Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/135

 "Wormwood" is undoubtedly a work of genius—a strange, horrible book, yet fraught with a tremendous moral. The story of inhuman vengeance goes swiftly on, without a stop or stay; one feels that the little bride-girl is doomed, that the priest must die, that unutterable misery must be the final lot of all the actors in the story.

Marie Corelli does not overstate the case when she declares that absinthe has taken a grim and cancerous hold of Paris. It is called for in the cafés as naturally as we, in London, order a "small" or "large" Bass. But what a difference in the two beverages! A French writer of authority says that fifteen per cent. of the French army are rendered incapable by the use of absinthe.

The bulk of the French populace drinks either bock or light wine, and it takes a fairly large amount of either to produce intoxication. In England the populace drinks draught ale or whiskey. Comparing the two peoples and their behavior—for example—on public holidays, we must allow that the French are by far the more sober nation. But in London we have not—except in one or two West-End cafés—this dreadful absinthe, and we may well be thankful that the drinking of it has not grown upon us as it has grown upon the Parisians.