Charles Baudelaire
(1821-1867)
French poet, critic, translator, and essayist
Member of the 'Hashish Club', author of the 'Poem of Hashish'.
Without doubt the best known member of the Club des Hachichins was the brooding melancholic Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire was no stranger to drugs. During his youth he lived in the Latin Quarter, a section of Paris like San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district of the 1960s, inhabited mainly by students, writers, artists, and thieves. The streets were narrow, dimly lit, and foul smelling. Students "hung out" at cafes and restaurants carousing and boasting about real and imagined sexual conquests. They drank to excess and indulged themselves in all the latest vices, among which were opium and hashish.
Baudelaire first met Gautier toward the middle of 1849 thanks to a mutual friend, the artist Fernand Boissard. Boissard and Gautier were both tenants at the Hotel Lauzun, and in the course of things Baudelaire was invited to attend the meetings of the Hashish Club. Yet, always the loner, Baudelaire rarely accepted the invitation.
In the preface to his Flowers of Evil (Fleurs du Mal), published in 1868, Baudelaire confesses that he usually avoided these clandestine soirees and that when he did attend, it was only as an observer. Gautier corroborates this confession:
It is possible and even probable that Baudelaire did try hascheesh once or twice by way of physiological experiment, but he never made continuous use of it. Besides, he felt much repugnance for that sort of happiness, bought at the chemist's and taken away in the vest-pocket, and he compared the ecstasy it enduces to that of a maniac for whom painted canvas and rough drop-scenes takes the place of real furniture and gardens balmy with the scent of genuine flowers. He came but seldom, and merely as an observer, to the meetings in Pimodan House [Hotel Lauzun], where our club met..."
Gautier himself gave up hashish "after trying it some ten times or so,... not that it hurt me physically, but because a real writer needs no other than his own natural dreams, and does not care to have his thought controlled by the influence of any agency whatever."
In the introduction to The Artificial Paradises, his best known work on hashish, Baudelaire candidly admits that for much of his information concerning the actions of the drug, he relied on the detailed notes he had accumulated in talking to his friends who had been using hashish for a long time. Two other major sources were Sylvestre de Sacy's writings, and a popular pharmaceutical text of the day, L'Officine ou reportoire general de pharmacies practiques (The Laboratory or General Encyclopaedia of Practical Pharmacy), parts of which he copied verbatim. The latter was first published in 1844 by the pharmacist Dorvault, and became a standard reference manual on drugs (it was reprinted and expanded in 1847, 1850, and 1855). Baudelaire incorporated approximately three-quarters of the material on hashish from Dorvault's 1850 edition in the Artificial Paradises which he published in 1858, although no mention of Dorvault appears anywhere in Baudelaire's writings.
The Artificial Paradises is divided into two parts. The first contains Baudelaire's "Poem of Hashish"; the second is a translation of de Quincey's Confessions of an Opium Eater. Baudelaire's inclusion of these two works into a single volume was due to his feeling that both drugs produced very similar effects. Indeed, it is sometimes impossible to tell whether Baudelaire is writing about opium or hashish in various parts of his "Poem of Hashish".
Although widely hailed as one of hashish's most articulate and analytical devotees, as well as one of its most tragic victims, Baudelaire was neither devotee nor victim of hashish. He was merely an observer of hashish's effects, and he died not from overindulgence in hashish but from syphilis. Nevertheless, aside from the bitter recriminations expressed at the end of his essay, Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises is unsurpassed as literature's most poetic description of the hashish experience. Gautier later wrote of the book:
Medically speaking The Artificial Paradises constitute a very well written monograph of hascheesh, and science might find in it reliable information; for Baudelaire piqued himself on being scrupulously accurate, and not for the world would he have allowed the smallest poetic imagery to slip into a subject that was naturally adapted to it.
Baudelaire begins his discussion by refuting the notion that hashish will transform anyone into an entirely different person. One "will find in hashish nothing miraculous, absolutely nothing but an exaggeration of the natural," he says. "The brain and organism on which hashish operates will produce only the normal phenomena peculiar to that individual - increased, admittedly, in number and force, but always faithful to the original."
Next he cautions that the user be in the right frame of mind to take hashish, for just as it exaggerates the natural behaviour of the individual, so too does hashish intensify the user's immediate feelings. Obligations that require attention will keep the user from enjoying the otherwise pleasurable effects of the drug and instead he will be tortured with worry and subjected to unbearable agony.
