French soldiers fighting in Algeria had been given the medicine as an anti-malarial treatment and brought a taste for the 73° alcohol back home. Mass-production cut prices, and a disastrous wine harvest propelled absinthe to the top of the French drinks charts.
Enter la Fée Verte…the Green Fairy. Named for the swirling emerald opalescence triggered by the addition of iced water to the neat liquid, both the working class and wealthy bourgeoisie consumed 36 million litres a year.
A stroll through Montmartre at 5.00pm in the 1860s would have revealed tables with men and women, often alone, contemplating their glasses of the spirit. This was the l’Heure Verte – the Green Hour, origin of our ‘Happy Hour’. A single absinthe was tolerated by the waiters. Drinkers solved that problem by moving to another, and another and another…
A closer look, perhaps, at the café tables, and we spot the poet Rimbaud and his lover, fellow poet Verlaine, both devotees of absinthe. His artistic life ended as abruptly as his relationship with Verlaine, who in a fit of drunken madness, shot the young Rimbaud.
Here we might encounter Guy de Maupassant, writer of ‘A Queer Night in Paris’ which tells of a provincial at an artist’s party who drinks so much absinthe that he tries to waltz with a chair, falls to the ground in a stupor, and wakes up naked in a strange bed.
Picasso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Hemingway, Degas, Gauguin…none were strangers to la Fée Verte and her tempting powers. Symbolist Alfred Jarry rode his bicycle with his face painted green in celebration of the joys of absinthe.