CHARLES
CROS (1842-1888)
Charles Cros was a poet, physicist, chemist, painter
and musician. He is reputed to be the actual inventor of the
phonograph, a device he called a Paréophone, in 1877. Lacking
financial resources, he was never able to patent his device, nor
commence production of it, and was later eclipsed by other inventors,
most notably Thomas Edison. He was also known for developing certain
color photography processes and an automatic telegraph. He was known
to drink up to twenty absinthes a day, and was a regular at some of
the most well-known Paris Absinthe Cafes.
ERNEST
HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)
Perhaps one of the most recent of famous absinthe
drinkers, Hemingway drank absinthe long after it was made illegal in
most parts of the world. He was known to drink absinthe in Spain,
before bull-fighting and perhaps before his running with the bulls. It
is also rumored that he liked to keep a few bottles around while
living in the United States. References to absinthe appear in many of
his famous writings, including Death In The Afternoon and For
Whom The Bell Tolls. Obviously, Hemingway never became the kind of
absinthe addict as others mentioned on this page, but even so, he,
like so many others, ended his life in suicide in 1961.
ALFRED
JARRY (1873-1907)
The famous author of the scandalous French absurdist
play, Ubu Roi. Jarry was an eccentric writer who was known to
drink absinthe straight. While Jarry considered his less well-known Exploits
and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, 'Pataphysician' his greatest work,
he will always be remembered for creating the foul and monstrous
character Pere Ubu, a grotesquerie who immediately drove audiences to
anger and indignation. Pere Ubu was the principal character in Ubu
Roi, which outraged the French theatre patrons of the time, and
made the young Jarry a cult figure. The French stage would never be
the same again. Jarry admittedly used absinthe to fuse together the
dream and reality, art and life.
ARTHUR
RIMBAUD (1855-1891)
Arthur Rimbaud was a young poet who arrived in Paris
at the age of sixteen, destitute but carrying an impressive body of
work. He soon fell in with Paul
Verlaine and the two became lovers. They would drink absinthe
together and play cruel games with each other. Rimbaud finally broke
off with Verlaine
in a particularly messy incident in which Verlaine
shot Rimbaud and was sentenced to prison. Rimbaud gave up absinthe and
spent the later years of his life enlisted in the Dutch army and
became involved in colonization and gun running. Although he had
stopped writing poetry, he nevertheless ended up being known as one of
France's greatest poets. He died alone (many thought he was already
long since dead) from possible cancer or complications of syphilis.
VINCENT
VAN GOGH (1853-1890)
Probably the most famous drinker of absinthe, nobody
really knows the extent of his absinthe intake. Most scholars believe
him to be an avid absinthe drinker, and some have said he was not only
addicted to absinthe but all manner of turpenes, of which absinthe is
a member, as well as the turpentine he used to thin his paint. But to
read his letters belies somewhat of an abhorrance of the drink and
those who drank it regularly. Some say he was actually a victim of
toxosis from digitalis, which at the time was a common treatment for
epilepsy. This would account for the sensitive nature of light in his
paintings, as digitalis sometimes causes its users to be
ultra-sensitive to light and to cause them to see halos around light
sources, as evident in van Gogh's paintings. Still, the psychosis he
is known to have experienced is more consistent with acute alcoholism
or absinthism, but an acurate diagnosis of his condition is not
readily available and we perhaps shall never really know the truth.
PAUL MARIE VERLAINE (1844-1896)
Bohemian poet of Paris, Verlaine sung the praises of
absinthe in his youth, and damned absinthe on his death-bed. He
consorted with prostitutes and men while drinking, to the dismay of
his young life. For a time the younger poet Rimbaud
was his constant companion, both platonically and sexually, for which
he is said to have had a tremendous guilt which drew him to further
bouts of intoxication. In his later days, he was poverty-stricken and
alone, and while despising other forms of intoxication he still
embraced his absinthe. Even while he cursed the drink on his deathbed,
his friends were said to be hiding bottles for him under his pillow.
