Green fairy liquid

A gushy woman told Whistler that she thought he was the greatest artist since Velazquez. ‘Why drag in Velazquez?’ Whistler drawled. One of the bonuses of any book on absinthe is that it drags in — corrals — more or less all the great French artists and writers from the 1860s to the early 1900s, and a few English ones too, such as Beardsley and Wilde. But it also brings in less celebrated figures, like Charles Cros, who died from his 20-glasses-a-day absinthe habit in 1888.

The son of a French doctor of law and philosophy, Cros was a poet. Adams devotes an appendix to Cros’ poem ‘Lendemain’, about the effects of absinthe-drinking. Like so many French poems, it is swooningly mystical and sonorous in the original, but seems magniloquent and over the top when rendered into the language of John Bull:

Absinthe drunk on a winter evening
Lights up in green the smoky soul;
And the flowers on the darling one
Exude perfume before the bright fire.