by Baker, Phil
He ended in a lunatic asylum, where he succeeded in strangling himself, and the child is the offspring of “the absintheur and his ‘serpent’, – begotten of mania and born of apathy.” Gessonex takes a scientific interest in him: “I think I know now how we can physiologically resolve ourselves back to the primary Brute period, if we choose, – by living entirely on Absinthe!” This is exactly what Gessonex would like to see: “Civilisation is a curse, – Morality an enormous hindrance to freedom.”
Gessonex shows Gaston his masterpiece – a painting of a priest breaking open a beautiful woman’s coffin in despair – before suggesting that they should do something “amusing”; they should visit the Paris morgue (which was a popular sight in those days; Dickens always visited the Morgue when he was in Paris).
“Because it is dusk, mon ami, – and because the charm of the electric light will give grace to the dead! If you have never been there at this hour, it will be a new experience for you, – really it is a most interesting study to any one of an artistic temperament! I prefer it to the theatre!”
As they are leaving, Gaston gives the child a couple of francs, causing it to emit “an eldritch screech of rapture” that makes the ceiling ring, before kissing the money. “He is a droll little creature!” says Gessonex.
As they walk towards the Morgue, Gessonex raises his battered hat to drab and broken down women with fantastic courtesy. In the Morgue they find the hideously rotted and disfigured corpse of Silvion Guidel, testing Gaston’s self- control. The morgue keeper thinks the priest is a suicide, but Gessonex, with his knowledge of anatomy, believes the priest to have been murdered. Gaston is understandably keen to change the subject, and when Gessonex makes a sketch of the dead priest, Gaston tears it into little pieces: “I thought it was a bit of waste paper! Forgive me! – I often get frightfully abstracted every now and then, – ever since I took to drinking absinthe!”
In the street, both men are getting nervous: Gessonex sees the apparition of a creditor behind him, and soon afterwards Gaston thinks he sees Silvion in the street. After brief digressions on Zola, on atheism, and on the moral state of Paris, Gaston is glad to duck into a café. “In what resort of fiends and apes could I hide myself…?” he wonders.
Gaston is further down the slippery slope in Volume Three. Walking near the Avenue de l’Opera, he sees a ship being built and launched upon a green sea, only to break up and give way to a skeleton. “All the work of my Absinthe-witch! – her magic lantern of strange pictures was never exhausted!” People walking around under her influence are not uncommon in Paris: “There are plenty of people in the furia of Absinthe… men who would ensnare the merest child in woman’s shape, and not only outrage her, but murder and mutilate her afterwards.”
Gaston meets his father in the street again, and this time he tells him the truth: he is an absintheur. Beauvais senior is appalled:
“You tell me you have become an absintheur, – do you know what that means?”
“I believe I do,” I replied indifferently. “It means, in the end, – death.”
“Oh, if it meant only death!” he exclaimed passionately… . “But it means more than this – it means crime of the most revolting character – it means brutality, cruelty, apathy, sensuality, and mania! Have you realised the doom you create for yourself, or have you never thought thus far?”
I gave a gesture of weariness.
“Mon Père, you excite yourself quite unnecessarily! […] and even suppose I do become a maniac as you so amiably suggest I have heard that maniacs are really very enviable sort of people. They imagine themselves to be kings, emperors, popes, and what not, – it is just as agreeable an existence as any other, I should imagine!”
“Enough!” and my father fixed his eyes upon me… “I want to hear no more special pleadings for the most degrading and loathsome vice of this our city and age”.
With that he removes Gaston from the bank, but Gaston is beyond caring.
“I hate all things honest! It is part of my new profession to do so” – and I laughed wildly – “Honesty is a mortal affront to an absintheur! – did you not know that? However, though the offence is great, I will not fight you for it – we will part friends! Adieu!”
Gaston reports two other encounters in his wanderings: first, he sees an English woman in the Champs Elysées, “the breathing incarnation of sweet and stainless womanhood” which makes Gaston, who knows himself to be a low and filthy absintheur, “slink back as she passed, – slink and crouch in hiding”. His next encounter is more congenial. He is meditatively stirring the “emerald potion” in a café when who should come up, as jaunty as ever, but Gessonex. Lifting his hat with a flourish, he glances appreciatively at Gaston’s drink:
“The old cordial!” he said with a laugh. “What a blessed remedy for all the ills of life it is, to be sure! Almost as excellent as death, – only not quite so certain in its effects.”
Gessonex sits down with a drink, and buys himself a copy of Journal Pour Rire, which brings out a surprisingly moral side in Gaston: a particular cartoon in it is “so gratuitously indecent that, though I was accustomed to see Parisians enjoy both pictorial and literary garbage with the zest of vultures tearing carrion, I was somewhat surprised at their tolerating so marked an instance of absolute grossness”. Hardly has Gessonex bought his Journal when a shot rings out: perhaps despairing of the uncommercial nature of his own work, Gessonex has shot himself in the head. Alive he starved, but no sooner is he dead than he is acclaimed a great genius.
