A Grenelle, la bevitrice di assenzio

By 1886 absinthe had become the everyday drink of working Paris, cheap, strong and faintly green, taken so widely in the late afternoon that the hour earned its own name, l'heure verte, the green hour. Toulouse-Lautrec was in his early twenties and just settling into Montmartre, where he would spend his career painting the singers, drinkers and dancers of its cabarets and dance halls. Here a woman sits alone with her glass, looking off past us, in the kind of cafe-cabaret Lautrec was starting to haunt. He does not moralise over her or turn her into a warning. He simply watches, close and level, the way he would watch this whole nocturnal world for the next 15 years.