ABSINTHE. 
357 
the  Madeleine  to  the  Bastile  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  par- 
ticular 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,  stu- 
dents, soldiers,  clerks,  charbonniers,  chiffonniers,  even,  mixing 
their  customary  draughts  of  emerald-tinted  poison,  and  watch- 
ing 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,  professors,  artists,  ac- 
tors, musicians,  financiers,  speculators,  shopkeepers,  even  women, 
yield  themselves  up  to  its  seductive  influence — to  those  undefina- 
ble  provocations  which  seem,  they  say,  to  impart  renewed  activ- 
ity 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  supercedes  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  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 
unlike  any  other  stimulant ;  it  produces  neither  the  heavy  drunk- 