Gaston meets Héloïse St.Cyr, who is appalled at his reduced condition. Too late she tells him that she was once in love with him, but that she feels nothing for him any longer. They talk of Pauline – still missing – her father – dead – and Silvion – missing too. “What has become of him, do you think?” says Gaston suddenly – “Perhaps he is dead?” “Perhaps” – he adds, beginning to laugh like a madman “he is murdered! Have you ever thought of that?” Their eyes meet, and Héloïse cries out in horror before she turns and runs for her life.
Gaston is still obsessed with finding Pauline; “this was the only object apart from Absinthe which interested me in the least.” And one day he does, singing in the gutter with her hand outstretched for coins from passers-by. She tells him again of her pure love for Silvion Guidel, which goads Gaston to tell her what has become of him: “He is dead, I say! – stone dead! – who should know it better than I, seeing that I – murdered him!”
“What fools women are!” says Gaston to himself.
A mere word! – … ‘Murder,’ for example – a word of six letters, it has a ludicrously appalling effect on human nerves! On the silly Pauline it fell like a thunderbolt…
Pauline collapses and lies unconscious. As she lies there, Gaston is moved to kiss her. She recovers consciousness and starts screaming “Murderer! Murderer! … au secours! Au secours!” (Help! Help!) Grabbing her, Gaston reiterates that he killed Silvion, forcing her to listen to the full story while she shudders and moans. Even as Gaston speaks, he is haunted by the pale phosphorescent apparition of Silvion creeping and skulking about: “There he is!” he says to Pauline. Suddenly Pauline breaks into a run, pursued by Gaston, until she reaches Pont Neuf. She dives off the parapet into the dark and swirling waters of the Seine.
“Pauline! Pauline!” Gaston cries to the waters – “I loved you! You broke my heart! You ruined my life! You made me what I am! Pauline! Pauline! I loved you!” He sinks into unconsciousness. Next day he wakes, still lying on Pont Neuf, and thinks back on the events of the night. “How strange it seemed! As the critics would say – how melodramatic!”
Gaston’s thoughts are interrupted by the terrifying spectacle of a green-eyed leopard on the bridge, until he sees an early morning workman walk through it. Gaston gets up and walks, knowing that the phantom leopard is still behind him. Gessonex used to peer anxiously behind him, Gaston remembers, “And I idly wondered what sort of creature the Absinthe-fairy had sent to him s
o persistently that he should have seen no other way out of it but suicide.”
Gaston has almost reached rock bottom. “And here I am, an absintheur in the City Of Absinthe, and glory is neither for me, nor for thee Paris, thou frivolous, godless, lascivious dominion of Sin!” Gaston haunts the Morgue, desperate to see Pauline again, and after two days her unidentified body is brought in. His first thought is that she must have a proper burial, but then he takes a perverse pleasure in the idea of her being thrown into the general pauper’s ditch.
The brain of a confirmed absintheur accepts the most fiendish idea as both beautiful and just. If you doubt what I say, make inquiries at any of the large lunatic asylums in France, – ask to be told of some of the aberrations of absinthe-maniacs, who form the largest percentage of brains gone incurably wrong, – and you will hear enough to form material for a hundred worse histories than mine!
The mortuary keeper can see that Gaston is interested in this particular body, but Gaston denies knowing her: “a fille de joie, no doubt!” Suddenly he sees “a pair of steadfast, sorrowful, lustrous eyes” flash “wondering reproach” at him. It is Héloïse, come to claim her cousin. Gaston has been cheated of his vengeance.
“What was there to do now? Nothing – but to drink Absinthe! With the death of Pauline every other definite object in living had ended. I cared for nobody; – while as far as my former place in society was concerned I had apparently left no blank.” Now, in Père Lachaise cemetery, he watches Pauline’s funeral from a distance: “I – I only had wrought all the misery on this once proud and now broken-down, bereaved family! – I, and Absinthe! If I had remained the same Gaston Beauvais that I once had been, – if on the night Pauline had made her wild confession of shame to me, I had listened to the voice of mercy in my heart – if I had never met André Gessonex… imagine! – so much hangs on an ‘if’!”
Night falls and Gaston is still hiding.
The guardians of Père-la-Chaise, patrolled the place as usual and locked the gates – but I was left a prisoner within, which was precisely what I desired. Once alone – all alone in the darkness of the night, I flung up my arms in delirious ecstasy – this City of the Dead was mine for the time! – mine, all these moulding corpses in the clay! I was sole ruler of this wide domain of graves! I rushed to the shut-up marble prison of Pauline – I threw myself on the ground before it, – I wept and raved and swore, and called her by every endearing name I could think of! – the awful silence maddened me! I beat at the iron grating with my fists till they bled; “Pauline!” I cried – “Pauline!”
By now Gaston can see, “Fiery wheels in the air, – great, glittering birds of prey swooping down with talons outstretched to clutch at me, – whirlpools of green in the ground into which it seemed I must fall headlong as I walked.” Gaston feels the need to confess to a priest, and confesses to Père Vaudron. Vaudron is driven half-mad by the revelation that Gaston has murdered his beloved nephew. Vaudron can offer him no forgiveness, but Gaston reminds him that he has to keep the secret of the confessional.
