Absinthe

Absinthe, The Green Fairy: Emile Zola considered him a real social evil poison that killed many French. He was banned since 1915 but now reappears in lighter version. Verlaine, Degas, Manet created the myth.

The wormwood is one of the myths that characterized the end of the nineteenth century. A liquor that has Paul Verlaine, staunch drinker, a reference that impressed but forced a connotation to a full term.

Its spread had begun to 1830 when it began the repatriation of soldiers who had conquered Algeria. It said that some 'of wormwood diluted in water, they had preserved from typhus, from cholera, dysentery by.

In France the odd drink bitter flavour taste of anise quickly became a fashion, almost a social rite. The péril called it the danger vert green, or even La fée concerns, the green fairy.

Officially it is a very tasty appetizer whose aromatic vaporise rising quickly in the head by a light and pleasant sense of stunning, of remoteness from reality. In addition, the drink is prepared with a vaguely initiation ritual that increases the fascination.

Having paid a little of liquid in the bottom of a coin cup-shaped, leans on the top edge of the glass tube, a teaspoon (if you did fogged the most varied, then became objects of small antiques), which supports a sugar cube. It thus leaves especially fresh water that slowly dissolves sugar and dilutes the liquor, softened. The effects depend on the amount of water and, of course, the amount of glasses.

The time des then went from five to seven in the afternoon, l'heure verte called, time, Green, among others coincides with that adultery hours.

The wormwood accompanied the life of bohemians, for example in the café Momus described by Henry Murger in his scenes from the life of Puccini bohemian that will music. For young people, the drink becomes a sign of their romance, the mark, a bit of 'theatre, their foreignness to the values of the middle class.

The wormwood does not help. The poet Musset, who abuses, which seem to say, a forty years old already. The theme des becomes one of the most repeated in the literature, in satire, in painting. In 1859 Edouard Manet painted his Buveur of absinthe that raises scandal and is refused by the Salon because, as a model, the artist took a Clochard and transfigured striking realism of the jury.

Toulouse Lautrec, Van Gogh, Picasso, Gauguin, there is no great artist who does not portray the absent expression, eyes lost a drinker of wormwood. One test with outstanding results also Edgar Degas painting a couple sitting at a table of marble. You have lost your gaze, he sets disenchanted something we do not see outside the frame.

The title is absinthe (1876), one of the most beautiful paintings of Degas that has a background but almost comical. The painter had used as models two of his friends, the actress Ellen Andrée theater and the sculptor Desboutin Marcellin, well-known personalities in the sphere of bohème.

What is ridiculous is that the two were almost entirely no drinkers. When the picture had already become famous, the Andrée confided in an interview: "Yes, in my glass, but only in mine, true there was the wormwood. Everything that we were asked to look into the void like two stupid. "
Which seems a fiction, but only in the context of Degas. Why the wormwood, and not just the wormwood for truth but the whole system of life, really killing. Verlaine, who died at 52 years, is one of the elderly. Baudelaire was dead to 46, Rimbaud at 37 as Van Gogh and ToulouseLautrec, Alfred Jarry even 32.

In Courtesy of (From "La Repubblica" on 18 December 2001)