Absynth us
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In fact, when wormwood was allowed back into the spirit in the U.S. But between 19 in France, and 19 in the U.S., no absinthe with wormwood (so, really, no true absinthe) was produced or imported in either country.Īnd so, all of the legends of absinthe then became about wormwood and thujone. (By then, everyone was convinced it was the traces of thujone that was causing all the drama.) A decade later, a wormwood-less American variation, Herbsaint, appeared in New Orleans, the absinthe capital of the U.S. The story of the “absinthe murder” made international headlines - no matter the fact that Lanfray also had creme de menthe, cognac, brandy and copious amounts of wine in his system when he committed the crime.ĭespite the ban, absinthe was so ingrained in French culture that, in 1922, a wormwood-free version of the booze was legalized. That night, he and his father each had a liter of wine, and shortly thereafter, Lanfray shot and killed his wife and two-year-old daughter. Lanfray stopped at a local cafe on his way to work and had a creme de menthe and then a cognac and soda. He had a second absinthe with breakfast.Īt 5:30 a.m. Jean Lanfray got up early, as he always did, on August 28, and, as he always did, poured himself a shot of absinthe with a bit of water. For example, he kept lice in his hair to throw at people, and he attended public readings for the sole purpose of screaming obscenities at whomever was on stage. Along the way, however, he managed to drink himself into a knife-wielding frenzy and slash Verlaine across the arms, and later, in the thigh. He, in short, believed that indulging in his vices was the path to becoming a visionary. “The poet makes himself a seer through a long, prodigious and rational disordering of all the senses,” Rimbaud once wrote. Rimbaud arrived in Paris in 1871, and was immediately drawn to Verlaine, a fairly famous writer but a legendary drunk. A close second was his lover, another poet, Arthur Rimbaud.
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If anyone can be credited with bringing absinthe to the Parisian literary community, it’s poet Paul Verlaine. (The same for ether and cocaine.) As these things do, drugs were widely used and wildly popular in artistic circles and other countercultural communities (for the time): “Addiction, homosexuality and transvestism did not necessarily go together,” Eugene Weber writes in France: Fin de Siècle, “but they moved in the same circles and were part of the same fin de siècle spirit.” Roughly 25 years later, opium and morphine had made their way into mainstream French culture, too. When the war ended in 1847, thousands of young Parisians poured back into the city with an acquired taste for high octane, anise-y booze. But it picked up real momentum in the 1840s, when French soldiers were sent off to Africa - France was now at war with Algeria - with bottles of absinthe to stave off malaria (and boredom). By way of purchase, marriage and possibly theft, Ordinaire’s recipe was, by 1797, being produced en masse and sold as recreational alcohol in a distillery owned by Henri-Louis Pernod, still one of the most widely recognized names in absinthe today.