Ice water dripped like plasma over a sugar cube poised on a spoon, then fell into the lucid green liquid at the bottom of the glass, each drop spreading a liquid mist until all the emerald clarity was replaced by opalescent cloud. A half-remembered line of poetry crept up on me: "The ceremony of innocence is drowned."

Where did that come from? I couldn't think, mesmerized as I was by the cube crumbling under the ever-so-slow trickle. The sugar gone, I filled the glass with more water and put it to my lips. There was a hint of anise, like pastis, but also the delicate aroma of bitter herbs that I'd never tasted before. So light. So refreshing. So…intoxicating. My first glass of absinthe.

I was among friends, and all of us were a little giddy as we drank, knowing that what we were doing had been against the law for most of the last century.

"Oh, I feel so warm," said a Frenchwoman among us. "So warm. Do you feel that?" A gentleman friend of hers laughed. "A votre santé," he said, "to your health," which reminded us all that absinthe has often been thought noxious. And the line of poetry went through my head again. "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." Yeats. Ah. It was W. B. Yeats. He must have known a lot about this stuff. "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Same poem. "The Second Coming." Ah, yes, I said to myself, half aloud, and sipped a little more.

So delicate in the mouth, so powerful in the mind, absinthe was the absolute favorite poison of poets and painters in that great and terrible time known as La Belle Epoque. It was said to give genius to those who didn't have any, and take it from those who did, but, be that as it may, Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso cannot be imagined, truly, without it.

In several volumes by French

- researcher Marie-Claude Delahaye and in Barnaby Conrad III's excellent Absinthe: History in a Bottle, you get an impressionistic notion of a world so thoroughly suffused in anise-scented cloud that you start to wonder if any writer or artist with vision was immune to the drink's charms.

Poets found new language on the page, painters discovered new strokes on the canvas. Manet, Degas, Gauguin and Toulouse-Lautrec certainly imbibed. Poet Paul Verlaine practically drowned in the stuff and his evil-genius/boy-lover, Arthur Rimbaud, believed absinthe was just the thing for "disordering the senses" and freeing the imagination. Even in the 1920s, after absinthe was banned in much of Europe, Ernest Hemingway knocked it back in Pamplona, and Harry Crosby, the rich, romantic, suicidal founder of the Black Sun Press in Paris, liked a splash of the contraband liquor in his dry Martinis.

In an era when ladies' bodies were whale-boned and bustled, women adored this elixir that liberated their minds. Compared with the cordials to which polite society had condemned them, this drink was so wonderfully fresh. "Absinthe makes the tart grow fonder," joked the poet Ernest Dowson, and even among the most buttoned-up women it lessened inhibitions and loosened libidos. As absinthe consumption spread through society, its use and its users raised all sorts of intemperate questions about discipline and order, love and art, drowning with every swallow the fake innocence of the times.

So, temperance crusaders fixed on it as the locus of all evil. An anti-alcohol campaigner in France declared that, "If absinthe isn't banned, our country will rapidly become an immense padded cell where half the Frenchmen will be occupied putting straightjackets on the other half." So ferocious was the moralizing onslaught against absinthe and the marshalling of pseudoscientific evidence that even after Prohibition came -- and went -- the stigma endured. Of course, so did the mystique, but only as a dimly remembered sin of the past. So, it is intriguing, indeed, that now, in the first (rather tepid) years of the twenty-first century, absinthe is coming back.

Or almost. Over the last few months liquors called absinthe, or absint or absenta, have proliferated in British bars and clubs, and even in a few American states. Absinthe aficionados on the Internet have tracked down about 30 labels produced by little enterprises from the Iberian Peninsula to the Japanese archipelago. But most of these alcohols are, as it were, denatured. Many are limited to 85 or 90 proof, and the wormwood content is negligible. Others have a home-brewed quality that does not inspire one's confidence, much less one's imagination. Spain, Portugal, tiny Andorra, the Czech Republic and Bulgaria all produce versions of the stuff. But do you really want to drink them? In France and Switzerland, where absinthe was born, and the best ought to be made, it was banned in 1915 and 1910 respectively, and it still cannot be sold or served within the law.

