This month's museum pick...

The Absinthe Museum
Absinthe: Spirits Rekindled

by Dea Adria Mallin

Poster for Absinthe Robette, designed by T Privat Livemont, 1896 © David Nathan-Maister & The Virtual Absinthe Museum http://www.oxygenee.com

You begin by pouring an ounce of liquid emerald into a glass. On top of the glass, you place a flat, trowel-like, slotted spoon, upon which rests a single sugar cube. The ritual requires that you now pour chilled water over the sugar cube slowly, slowly, drop by drop, so that it can dissolve by the time the glass is filled. As the water encounters the clear green liquid, it clouds, and now you stir the opalescent liquid, 144 proof, with the spoon. The green fairy unfolds her wings. The elixir is complete. The glass is full. Or is it?

The drink is absinthe, and since its “invention” in 1792 by Pierre Ordinaire, a French doctor living in Switzerland and looking for a patent medicine to cure stomach ailments, absinthe has been yearned for, ritualized communally and individually, swallowed for good and for ill, lauded as “holy water” and muse of creative inspiration, and demonized as a spur to depression and suicide and as the cause of working-class agitation, of epilepsy, tuberculosis, low birthrates, abnormal fetuses, hereditary damage, debauchery, degeneracy, criminality, and insanity.

Though banned in France and the United States since the early 20^th century, in the past ten years there has been an upsurge of interest in absinthe, accompanied by an absinthe museum and websites offering versions of the drink, sources of wormwood seed, treatises, recipes, and antique, new, and reproduction paraphernalia for sale. Once called by a fin de siècle imbiber “the maximum poison – condensed, refined, perfumed, and irresistible,” absinthe is again irresistible, capturing the imagination if not the mercenary impulses of the public.

Glasses -- some etched with pour marks, water carafes, saucers, spoons (at least twenty-three styles), decanters, bronze spigot fountains, even labels from the old absinthe bottles are all collectible -- and terribly expensive.

Books are appearing on the market to address the history and mystery of the substance. One of the first and best is Absinthe: History in a Bottle by Barnaby Conrad III (Chronicle Books $20). Conrad’s lavishly illustrated book covers the origins, art, literature, liqueur, and decadence of absinthe, and at the end of a long period of research, living in France, Conrad gets to try the real thing, obtained across the border in Switzerland. He spirits the bottle into France and chooses l’heure verte of the old Paris cafés and Grand Boulevards to put on the music of Erik Satie, himself an absinthe drinker. Conrad takes out the absinthe spoon given him by Absinthe Museum founder and curator, Marie-Claude Delahaye, and he fills his glass. Finding authentic absinthe “a gentle thing,” Conrad fills his glass again, and again, and again. In the morning, he is reminded of Rilke writing about a poet friend drinking absinthe, who “saw his glass grow and grow until he felt himself in the center of its opal light, weightless, completely dissolved in this strange atmosphere.”

Conrad is not alone in his curiosity to experience the real thing. Betina Wittels’ recent book, A Sip of Seduction, is the result of her own pursuit, first of antique absinthe spoons and next, the rest of the absinthe accoutrements which she collects and sells (she just outfitted an absinthe bar in Manila), and then, admittedly, of the Green Fairy herself – in the sense of visual and kinesthetic heightening of experience through absinthe.     

Origins

Millennia before Artemesia absinthium, bitter to the taste, arrived in France, the Greek physician Hippocrates prescribed the vivifying liquid of wormwood leaves soaked in wine or spirits for jaundice, rheumatism, anemia, and menstrual pains, while Galen prescribed it for swooning and as a gastric purge. The Roman scholar, Pliny the Elder, used it as a cure for bad breath. In the 17^th century, it was thought to protect against plague, and people slept with it in their pillows.

Modern absinthe is attributed to Dr. Pierre Ordinaire, who was familiar with ancient use and combined wormwood, anise, hyssop, and other ingredients including parsley and spinach into a 136 proof cure-all, nicknamed, for its green color, La Fée Verte, or the Green Fairy. 

