-lidded, and brutish, absolutely indifferent to all things external, nods to the warm languor of the poison. Her flat, shuffling feet tell all the tale. Every tone and touch breathes the sentiment of absinthe.

  A major critic of the day, D.S.MacColl, described it as “the inexhaustible picture, the one that draws you back, and back again.” It was in response to MacColl that the bricks started to fly. The Westminster Gazette critic – “The Philistine”, as he signed his pieces – wrote that any one who valued dignity and beauty would never be induced to consider L’Absinthe to be a work of art. Sir William Blake Richmond weighed in to attack it as too ‘literary’: “L’Absinthe is a literary performance. It is not a painting at all. It is a novelette – a treatise against drink. Everything valuable about it could have been done, and has been done, by Zola.”

  Sickert, in contrast, felt that, “much too much has been made of ‘drink’, and ‘lessons’, and ‘sodden’, and ‘boozing’ in relation to the picture”, and that it should simply have been called ‘Un homme et une femme assis dans un café’. The lesson he had in mind was probably that of George Moore, who must have recognised the setting, and could have said something more interesting than, “What a slut! The tale is not a pleasant one, but it is a lesson.” As for the lesson, it could be almost anything: in one of the many parodies the picture has attracted, it is, “I’ll never use that dating agency again.”

  MacColl summarized the opposition to the picture as the “French poison” view versus the “temperance tract” view. He later met Degas in Paris and found him stung by the response to the picture, to which he would never have given such a flamboyant title as ‘L’Absinthe’. He objected to being attacked by the press and being said to paint, as he put it, “comme un cochon” (like a pig).

  As for Ellen Andrée, she was far less miserable than she looks in the picture. Barnaby Conrad cites an interview she gave to Felix Feneon, over forty years later:

  My glass was filled with absinthe. Desboutin has something quite innocuous in his… and we look like two idiots. I didn’t look bad at the time, I can say that today; I had an air about me that your Impressionists thought ‘quite modern’, I had chic and I could hold the pose as they wanted me to… But Degas – didn’t he slaughter me!”

  In France, absinthe began to change its public character, particularly after it became a favourite drink of the working classes. In Zola’s 1877 novel L’Assommoir, a character named Boche remembers a man he used to know: “a joiner who had stripped himself stark naked in the rue Saint-Martin and died doing the polka – he was an absinthe drinker.” Around 1860 absinthe had started to leave Montparnasse and spread from the bourgeoisie and the Bohemians to the workers, and it was from then on that it started to be regarded as a threat to society.

  Commenting on the “most grave” problems of “contamination” (whereby bourgeois habits spread to workers) a Doctor Legrain wrote in 1903: “I am an old Parisian; I’ve lived in Paris for 43 years. I’ve seen very clearly the first invasion of the aperitif with the bourgeoisie, and it is only much later, in the last fifteen or twenty years, that I have seen the workman consume it in his turn.” Doctor Ledoux, five years later, has a similar story to tell:

  Our fathers still knew the time when absinthe was an elegant drink: on the café terraces, old Algerian warriors and bourgeois idlers consumed that louche beverage with the aroma of mouthwash. The bad example was set from on high, and little by little absinthe democratised itself.

  A certain Professor Achard knew exactly what was happening: it was all down to the improvements that had been made to the conditions of the working classes, particularly the increase in wages and the reduction of the working day to only eight hours; consequently they had “more time and money to waste on drink”.

  A far more likely factor was the change in price between absinthe and wine. In its respectable heyday absinthe had been a relatively expensive drink, but the cost dropped over the years, especially with the appearance of cheaper and nastier brands. In particular, the ravaging of the French vineyards by phylloxera in the 1870s and again in the 1880s made wine more expensive. It had a double effect in this respect, because absinthe manufacturers who had previously used grape alcohol now turned to industrial alcohol, making absinthe cheaper still. At 15 centimes, a glass of absinthe was about a third the price of a loaf of bread; a bottle of wine might be a franc (100 centimes). Absinthe was cheapest of all in bars like the ones around Les Halles, for market workers, where you could stand and drink absinthe for only 2 sous (10 centimes). In rock bottom bars like Le Père Lunette there were no tables or chairs: nothing but the zinc counter.

