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This is a very clean and cheerful village, devoted to the lucrative manufacture of absinthe, and producing inhabitants who look like gentlemen and ladies, and promenade the ways in bonnets and hats, after a most un-Swiss-like fashion.
A drinking place every two doors, with tables out on the sidewalks, and absinthe in big glassfuls! Tonet had seen it all himself, and described everything with gestures or grimaces that vividly pictured each episode and kept his companions laughing noisily. And up there was the Moorish city.
Perhaps he had been wrong in letting her do some things drink absinthe, for example. One lost one's sense of mental and moral perspective in a place like this. At least he had guarded her well. If he had not met her that day at the station, she might have fallen into worse hands than his own. Things could not go on indefinitely as they had been going. What was to be the end of it all?
The ring-doves liked the hemp-seed and the maize, but the white peacock seemed to prefer sponge-cake soaked in lemonade. "I know a literary man who once taught a peacock to eat sponge-cake soaked in absinthe," Miss Sandus remarked, on a key of reminiscence. "Really? An unprincipled French literary man, I suppose?" was Susanna's natural inference.
Well, I'm ready to take the consequences. You talk glibly of giving up drinking, but it's the only thing I've got left now. What do you think life would be to me without it? Can you understand the happiness I get out of my absinthe? I yearn for it; and when I drink it I savour every drop, and afterwards I feel my soul swimming in ineffable happiness. It disgusts you.
"Otherwise we shall be strung up to a pitch of tension that will make us think the requiem of church bells, which we shall hear in a few minutes, the voices of spirits or of spectres. Julian, here is your absinthe. What will you drink, Miss Bright? Brandy, lemonade, whiskey?" "Lemonade, please," Cuckoo said, almost in a whisper. The tears were crowding in her eyes.
At last, she mixed with the worst kind of people, drank absinthe, they say, and had nothing to put to her back. When she got any money she spent it on a parcel of hussies instead of buying clothes." "And where is she living?" "Right by, in a house in the Rue Vintimille." "If that is so," replied M. Lecoq, severely, "I am astonished that she is not here."
Evidently they were of the mauvais sujet class; their bleary eyes and limp jaws told plainly of a common love of absinthe; and their eyes had that haggard, worn look of slumbering ferocity which follows hard in the wake of drink.
But then I didn't know anything of the rights of the case. He's a queer, cantankerous devil, and he's always being wronged, according to his own accounts, and not only by the critics. No one pays much attention to what he says nowadays. It's just that absinthe and the cigarettes that are the ruin of him, day and night. Poor devil! why can't he stick to whisky and a pipe, like a decent Christian!"
"My dear Dick, I'll gladly take to morphia or drink if it will help," said Miss Van Tuyn. "I can easily get the Cafe Royal expression. One has only to sit with a glass of something the colour of absinthe in front of one and look sea-sick. I'm perfectly certain that with a week or two's practice I could look quite as degraded as Cora."
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