Feverish Fairy

No prizes for guessing who wrote this, or what the drink is:

‘There was very little left of it [in his hipflask] and one cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in the cafés, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of bookshops, and kiosks, and of galleries, and of the Parc Montsouris, of the Stade Buffalo, and of the Butte Chaumont, of Foyet’s old hotel, and of being able to relax and read in the evening, of all the old things he had enjoyed and forgotten and that came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue numbing, brain warming, stomach warming, idea changing liquid alchemy.’

When Ernest Hemingway (the sentence is from For Whom the Bell Tolls) and Hadley crossed the Atlantic in 1921, absinthe had been banned in France for six years. The ban was the result of lobbying from a jealous wine industry and a moral panic based on absinthe’s reputation as a hallucinogenic. La Fée Verte (the Green Fairy) has always been legally available in Spain, however, which was where Hemingway later prosecuted his love affair with the stuff.

But was absinthe hallucinogenic? Here’s Oscar Wilde on the subject:

Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking I was clearheaded and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust. The most wonderful flowers — tulips, lilies and roses — sprang up and made a garden of the café. ‘Don’t you see them?’ I said to him. ‘But Monsieur, there is nothing there.’

Last month, France’s teetotal President Sarkozy announced the lifting of the ban after nearly a century.