Current research points to two women, the Henriod sisters, who made and sold absinthe in Switzerland long before Dr. Ordinaire arrived. They sold a bottle to a man who discovered that it not only helped his indigestion but cured fevers, chills, and bronchitis. He bought their recipe, marketed it, and when his daughter married Henri-Louis Pernod, went into partnership producing the absinthe in a distillery. To avoid high import taxes, Pernod soon opened a larger factory, Pernod Fils, twelve miles away in Pontarlier, France, the first distillery of an anise-based liqueur in France, and the rest, as they say, is histoire.

On the darker side, the derivative essence of wormwood is thujone, thought to produce convulsions, hallucinations, amnesia, violence, and seizures. Wormwood, then, depending upon its thujone content, is poison. The anise component -- experienced as a light, minty, licorice taste by some and called bitter by others (hence, the desire for the sugar cube) -- combined with alcohol can cause drowsiness, if not stupefaction. The hyssop in the mixture was known to produce trembling.

La Belle Époque in France

Used medicinally as a fever preventative and to purify polluted water for French troops in Algeria in the 1840s, absinthe followed the soldiers -- who had developed a taste for the “slightly antiseptic but refreshing licorice taste” -- home to Paris in the 1840s, and by the 1850s, the Grand Boulevards would fill with fashionable people in top hats and bowlers gathering between 5 and 7 p.m. for l’heure verte, the “Green Hour,” after which began a drift to theatre or perhaps boudoir. In the beginning, only the wealthier patrons of cafés could afford the drink, then the bohemians, and by 1875, its popularity was such that the working man, too, observed the Green Hour.

The list of famous artists and writers lauding absinthe as muse is long: Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Alfred Jarry, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Heminway, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and on and on. They gathered in Montmartre where the literati crowded in at Au Lapin Agile and the artists at the Nouvelle Athènes café.

The French playwright Alfred Jarry drank his absinthe straight, remained in a constant twilight state, and died young. Oscar Wilde said that “after the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”

Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings of the dance halls, the brothels, and Montmartre were  virtually bathed in absinthe, and the artist carried absinthe with him in a hollow cane saying, “One should drink little – but often.” Degas painted “L’Absinthe,” in which a man a a woman sit in a bar before a glass of absinthe, staring. Gauguin painted “Dans un café à Arles,” where the proprietress sits behind a tall glass of absinthe with her enormous water siphon and sugar cubes before her and three prostitutes behind her. Van Gogh painted a still life of an absinthe glass and water decanter in ochre and greenish hues, reminding of Oscar Wilde’s rhetorical question, “A glass of absinthe is as poetical as anything in the world; what difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?”

THE ABSINTHE DRINKER by Pablo Picasso, 1901

By 1900, when Picasso started to paint absinthe drinkers, absinthe was seen as “bottled madness.” In his 1901 painting titled “Woman Drinking Absinthe,” the woman wraps her sinewy arms around herself as Judy Garland at her loneliest used to do, the glass of absinthe and the water siphon carrying the same spatial weight as the woman. In the same year, Picasso painted “The Absinthe Drinker,” a powerful psychological portrait of addiction with more sinewy arms and hands, painted mouth, and hungry eyes whose focus is entirely upon the glass of sparkling absinthe. Picasso’s powerful “Two Women Seated at a Bar” depicts only their bare backs and absinthe-green gowns and the single glass of green absinthe between them, directly in the painting’s golden mean.  

In contrast to these depictions were the advertising posters from the makers of absinthe. Pernod’s absinthe was depicted as being poured by a child. Women on the posters, red hair flying and kohl-accented eyes, were at once sexy and provocative, sensual and dreamy, with the glass or the bottle held aloft as the ultimate prize.

The Banning of Absinthe, or the Death of the Green Fairy

In 1874, 700,000 liters of absinthe were consumed in France. In 1910, the figure had risen to 36 million liters. Alcoholism was a problem in France, and yet the simple shimmer of a glass of absinthe on the table in a café called out to people as a symbol of independence if not rebellion, of an unsinkable and indomitable spirit, of time stretching into eternity. The temperance movement began in France in 1872 with a combination of scientists, medical doctors, and social reformers. While there were some who defended absinthe and blamed the poor quality of the alcohol or the thujone quantity or the copper sulfate as coloring agent used in cheap absinthe for destroying its reputation, there were many doctors who wrote treatises describing their patients’ complex maladies from its use, and inveighing against absinthe.

