Creative devotees
Today's absinthe vendors would thrill to the testimonials that artists and writers once lavished on the spirit. Toulouse-Lautrec. Paul Verlaine. Arthur Rimbaud. Vincent Van Gogh. Pablo Picasso. These people didn't just drink the stuff - they grabbed paintbrushes and pens to prove how absinthe inspired and wrecked them.
Czech painter Viktor Oliva focused on the fantasy, creating a translucent green fairy perched on a table, invisible to the besotted man sitting there. The fairy in Albert Maignan's "Green Muse," more brazen, actually runs her fingers through a poet's hair.
Depicting the drink's darker side with sad, muddy colors, Edgar Degas painted a sullen woman sipping the cocktail. Manet portrayed a top-hatted drunk standing in the shadows, an empty bottle lying in the foreground.
French poet Rimbaud, who seems to know the feel of the fairy's touch, called his drink of choice "a liquid jewel."
"The darkest forest melts into an open meadow," he wrote. "Waves of green seduce. Sanity surrendered, the soul spirals toward the murky depths, wherein lies the beautiful madness - absinthe."
Oscar Wilde famously summed up the absinthe experience like this: "The first stage is like ordinary drinking, the second when you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things."
Even Hemingway, no waster of words, wrote of an absinthe'd evening: "Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks."
Absinthe's mythology is both blessing and curse for marketing departments. If not for the stories, who would pursue the drink? But if not for the stories, who would be disappointed in it?
Other drinks are served with an emotional twist - Guinness stout and certain wines, for instance. But for Paul Clarke, a Seattle writer behind the Cocktail Chronicle blog, only absinthe, with its vivid historical bouquet, so clearly evokes both a specific place - Belle Epoque Paris - and an era.
"When you serve a glass, you're pouring a whole rush of background along with it," he says. "When you smell it as it slowly louches, it's a highly distinctive and beautiful scent - it's almost impossible not to think of an art nouveau print while you're pouring."
In fact the French appropriated the word "louche" to help people articulate the soft roiling and misting as water droplets hit a glass of absinthe. It had been an adjective meaning "shady" or "disreputable."
