The saints are sometimes depraved in darkly romantic art. Some dark romanticists, as Baudelaire, De Quincey, Coleridge ("opium eaters") Dylan Thomas, Burroughs, and perhaps Stuart Staples and Gainsbourg, depict gloomy bars in songs and poems. And intoxication. The only consolation for human beings is the artificial paradise, according to Baudelaire. Human vices - the use of drugs - are often imaginatively depicted in Dark Romantic works. The use of drugs is a metaphor for the decadent natural world and the distant, obscure, supernatural world (see religious symbolism and mysticism and folklore Barromanticism (My own name for a genre within the genre dark romanticism). At the drinking bar the disillussioned lonely man or woman, maybe abandoned by God or a lover, finds relief in a distressed world. She or he wish to let go of all that disbelief by lighting that cigarette and pouring that whisky.  Absinthe - the drink of authors, poets and madmen. The esmerald green posion inspired Van Gogh, Hemingway, Wilde, Strindberg and Soderberg among others.One can only wonder if drinking absinthe was the result - or the reason - of their genious. The nerve-wracking drink was forbidden in France, USA and many other countries.  try absinth.com - history and more