FRANCE: Brutish Wormwood

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Thus in the second year of the War the Paris correspondent of London's pompous Times described to anxious wives and sweethearts of Britain's warriors the insidious green potion that had been tempting their dear ones in bistros from Montmartre to Montparnasse. This harrowing revelation that British children yet unborn would pay for their father's absinthe drinking could never have passed His Majesty's censor had not the Times been privileged to announce simultaneously that the French Government was banning and prohibiting le diable vert (the green devil). Last week, after 19 years, all Europe was startled by persistent re ports of fresh absinthe deviltry in Paris.

To balance the French budget in these hard times lotteries and roulette have again been made legal. Last week, Paris was sure that absinthe will be next. The Cabinet of Premier Gaston ("Gastounet") Doumergue was reported considering whether to legalize absinthe at its full pre-War strength of 66% alcohol or perhaps go further and legalize what used to be called Swiss absinthe (80%). According to inspired reports, "The Government feels that by monopolizing the sale and manufacture of absinthe they can keep consumption within moderate limits and yet obtain a large revenue."

Absinthe connoisseurs contemptuously observed that the humdrum bourgeois statesmen who make up the present Cabinet were wasting their time debating anxiously such a minor factor as the alcoholic strength of a drink which gets its chief effect from wormwood (absinthium) which contains the powerful narcotic absinthin. The alcohol in absinthe acts as the carrier and catalyst of the drug in its subtle assault upon the brain. Neither wormy nor a wood, wormwood is a bitter-tasting weed fairly common in Europe and the U. S. under such local names as madderwort, mugwort, ming-wort, warmot and wermuth. Swiss farmers never think of buying absinthe, but make it at home from their own weeds. Swiss law, while banning the sale of absinthe in Switzerland, permits every farmer to make as much as he likes "for his own use."

Absinthe capital of the world today is no city of Europe or Asia but New Orleans. Louisianans have been sipping absinthe almost as long as the French who brought it back from their expeditions into North Africa centuries ago. The big New Orleans absinthe firm is L. E. Jung & Wulff Co. In 1926 Mr. Jung died worth some $250.000 and was succeeded by Mr. Wulff as president. Swank Son Frederick August Wulff is treasurer, plays crack polo and is a captain in the 108th Cavalry of Louisiana's National Guard, but the firm's "Grand Old Absinthe Man" is James Bartholomew Higgins, 78, who has been in absinthe for 63 years.

"Absinthe is not as bad as it is painted," said Mr. Higgins last week. "In the old Sazerac Bar on Royal Street I have seen the same men come in every day between 4 p. m. and dinner time, for years. They ordered absinthe frappe, a long cold drink you can sip while you sit and read your afternoon paper or talk with friends. There were scores of men who always took that one drink a day before dinner, and who I never saw take two drinks of absinthe the same day."

President Wulff, himself a judicious oldster of 62, blamed such victorian decadents as the late Oscar O'Flahertie Wills Wilde and Charles Pierre Baudelaire for leading Paris on to rash absinthe