  A new object begins to appear in the iconography of absinthe pictures: the workman’s toolbag, lying idle by the café table. La Mère, an 1899 painting by Jules Adler, shows a miserable looking woman carrying a child in her arms as she hurries past two men drinking at a café. She seems to be averting the child’s gaze, as if one of the sottish looking men might be its father. One of them is evidently making a point to the other, raising his hand in laboured emphasis in the manner of a ponderous drunk. The open toolbag sits under the table. On the window of the café is written ‘Absinthe 15 centimes a glass’. A slightly later cartoon in Le Rire shows a similar bag – somewhere between a cricket bag and a leather satchel, still carried by railway workers – lying idle beside another table. This time the table’s dishevelled inhabitant, who is sunk a bit lower in his chair than he should be, is settling down to get his head round one of life’s mysteries: “absinthe kills you but it makes you live.”

  It kills you, but it makes you live. It is the distinctive two- sided rhetoric that develops around addictive drugs, with the idea that they come to supply everything but lead to ruin. Trying to explain the fascination of surgery, a doctor told the Goncourt brothers that, “you get to the point where nothing matters but the operation you are performing, the science you are practising. It’s so beautiful. I sometimes think that I should stop living if I couldn’t operate. It’s my absinthe.” And on the other side of the addiction coin, Zola’s Nana contains a grim warning in the figure of Queen Pomare, the aged ex-courtesan. Satin tells Nana the story:

  Oh, she had been such a splendid girl once, who had fascinated all Paris with her beauty. And such go, and such cheek – leading the men about by their noses, and leaving great notabilities blubbering on her staircase! Now she was always getting drunk, and the women of the district gave her absinthe for the sake of a laugh, after which the street urchins threw stones at her and chased her. Altogether it was a real come-down, a queen falling into the mud! Nana lis
tened, feeling her blood freeze.

  One of the first people to get on the absinthe case was Henri Balesta, in his 1860 book Absinthe et Absintheurs. For the most part Balesta’s sensationalistic and cautionary work is taken up with case histories that might have come from nineteenth- century engravings and temperance tracts. A father introduces his little six year old daughter – who is already grieving for the death of her mother – to absinthe in order to comfort her, and inadvertently makes her an addict. After she dies from absinthism, he hangs himself. Another absinthe drinker brings misery on his whole family, and finally encounters a prostitute who turns out to be his daughter.

  Balesta observes that “absinthomania” is not “a vice peculiar to the rich and idle” (something which within a few years would need no pointing out); “the man of the people, the workman, has not been spared its ravages.” He also made the prescient point that working-class absinthe abuse blighted wives and children and damaged whole families, in a way that middle-class Bohemian self-destruction tended not to.

  Was absinthe worse than other types of alcohol? We can look at the pharmacology later – and consider why Van Gogh drank turpentine – but debate continued on this subject. Absinthe was widely perceived as a poison, and it was associated with ruin in general and insanity in particular. The 1865 Dictionnaire de Médecine, edited by Littre and Robin, listed absinthism as a variety of alcoholism but emphasised that the results were due to something other than alcohol.

  Doctor Auguste Motet had been examining absinthistes in a Paris asylum, and in 1859 he published his findings as, Considérations générales sur l’alcoolisme et plus particulièrement des effets toxiques produits sur l’homme par la liqueur absinthe. He concluded that absinthe was worse than other drinks, producing hallucination and delirium. Louis Marce of the Bicêtre Hospital gave essence of absinthe to animals, with predictably dire results, and the conclusive breakthroughs in establishing absinthism as a disease distinct from alcoholism came with Marce’s former student Valentin Magnan.