Guess the date the story first appeared to be in with a chance of winning prizes including a ticket to a Masterclass of your choice
To mark the Guardian’s bicentenary, we are running a competition for readers. We have selected six stories that have appeared over the past 200 years. There is a link between them, but just to make it a little spicier we will not be telling you what that link is.
The first of the six stories was reprinted in the Guardian last Friday (7 May). The second is below, with the other three to follow on 21 and 28 May, and 4 June. On 11 June, we will publish the final piece along with the other five, alongside a form for entries. You must guess the date that each of the stories appeared. The first 10 randomly chosen readers who correctly identify the dates (or got closest to them) will receive prizes, including a ticket to a Guardian Masterclass of your choice, a ticket to a Guardian Live event of your choice, and merchandise packs of commemorative gifts to mark the 200th anniversary. All entries will need to be received by 2 July. The results and a list of winners will appear on 16 July. If more than 10 people get all six right, the winning names will be drawn from a hat (possibly metaphorical).
Here is the second story. File it away, make a note of your answer, and look for the next story next Friday. Good luck.
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The absinthe drinker
The Pall Mall Gazette has a curious paper on absinthe drinking in France. The writer says: The indulgence in absinthe which already prevails to a great extent among all classes of Frenchmen threatens to become as widespread in France and as injurious there as opium eating is in China. If a visitor to Paris strolls along the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Bastille some summer’s afternoon between 5 and 6 o’clock – which is commonly called the “hour of absinthe” – he can hardly fail to remark hundreds of Parisians seated outside the various cafes or lounging at the counters of the wine shops and imbibing this insidious stimulant. At particular cafes, the Cafe de Bade for example, out of 50 idlers seated at the little round tables, 45 will be found thus engaged.
But it is not on the boulevards alone that absinthe is the special 5 o’clock beverage. In most of the wine shops in the faubourgs, in the “Quartier Latin”, and round about the Ecole Militaire, you may see at that particular hour workmen, students, soldiers, clerks, charbonniers, chiffoniers even, mixing their customary draughts of emerald-tinted poison and watching the fantastic movements of the fluid as it sinks to the bottom of the glass, wherein it turns from green to an almost milky white, at the moment when the perfumes of the various aromatic plants from which it is distilled disengage themselves.
After the first draught of this poison, which Dr Legrand, who has studied its effects, pronounces to be one of the greatest scourges of our time, you seem to lose your feet, and you mount to a boundless realm without horizon. You probably imagine that you are going in the direction of the infinite, whereas you are simply drifting into the incoherent.
Absinthe affects the brain unlike any other stimulant; it produces neither the heavy drunkenness of beer, the furious inebriation of brandy, nor the exhilarant intoxication of wine. It is an ignoble poison, destroying life not until it has more or less brutalised its votaries, and made drivelling idiots of them.
There are two classes of absinthe drinkers. The one, after becoming accustomed to it for a short time, takes to imbibing it in considerable quantities, when all of a sudden delirium declares itself. The other is more regular, and at the same time more moderate in its libations; but upon them the effects, though necessarily more gradual, are none the less sure.
Absinthe drinkers of the former class are usually noisy and aggressive during the period of intoxication, which, moreover, lasts much longer than drunkenness produced by spirits or wine, and is followed by extreme depression and a sensation of fatigue which is not to be got rid of. After a while the digestive organs become deranged, the appetite continues to diminish until it is altogether lost, and an intense thirst supplies its place.
Now ensues a constant feeling of uneasiness, a painful anxiety, accompanied by sensations of giddiness and tinglings in the ears; and as the day declines hallucinations of sight and hearing begin. A desire of seclusion from friends and acquaintances takes possession of the sufferer, on whose countenance strong marks of disquietude may be seen; his mind is oppressed by a settled melancholy, and his brain affected by the sort of sluggishness which indicates approaching idiocy.
During its more active moments he is continually seeing either some imaginary persecutor from whom he is anxious to escape, or the fancied denunciator of some crime he dreams he has committed. From these phantoms he flies to hide himself, or advances passionately towards them protesting his innocence. At this stage the result is certain, and dissolution is rarely delayed very long.
