Finally, in 1846, the ground floor corner room became a saloon known as " Aleix's Coffee House," run by Jacinto Aleix and his brother, nephews of old Senora Juncadella. Relatives of the original owners turned it into an épicerie, then a bootshop. In 1820, after Francisco Juncadella died and Pedro Font returned to his native Spain, the place continued as a commission house for the barter of foodstuffs, tobacco, clothing, and Spanish liquor. The building was constructed in 1806 for the importing and commission firm of Juncadella & Font, two Catalans from Barcelona. Henry was just a struggling newspaperman named William Sidney Porter when he came to dream over an absinthe frappé
Alexis, Grand Duke of all Russians, drank here, and the chairs once creaked under William Howard Taft's presidential bulk. Beauregard are just a few of the many who relaxed over a green absinthe in this shady retreat. " The Old Absinthe House " with its scarred cypress bar was visited by many famous people: Oscar Wilde, Lafcadio Hearn, William Thackeray, Walt Whitman, Aaron Burr, and General P.G.T. (Today, one can still find a version of this made without wormwood and marketed under the name Herb Sainte.) Of all the ancient buildings in New Orleans's famed French Quarter, none has been more glorified by drunks and postcard photographers alike than a square, plaster and brick structure at the corner of Bourbon and Bienville streets. The drink, which was spelled absynthe in an 1837 New Orleans liquor advertisement, enjoyed a vogue under such brand names as Green Opal, Herbsaint, and Milky Way. Like most country doctors, he prepared his own remedies, and being acquainted with absinthe's use in ancient times, he began experimenting with it.Ībsinthe soon found its way to the Little Paris of North America, New Orleans. Ordinaire is said to have discovered the plant Artemisia absinthium growing wild in the hills of the Val-de-Travers region. On his periodic journeys by horseback, Dr. Modern absinthe allegedly was invented in 1792 by an extraordinary French doctor called Pierre Ordinaire, who fled France's revolution to settle in Couvet, a small village in western Switzerland. Absinthe incorporated Olympian legends of debauch and rather downhome peasant notions. Independent distilleries were producing absinthe made from the dried leaves of wormwood steeped in equal parts of malmsey wine and " burning water thrice distilled." The " Purl " of Tudor England was compounded of ale or hot beer and wormwood, and although it was mainly popular with the working classes, Samuel Pepys reported in his famous diary that he had enjoyed several glasses of wormwood ale one night " in a little house.which doubtless was a bawdy house." These dusty tales convey something of the mystique surrounding absinthe one imagines a flask of it sitting beside the alchemist's crocodile and the mandrake root. Over the centuries, however, wormwood drinks moved away from being just bitter medicine. He also recommended it as an elixir of youth and as a cure for bad breath. and noted that it was customary for the championin chariot races to drink a cup of absinthe leaves soaked in wine to remind him that even glory has its bitter side. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder called it apsinthium in the first century A.D. Hippocrates prescribed it for jaundice, rheumatism, anemia, and menstrual pains. Pythagoras recommended wormwood soaked in wine to aid labor in childbirth.
Most likely the word absinthe derives from the Greek word apsinthion, which means " undrinkable " presumably because of its bitter taste. Hippocrates recommended absinthe for juandice and rheumatism.Īncient absinthe was different from the liquor that Verlaine and Picasso imbibed, generally being wormwood leaves soaked in wine or spirits.