30 
ABSINTHE. 
that in the course of our hour’s Truffle-hunting we were warned off half-a- 
dozen times.— Gardeners' Chronicle. 
ABSINTHE. 
Much has been written lately in the daily press and medical journals on the 
effects of absinthe drinking, now becoming so general among all classes in 
France. The following article first appeared in the ‘ Pall Mall Gazette 1 :— 
“The indulgence in absinthe which already prevails to a great extent among all 
classes of Frenchmen threatens to become as widespread in France and as injurious 
there as opium-eating is in China. If a visitor to Paris strolls along the Boulevards 
from the Madeleine to the Bastille some summer’s afternoon, between five and six o’clock, 
which is commonly called the ‘hour of absinthe,’ he can hardly fail to remark hundreds 
of Parisians seated outside the various cafes, or lounging at the counters of the wine¬ 
shops, and imbibing this insidious stimulant. At particular cafes, the Cafe de Bade, for 
example, out of fifty idlers seated at the little round tables forty-five will be found thus 
engaged. But it is not on the Boulevards alone that absinthe is the special five o’clock 
beverage. In most of the wine-shops in the Faubourgs, in the Quartier Latin, and 
round about the Ecole Militaire, you may see at that particular hour workmen, students, 
soldiers, clerks, charbonniers, chiffonniers even, mixing their customary draughts of 
emerald-tinted poison, and watching the fantastic movements of the fluid as it sinks to 
the bottom of the glass, wherein it turns from green to an almost milky-white, at the 
moment when the perfumes of the various aromatic plants from which it is distilled 
disengage themselves. A quarter of a century ago, absinthe was the drink of French 
coachmen, grooms, and footmen, and people of the lowest class; to-day its most ardent 
lovers are to be found among educated and well-to-do Parisians. Literary men, pro¬ 
fessors, artists, actors, musicians, financiers, speculators, shopkeepers, even women, yield 
themselves up to its seductive influence—to those indefinable provocations which seem, 
they say, to impart renewed activity to an enfeebled brain, developing a world of new 
ideas, and which thus, it is believed, have inspired many a noble work of imagination 
in literature and art. It may be so, but then those who habitually excite the brain with 
absinthe soon discover that they can produce positively nothing without its aid, and that 
a time arrives when heavy stupor supersedes that excitement of the intellectual faculties 
which once seemed so easy and so harmless. After the first draught of this poison, 
which Dr. Legrand, who has studied its effects, pronounces to be one of the greatest 
scourges of our time, you seem to lose your feet, and you mount to a boundless realm 
without a horizon. You probably imagine that you are going in the direction of the 
infinite, whereas you are simply drifting into the incoherent. Absinthe affects the brain 
nnlike any other stimulant; it produces neither the heavy drunkenness of beer, the 
furious inebriation of brandy, nor the exhilarant intoxication of wine. It is an ignoble 
poison, destroying life not until it has more or less brutalized its votaries, and made 
drivelling idiots of them. There are two classes of absinthe drinkers. The one, after 
becoming accustomed to it for a short time, takes to imbibing it in considerable quan¬ 
tities, when all of a sudden delirium declares itself. The other is more regular, and, at 
the same time, more moderate in its libations; but upon them the effects, though neces¬ 
sarily more gradual, are none the less sure. Absinthe drinkers of the former class are 
usually noisy and aggressive during the period of intoxication, which, moreover, lasts 
much longer than drunkenness produced by spirits or wine, and is followed by extreme 
depression and a sensation of fatigue which are not to be got rid of. After a while the 
digestive organs become deranged, the appetite continues to diminish until it is altogether 
lost, and an intense thirst supplies its place. Now ensues a constant feeling of un¬ 
easiness, a painful anxiety, accompanied by sensations of giddiness and tinglings in the 
ears; and as the day declines hallucinations of sight and hearing begin. A desire of 
seclusion from friends and acquaintances takes possession of the sufferer, on whose 
countenance strong marks of disquietude may be seen ; his mind is oppressed by a 
settled melancholy, and his brain affected by a sort of sluggishness which indicates 
approaching idiocy. During its most active moments he is continually se ing either 
some imaginary persecutor from whom he is anxious to escape, or the fancied denun- 