Of course, a whiff of the illicit elicits added pleasure for Parisians, who rarely let legal or political consistency stand in the way of commerce. And the British have always made a specialty of discovering the greatest pleasures France has to offer, then promoting them in the rest of the world. So it was with the "clarets" of Bordeaux. So it is with absinthe today. Since last summer, a

French pastis company has been making absinthe for export under the appropriate label "La Fée." (The firm prefers to remain nameless lest it be swamped with domestic French orders that cannot legally be filled.)

The four Englishmen who've made it their mission to revivify absinthe are anything but anonymous. They're straight out of the London club scene. John Moore, part of the ultrasmooth rock group Black Box Recorder ("The Facts of Life"), has been importing various brands to Cool Britannia since 1995. In 1998, Moore joined with George Rowley, of Bohemia Beer House, Gavin Pretor-Pinney, creative director of the intriguingly named magazine, The Idler, and Tom Hodgkinson, editor of that publication, to found a company called Green Bohemia importing a Czech variant called Hill's Absinth. They claim it did very well. But, for anyone passionate about the romance of absinthe (with an e), Hill's was pretty thin gruel.

For that, Delahaye says, you still have to go to Britain. "La Fée is only legal to export," she emphasizes. Disappointed, I ask if this French resurrection of absinthe is really a plot to poison British youth. She shrugged one of those conspiratorial French shrugs, and smiled mischievously. "Oh, no," she says. "Not at all."

Delahaye, with her medical and scientific background, is not one to dismiss the potentially noxious side effects of the green fairy. But, like most of the people who've studied the question in recent years, she's concluded that the most dangerous component of absinthe is the alcohol. Some of the herbal oils may also be carcinogenic or contribute to epileptic-type fits, she says, "but to consume enough to have an effect, you'd die long before of alcoholism." Nor does Delahaye believe there's much hope of hallucinatory experiences, even if alpha-thujone does share some molecular properties with THC, the active ingredient of marijuana. In fact, the alpha-thujone level in absinthe is regulated by the European Union, which permits 10 milligrams a liter, or almost three times La Fée's content of 3.4. "So," sighs Delahaye, "we have this absinthe that's made in France -- and to European standards -- but it can't actually be sold in France."

Now, this is a real shame. Absinthe is a drink that has geographical specificity, just as Orvieto's limpid wines need an Umbrian sunset for their full effect, or the great rums need Caribbean sands and ceiling fans. Absinthe, in Europe, seems to require the mirror-walled cafés of Paris or rustic French inns full of color-mad painters to achieve its full effect. (In America, you'd want to evoke the spirit of Baudelaire's idol, Edgar Allan Poe, in the old, Gothic South: perhaps in the redolent alleys of New Orleans; or on a plantation among the mottled shadows of a red sun glowing through the twisted branches of the live oaks at l'heure verte.) In sum, a certain threshold of decadence is required to make absinthe as truly delicious as it wants to be. And Auvers-sur-Oise, where hundreds of painters worked in the nineteenth century, would be a perfect place.

At the Auberge Ravoux, where van Gogh ended his life in 1890, owner Dominique-Charles Janssens understands well the special allure of absinthe. He serves a passable ersatz version in his restaurant, complete with the proper glasses and spoons. But for the full effect, one needs the real thing.

The ideal absinthe experience, I think, would be to welcome the

- arrival of the green hour at the zinc of Mme. Delahaye's establishment, temple that it is to la fée verte. Then, I'd wander the streets where Corot and Daubigny, Gauguin and van Gogh painted, and look out over the golden cornfields where the crows flew against an impossibly blue sky in the last week of van Gogh's life. And all the romance and intensity that was art, that was absinthe, in the summer of 1890 would come back to me. The sun would cast long shadows with that wonderfully clear light that brought the painters to Auvers, a place at once rural and civilized.