The night the Doubs ran green: the 1901 Pernod fire

On Sunday, August 11, 1901, at half past noon, lightning struck the Pernod Fils absinthe works at Pontarlier, near the Swiss border. The wires carried it into the cellars, where the spirit was stored in great tanks. "Terrific explosions," an American paper reported, came "as reservoir after reservoir of absinthe blew up." The burning liquor ran out of the works and into the River Doubs, "transforming the surface into a sheet of fire."

Nobody was killed. Two hundred and fifty workers were put out of work. The part people remember came two days later, twelve kilometers away, at a cave mouth that Gustave Courbet had painted. The absinthe settled an argument the geologists of the Doubs had been having for years. The scientist who proved it also wrote down what else the river could carry, and the page ends with that.

1805 to 1901: Pernod Fils and the missing river

Pernod Fils dated itself to 1805, when Henri-Louis Pernod opened at Pontarlier, and by 1901 it was the best known name in absinthe. The regional heritage inventory, built from the firm's own records, puts its output at 8,600 liters a day in 1884 and 20,000 liters a day by 1896, from twenty six stills. The works sat on the bank of the Doubs on the edge of town.

The river was the problem the geologists cared about. A few kilometers below Pontarlier, around Arçon, the Doubs loses water into its limestone bed. Twelve kilometers to the northwest and about 250 meters lower, the Loue comes out of a cliff at Ouhans, already a full river. Eugène Fournier, a professor at the science faculty in Besançon, had argued in print that the Loue was the lost water of the Doubs. Dye tests with fluorescein, the August 1901 report says, "had not given conclusive results."

August 11, 1901: the fire

The storm broke over Pontarlier in the early afternoon. L'Illustration, the Paris weekly, reported that the lightning struck the factory and that a spark from the electric system was said to have lit the alcohol in the cellar vats. When the fire reached the stores of filled bottles, "explosions followed." The alcohol "ran in floods into the Doubs in streams of fire."

Photographers were out within the hour. Their postcards are captioned by the clock: the fire at half past one, at two, at three. By the last of them a single white plume covers the long sheds. Most of the absinthe ran into the river in the evening, the Academy report says. Only on Tuesday morning, L'Illustration said, was the danger over.

August 13, 1901: the smell at Ouhans

At noon on Tuesday, "less than forty eight hours after" the fire, the keepers of a works at the Loue spring noticed a smell of absinthe. It grew "very strong toward three o'clock." By Wednesday morning it had followed the river down to Mouthier, where it was "as strong as a glass of absinthe" on a café table. In the cave the water had "a slight taste of anise." Below the first falls it foamed in white, soapy flakes and piled up in "dirty green foam."

Two bottles of Loue water went to Paris. André Berthelot examined them. He distilled the water, drew off a drop of oil that smelled and behaved like anise, and found a deep green resin "with the properties of wormwood resins." On August 19 his report went before the Academy of Sciences. The evidence, he wrote, left "no doubt" that the liqueur had reached the Loue. Fournier was right.

August 24 to September 22, 1901: the story crosses the Atlantic

A cable from Paris dated August 24 told American readers that the fire had settled "the much-debated geographical problem" of where the river came from. The St. Louis paper printed the wrong river, the Loing, which runs south of Paris. By September 22 the story had reached Richmond, Virginia, in fuller form: the streams had "turned the pale opaline-green hue of absinthe and water," mixed and ready to drink, "though some would add a few lumps of sugar." The Richmond writer could not resist a last line about the Pontarlier expert: "he may have been tasting the opaline waters of the Loue."

Fournier took the fire to the Academy himself on December 2, 1901, in a paper on rivers captured by underground streams in limestone country. An English summary in the Geographical Journal the next year said the link "has been positively proved by the recent fire at the Pernod works."

1901 to 1903: rebuilding

Pernod Fils did not stop for long. In September 1901 the firm was allowed to move its stills and coloring vats into the cooperage and keep working, the heritage inventory records. The distillery was rebuilt on the same ground in 1902 and 1903, with sixty stills able to make 25,000 liters a day. Twelve years later France banned absinthe. The building later became a chocolate factory.

Berthelot's warning

Berthelot's report ends on a warning. If a river could carry absinthe from Pontarlier to Ouhans in two days, he wrote, it could carry anything else that went into the Doubs. He named sewage, and the germs of typhoid and cholera. Whatever went into the Doubs above Arçon could come out at Ouhans and run on down the Loue. The fire had shown it, and the only reason anyone knew was that the river smelled like absinthe for a day.

The fire and the river, year by year

Where the sources disagree

The day. L'Illustration said "last Monday." The Academy report and the calendar say Sunday, August 11.

The damage. An American wire report said 200,000 francs. L'Illustration said more than two million. They differ by ten times.

The million liters. The figure is in every retelling. Berthelot wrote it with a question mark: about 500,000 liters of pure alcohol, "for a million liters of liqueur?" Treat it as an estimate.

The earlier test. The 1901 report says fluorescein dye was tried. A later account says salt. The names of whoever ran it are not in the 1901 record.

The river's name. Some American papers printed "Loing." The river is the Loue.