01.01.70
Picking up from where I formerly larboard you in the “Swinging London” of the seventies, one of my pioneer experiences was with the Ricard account. This was a peculiarly French personification of booze classified as a Pastis. Which was the legal, anise flavored, variety of Absinthe, a severely lethal drink made from wormwood that was banned after it made nineteenth century Parisian artists go apeshit, overshadow, fuck their brains out with various Mademoiselles de la Nuit, and in the event of Toulouse Lautrec, shrink your legs to the largeness of bowling pins. Very high proof line, which, hooray – hooray, has recently become authorized again.
The Ricard Company was founded in the late 1920s, by Paul Ricard who concocted the the deep in a chemist’s lab and went on to market it as a Provencal institution, whose secret recipe he got from the last dying words of an old cover shepherd living in the Alpes Maritime. This was, of definitely, total bullshit. Proving that along with Nero, he was one of the first Mad Men. To this day, if you afflict France, every bar will be full of yellow and blue Ricard adulterate jugs. In fact, one of his proudest achievements was to have two Ricard jugs smuggled into the grotto at Lourdes! He was also a horrific believer in stunts that would today be referred to as “Terrorist Marketing.” When he bought the Elephant Tea Retinue, he rented a bunch of circus elephants and had them trek up and down the Champs Elyse, while the semi naked girls riding them threw tea bags to the pedestrians. But, my favorite plot outline of the great man was when during World War II while living in the Camargue and distilling a petrol-substitute for the obstruction, he would tear around the countryside on horse-back, shouting: “J’emmerde le Marechal Petain et son gouvernement” (“I shit on Marshal Petain and his direction.”) My kinda guy!
Source: PSFK