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following among the Bohemian artists of Paris. The famous 1875-76 Degas painting Dans un Café has the subtitle L’Absinthe. Apparently it was ‘hissed at’ when it was auctioned in the early 1890s, due to its ‘depraved’ subject matter. Manet painted The Absinthe Drinker , while in 1887 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec did a pastel drawing of Vincent van Gogh with a glass of absinthe, while van Gogh himself painted a still life of a carafe and a glass of absinthe. On 27 July 1890, van Gogh shot himself. A thuja tree (a source of wormwood oil) was planted on his grave, probably inspired by van Gogh’s love of thuja trees, whose flame-like images he included in some of his paintings.
    However, as imbibing absinthe became all the rage with Parisians, ‘absinthism’ also became recognised as a medical illness.

A key ingredient of absinthe is WORMWOOD, a small shrub belonging to the daisy family.
    Absinthism
    In 1879, a Dr Richardson wrote in The New York Times a fairly typical description of ‘absinthism’: ‘The bitterness increases the craving or desire, and the confirmed habitué is soon unable to take food until he is duly primed for it by the deadly provocative. The sufferer…is left cold, tremulous, unsteady of movement, and nauseated…In the worst cases, the person becomes a confirmed epileptic.’
    An 1882 report from The New York Times noted: ‘The poor wretches given up to absinthe-drinking suffer from a peculiar train of nervous symptoms, the most prominent of which is epilepsy of a remarkably severe character, terminating in softening of the brain and death.’ The report then discusses a man known to drink large quantities of absinthe. ‘The convulsions lasted until death—four days and four nights. During the last five or six hours of life the skin of the face became almost black.’
    And, of course, lurid prose was written to deter still-innocent potential imbibers from even thinking of drinking absinthe.
    A typical example from The New York Times of 1884 had the enticing title of ‘The charms of absinthe: The allurements it holds out to its victims, and the sting that comes afterwards, confessions of a Frenchman who succumbed to it’. In a bar, a disgustingly healthy and fresh-faced American youth sees a ‘tall, sallow-faced Frenchman, with a heavy and carefully waxed moustache’ drinking a glass of absinthe. The Frenchman tells the sorry tale of his downfall, from being a brilliant, wealthy and well-connected medical student with a glowing future, to the unwell absinthe-addicted loner who had lost his friends and his future. He confesses, ‘…I lost my power of reasoning. I had no more idea of a correct syllogism than I had of the man in the moon. This was followed by utter prostration. It ended in delirium tremens. I justescaped a lunatic asylum.’ In response to this precautionary tale, the shaken young American vows to abstain from the awful absinthe.
    And It Gets Worse…
    Despite this bad press, the consumption of absinthe increased even further in the 1880s and 1890s, especially in France.
    This was due to two factors. First, an imported American bug, the aphid, had attacked French grapevines, destroying many French vineyards, and so the production of wine dropped precipitously. Second, there was a huge increase in the mass production of absinthe, significantly dropping its price. As a result, the annual consumption of absinthe in France increased by 15 times from 1875 to 1913, to some 40 million litres.
Death of French Vineyards
In the 16th century, French colonists brought European grapevines to Florida in the USA to grow grapes. They failed.
A tiny North American insect (the ‘yellow aphid’ or ‘plant louse’) attacked the roots of the European grapevines. It stabbed the roots with its snout or proboscis. It would inject toxic saliva through one ‘pipe’ in the proboscis and suck up the sap to feed itself through another pipe. As the plant got sick, its internal pressure reduced,