Paul Verlaine at the table

In the literary Paris of the Second Empire and the Third Republic, the penniless poet does not dine in three bourgeois courses. His day revolves around the café and the wine merchant: the green hour of late afternoon (the absinthe aperitif), the snack eaten standing at the zinc counter, the hot soup taken at the counter for a few pennies, and, on lucky evenings or during exile in Belgium, a proper brasserie meal. They eat little, drink much, and talk of verse and music.

Absinthe, a maceration of wormwood, anise, and fennel served over melted sugar dripped drop by drop from a fountain, is the emblematic ingredient of all Symbolist bohemia. For Verlaine it was both muse and poison: its aniseed bitterness runs through his Latin Quarter cafés and marks his collections as much as his physical ravages.