The Nouvelle-Athènes

Walk up to the Place Pigalle in Paris in 1875. The square sits at the foot of Montmartre (pronounced “mon-MART-ruh”), the steep hill on the city’s northern edge that was, then as now, where painters and poets and people who didn’t have proper jobs tended to live because the rents were cheap and the wine was cheaper. On the corner of the square, with windows onto the street, sits a café. Its name is the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes— French for “the New Athens,” a grand classical name slapped onto a smoky room with marble tables and gas lamps and a back wall lined with mirrors. By 1875 this is the most important room in modern painting in France, and almost nobody outside it knows that yet.

To understand why, you need to know what it replaced. For years the loose group of young painters now called the Impressionists — Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, the rest — had drunk and argued at a different café, the Café Guerbois, over on the rue des Batignolles in another quarter. (Reader, file this fact away, because the next time you see a popular history place L’Absinthe in the Guerbois, you’ll know it’s wrong. The Guerbois was the old hangout. The Nouvelle-Athènes is the new one.) Around 1875 they migrated, more or less en masse, to the Nouvelle-Athènes, and the painters brought the writers with them — the critic Edmond Duranty, who in 1876 would publish a little pamphlet, La Nouvelle Peinture (“The New Painting”), arguing that art’s job was to look at the unsentimental modern present; the young novelist Émile Zola, sharpening the same argument in fiction. The painters, on the same migration, were doing it in oil paint.

So a café, in this period and this city, is not just a café. It is an office, a salon, and a public living room rolled into one. A working painter who can’t afford studio heat (and most of them couldn’t) can sit at a marble-top table for hours over a single drink, arguing with other painters about what art ought to be. Degas, who was forty-one and prickly and rich enough that he didn’t have to be there for the cheap rent, was nonetheless there constantly. He was the café’s most acid wit and one of its most committed observers. The picture we’re about to look at is essentially him taking notes on his own bar.

Now to the drink in the title. Absinthe (pronounced “AB-sinth”) was, in 1875, the cheapest and strongest of the popular Paris liquors. It was a clear, high-proof spirit — roughly seventy percent alcohol, about twice as strong as a modern vodka — distilled from anise, fennel, and the bitter herb wormwood, which gave it a faint green color and a faintly medicinal taste. You drank it the way you didn’t drink most spirits: you set the glass down, balanced a perforated slotted spoon across the rim, laid a sugar cube on the spoon, and slowly dripped ice water through the sugar into the absinthe. The water hit the spirit and the drink suddenly went cloudy and milky-pale — an effect called the louche(pronounced “loosh”; French for “shady” or “murky,” and yes, the word has the double meaning on purpose). That ritual of preparation, the green going milky, took a few minutes. By the end of it you had a tall, pale, slightly cloudy drink in front of you, and you were committed to the next hour of your life.

In 1875, this was an absolutely ordinary drink. Working men drank it on the way home from the factory; office clerks drank it at five; respectable middle-class Parisians drank it in nice cafés like the Nouvelle-Athènes. It was sometimes called the fée verte — “the green fairy” — but cheerfully, the way you’d nickname a favorite drink, not ominously. The full anti-absinthe panic — the medical scare-stories about “absinthism,” the temperance crusades, the eventual outright bans across France in 1915 and most of Europe in the same era — was still ten or twenty years off. In 1875 absinthe was not yet the green poison. It was the green Tuesday-night drink.

That timing matters, because the picture we’re about to look at is one of the things that helpedturn the drink into the panic. Not in 1876, when Degas painted it. Seventeen years later, in London, when Victorians who had never set foot in the Nouvelle-Athènes looked at it and decided what they were seeing was the road to ruin. We’ll get to that. But hold the date: 1875–76, in a real café, with a real drink that wasn’t yet a moral problem. That’s the room Degas walked into with his sketchbook.

He wasn’t going to paint the room as it actually was, full of arguing painters and clinking glasses. He was going to paint its opposite. He was going to paint a Nouvelle-Athènes drained of conversation, with two strangers (who weren’t strangers) shoved off into one corner, and the rest of the picture given over to empty tables. He was going to use his own friends — and his own bar — to make a portrait of being alone in a crowd. That was the picture.