From the Gin Fizz House to the Absinthe House is a long way,--in more meanings than one. The Absinthe House is hardly less famed, but in these days when drinking has largely gone out of fashion and wormwood is under the particular ban of the United States statutes, it is largely a relic of the past. It stands in the heart of the old French town and before we come to its broad portal, let us study the fascinating quarter in which we are to find it.
We have already spoken of Canal street, so broad in contradistinction to the very narrow streets of the rest of the older parts of the town, that one can almost see the narrow water-filled ditch that once traversed it, as the dividing line of the city. South of Canal street, the so-called American portion of the city, with many affectations of modernity--north of that thoroughfare--curiously enough the down-stream side--the French quarter, architecturally and romantically the most fascinating section of any large city of the United States. The very names of its streets--Chartres, Royal, Bourbon, Burgundy, Dauphine, St. Louis--quicken anticipation. And anticipation is not dulled when one comes to see the great somber houses with their mysterious and moth-eaten courtyards and the interesting folk who dwell within them.
We choose Royal street, heading straight away from Canal street as if in shrinking horror of electric signs and moving-picture theaters. In a single square they are behind and forgotten and, if it were not for the trolley cars and the smartly dressed French girls, we might be walking in Yesterday. The side streets groan under the same ugly, heavy patterns of Belgian block pavement that have done service for nearly a century. Originally the blocks--brought long years ago as ballast in the ships from Europe--were in a pretty pattern, laid diagonally. But heavy traffic and the soft sub-strata of the river-bank town have long since worked sad havoc with the old pavements. And a new city administration has finally begun to replace them with the very comfortable but utterly unsentimental asphalt.
Here is the Absinthe House, worth but a single glance, for it has descended to the estate of an ordinary corner saloon. Only ordinary corner saloons are not ordinarily housed in structures of this sort. You can see houses like this in the south of France and in Spain--so I am told. For below Canal street is both French and Spanish. Remember, if you please, that the French of the Southland shared the same hard fate of their countrymen in that far northern valley of the great St. Lawrence--neglect. The French are the most loyal people on earth. Their fidelity to their language and their customs for nearly two centuries proves that. That faith, steadfast through the tragedy of the indifference and neglect of their mother country, doubly proves it. And the only difference between the Frenchman of Quebec and the Frenchman of New Orleans was that in the South the Spaniard was injected into the problem. But the Frenchman in the South was not less loyal than his fellow-countryman of the North. A dissolute king sitting in the wreck of his great family in the suburbs of Paris might barter away the title of his lands, but no Louis could ever trade away the loyalty of the older French of New Orleans to their land and its institutions. In such a faith was the French quarter of the city born. In such faith has it survived, these many years. And perhaps the very greatest episodes in the history of the city were in those twenty days of November, 1803, when the French flag displaced the Spanish in the old Place d'Armes, to be replaced only by the strange banner of a newborn nation which was given the opportunity of working out the destiny of the new France.