After another binge on absinthe, Gaston becomes so ill that a doctor is called. He tells him that his sufferings are due to absinthe:
“You must give it up,” he said decisively, “at once, – and for ever. It is a detestable habit, – a horrible craze of the Parisians. Who are positively deteriorating in blood and brain by reason of the their passion for this poison. What the next generation will be, I dread to think!”[…] “I must inform you that if you persist drinking absinthe you will become a hopeless maniac.”
Gaston has one last hope. He remembers Héloïse St.Cyr. He will go to her, and ask her pity, and try to give up absinthe for her sake; only Héloïse can free him from the curse of absinthe. He goes to the St.Cyr mansion, but its aspect has changed. The doors are open and it is draped in black. Someone has died. It must be the old Comtesse, thinks Gaston, as he presses further in among the incense and white lilies. But the figure lying in the chapelle ardente is Héloïse. “Dead!” cries Gaston, “Dead! Grovelling on the ground in wild agony, I clutched handfuls of the flowers with which her funeral couch was strewn – I groaned – I sobbed – I raved! – I could have killed myself then in the furious frenzy of my horror and despair.”
Gaston has lost everything. In a sudden flash he realises that there is a god, the God who made wormwood. Finally, he kills his last vestiges of conscience and becomes wholly an absintheur:
Absintheur, pur et simple! – voila tout! I am a thing more abject than the lowest beggar that crawls through Paris whining for a sou! – I am a slinking, shuffling beast, half monkey, half man, whose aspect is so vile, whose body is so shaken with delirium, whose eyes are so murderous, that if you met me by chance in the day-time, you would probably shriek for sheer alarm! But you will not see me thus – daylight and I are not friends. I have become like a bat or an owl in my hatred of the sun! – … At night I live; – at night I creep out with the other obscene things of Paris, and by my very presence, add fresh pollution to the moral poisons in the air! I gain pence by the meanest errands, – I help others to vice, – and whenever I have the opportunity, I draw down weak youths. Mothers’ darlings, to the brink of ruin, and topple them over – if I can! […]For twenty francs, I will murder or steal, – all true absintheurs are purchasable! For they are the degradation of Paris, – the canker of the city – the slaves of mean insatiable madness which nothing but death can cure.
Finally another absinthe addict, a derelict chemist, gives Gaston a phial of lethal poison in exchange for absinthe – “a mere friendly exchange of poisons” – which Gaston intends to swallow as soon as he has the courage.
Corelli was not well liked by the Wilde-Smithers-Dowson set. Wilde told William Rothenstein that a prison warder had asked him about Marie Corelli’s morals, to which he had replied that there was nothing wrong with her morals, but as for her writing, “she ought to be here.” Ernest Dowson reports in a letter to his friend Arthur Moore that, “My people, meaning well doubtless, brought me a book of Marie Corelli’s to read.” It would be interesting to know which one it was. Whichever, it is not likely to have cheered him up very much.
FRENCH POETRY
The subject of absinthe drinking spawned a great deal of French poetry, much of which can be found in Marie-Claude Delahaye’s book, Absinthe Muse Des Poètes. The following is a very small sample.
Raoul Ponchon (1848–1937) was a prolific versifier, publishing a staggering 150,000 poems over forty-odd years – he started late – of which around 7,000 are devoted to drinking. This one, from 1886, shows the persistent association between absinthe and death.
Absinthe
Absinthe, je t’adore, certes!
Il me semble, quand je te bois,
Humer l’âme des jeunes bois,
Pendant la belle saison verte!
Ton frais parfum me deconcerte,
Et dans ton opale je vois
Des cieux habites autrefois,
Comme par une porte ouverte.
Qu’importe, o recours des maudits!
Que tu sois un vain paradis,
Si tu contentes mon envie;
Et si, devant que j’entre au port,
Tu me fais supporter la vie,
En m’habituant à la mort.
Absinthe, I adore you, truly!
It seems, when I drink you
I inhale the young forest’s soul
During the beautiful green season.
Your perfume disconcerts me
And in your opalescence
I see the full heavens of yore
As through an open door.
What matter, O refuge of the damned!
That you a vain paradise be
If you appease my need;
And if, before I enter the door
You make me put up with life
By accustoming me to death.
Raoul Ponchon
Gustave Kahn (1859–1936) was associated with the Symbolist movement, an
d later wrote a history of it. Mallarmé praised him for writing something which was neither prose nor poetry, like the following paean to absinthe as an all-embracing female object:
Absinthe, mère des bonheurs, o
liqueur infinie, tu miroites en mon verre
comme les yeux verts et pales de la
maîtresse que jadis j’aimais. Absinthe,
mère des bonheurs, comme Elle, tu
laisses dans le corps un souvenir de lointaines douleurs;
absinthe, mère
des rages folles et des ivresses titubantes,
ou l’on peut, sans se croire
un fou, se dire aime de sa maîtresse.
Absinthe, ton parfum me berce…
Absinthe, mother of all happiness, O
infinite liquor, you glint in my glass
green and pale like the eyes of the
mistress I once loved. Absinthe, mother
of happiness, like Her, you leave in the
body a memory of distant pain; absinthe
the mother of insane rages and of staggering drunkenness