Even artists and writers were anti-absinthe at their end. The poet Ernest Dowson, who drank absinthe to drown “that obscure night of the soul,” later cautioned that “nothing was changed” by absinthe, as “green changed to white, emerald to opal.” Dowson died at 33. Poet Arthur Rimbaud sought to fuse the Dionysian and the Apollonian through “the green pillars” of absinthe, but eventually, in his poem, “Un Saison en Enfer” (“A Season in Hell”), he called his absinthe-led experiences madness, folly, destructive magic. Even Baudelaire, who saw the craving for sensation as the supreme characteristic of the age and began with absinthe and opium as a means for “the multiplication of personality,” had begun, by 1860, to denounce drugs and alcohol. “I have come to loathe all stimulants because of the way they expand time, and of the exaggeration with which they endow everything,” he said. Baudelaire called absinthe’s mysteries “a stage-set paradise, to be gained at a stroke, but an inadequate substitute for the real thing.”

While the drink was never banned in England, Portugal, or Spain, the Swiss banned absinthe in 1908, after a man who had heavily consumed the drink killed his pregnant wife and 4-year-old daughter and did not remember doing it. The Belgians banned absinthe in 1905, the Dutch in 1910, and the United States in 1912; the French waited until World War I, when politicians and generals pointed out that sober troops were sorely needed. By 1915, the drink was illicit in France.

But no matter. After WWI, the French were drinking whiskey and martinis, American-style, and the hurried man of the new century was replacing the daydreaming Frenchman, strolling the boulevards and pausing for l’heure verte, when ideas and absinthe had been ritually consumed.

In Pontarlier, just across the border from Switzerland (where, ironically, absinthe is, as of 2005, legal again, and the mystique of the forbidden about to get lost if absinthe hits the supermarkets), the old Pernod distillery is the site of a Nestlé chocolate factory, and where there were once twenty-two distilleries producing absinthe, there are now two rooms in the Pontarlier Museum devoted to absinthe’s past. Here, one can peruse absinthe posters, bags of dried wormwood, vintage absinthe labels, and copper distilling apparatus.

Musée de l’Absinthe

Marie-Claude Delahaye, a lecturer in cellular biology at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie in Paris, found her first absinthe spoon in 1981 and founded the Absinthe Museum in 1994 in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village about 40 minutes outside Paris where Vincent van Gogh, absinthe imbiber, and his brother Theo are buried, and where Pisarro and Cezanne once lived. For Delahaye, absinthe has become as dominant in its way as it was for the Belle Epoque  French artists and intellectuals when the drink was legal.

Marie-Claude searched antique shops and flea markets for the paraphernalia of the absinthe drinker, prowling for the glasses, the spoons, the etchings, drawings, paintings, posters, postcards, bottle labels -- all the absinthe-inspired memorabilia she could get her hands on, until she had enough to fill a museum. Earlier, she had organized exhibitions and in 1983 wrote the definitive absinthe book, L’absinthe: Histoire de la fée verte, available only in French but now out of print and highly collectible. The museum was officially accredited by the French government in 2000 and includes a sugar bowl from the café of Rimbaud and Verlaine, as well as Toulouse-Lautrec’s well-used absinthe spoon. Upstairs in the museum is a replica café-bar where the drink itself cannot be served. The museum, at 44 rue Callé, is open to the public in October and November and from March to May on weekends only between 11 am and 6 pm. From June to September, it is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 am to 6 pm 

And while I have not been to the museum itself, I wonder if Barnaby Conrad’s mention in his book Absinthe; History in a Bottle, of one Ernest Delahaye, who received a letter in 1872 from the poet, Arthur Rimbaud, praising a particular café for its absinthe, is more than mere coincidence of cognomen. If I get to Auvers-sur-Oise, I will have to ask Marie-Claude Delahaye.