Once he has been properly prepared, the hashish user will pass through three successive phases. The first comes on rather slowly, almost imperceptibly. Because the novice has in all likelihood been previously told something of the effects of hashish, Baudelaire advises his readers that they are likely to feel impatient. This impatience, he warns, must be overcome for it could throw the novice into a state of anxiety. An indication that the drug is beginning to work, regardless of what the user says, is uncontrollable laughter. The most trivial remark assumes new meaning. A sense of incongruity, of puns on words, of ridiculous situations, are all characteristic of the mirth of hashish. A second indication that hashish is beginning to act is an inability to maintain a train of thought. Ideas race through the mind, becoming disjointed, fragmented, isolated; conversation is no longer possible.
The second stage of intoxication is characterized by a feeling of coldness in the extremities and general lassitude. There is a sense of stupor and stupefaction. The mouth feels parched with incredible thirst. A heightened feeling of sensory acuity begins to be imagined. The senses are scrambled. Sounds have colors; colors contain music. It is now that one begins to see and hear things that are not there.
The final stage is marked by a feeling of calmness. Time and space have no meaning. There is a sense that one has transcended matter. In this state, one final supreme thought breaks into consciousness - "I have become God."
Having traced the stages of hashish intoxication, Baudelaire concludes his essay with a chapter entitled "moral". Here Baudelaire deals with the after effects of hashish. Although he states that there are no dangerous physical consequences from hashish, he contends that the same cannot be said for the user's psychological health. Although hashish increases creativity and elevates imagination, the individual who has come to rely on the drug for inspiration may become its prisoner, unable to think creatively at all unless drugged with hashish. Moreover, hashish's weakening of the will makes the user unable to profit from any creative insights he may derive from the drug. If one can instantly realize all the pleasures of heaven and earth through hashish, he asks, why should anyone actively pursue such goals?
Baudelaire moved out of the Hotel Lauzun shortly after a botched suicide attempt. He was suffering from syphilis, he drank heavily, and he was constantly resorting to opium to help himself deal with a deep-seated feeling of despondency and self-hatred. Although respected by fellow writers and critics, Baudelaire considered himself a failure. He died in 1866, his brain decayed by the syphilitic bacterium he had contracted as a youth.
Charles Baudelaire reports on Cannabis:
" Sometimes strange things happen among the male and female workers during the hemp harvest. It seems as if some dizzy spirit rises from the harvest which circulates around their legs and mounts mischievously to the brain. The head of the harvester is full of whirlpools, at other times loaded with daydreams. The limbs weaken and refuse to be of service. Similar phenomena happened to me as a child when I was playing and rolling around in heaps of lucerne.
There have been attempts to make hashish out of hemp grown in France. So far they have all been unsuccessful, and the obstinate ones who wish to procure themselves enchanted enjoyment at no matter what price continue to use hashish from across the Mediterranean, that is to say made from Indian or Egyptian hemp. Hashish is composed of a decoction of Indian hemp, butter, and a little bit of opium.
Here is a green jam, strangely odorous, so odorous that it provokes a certain repulsion, as any fine odour does when carried to its maximum force and density. Take a piece as big as a walnut, fill a small spoon with it, and you possess happiness; absolute happiness with all its frenzies, its youthful follies, and also its infinite beatitudes. Happiness is there in the form of a little piece of jam; take it without fear, no one dies from it; the physical organs are hardly touched. Perhaps your will-power may be diminished, but that is another matter.
Usually in order to give the hashish all its strength and powers of development, it is mixed with very hot black coffee and drunk on an empty stomach. Supper should be taken late that evening, at about ten o'clock or midnight. A very light soup is the only food permitted. Breaking this simple rule produces either vomiting, as the food quarrels with the drug, or it cancels the effect of the hashish. Many ignorant or stupid people who have broken this rule accuse hashish of being powerless.
No sooner has the little amount of drug been swallowed (an act which requires a certain determination, as the mixture has such a strong odour that it provokes nausea in some people) than you find yourself placed in a state of anxious waiting. You have heard vaguely about the marvellous effects of hashish, your imagination has already formed its particular idea of an ideal intoxication, and you are impatient to find out if the result will in reality live up to your preconception. The amount of time that passes between drinking the drug and feeling the first effects varies according to temperaments and also according to habit. People who know their way around with hashish sometimes feel the first effects after half an hour.
I forgot to say that as hashish causes an exaggeration of the personality at the same time as a very sharp feeling for circumstances and surroundings, it is best to use it only in favourable circumstances and surroundings. All joy and happiness being super-abundant, all sorrow and anguish is immensely profound. Do not experiment with it if you have to accomplish some disagreeable matter of business, if you are feeling melancholy, or if you have a bill to pay. Hashish is not suited for action. It does not console as wine does, all it does is to develop immeasurably the human personality in the actual circumstances where it is placed. As far as possible, one should have a beautiful apartment or landscape, a free dear mind, and some accomplices whose intellectual temperament is akin to your own; and a little music too, if possible.
Novices at their first initiation almost always complain about how slow the effects are, and as it is not going fast enough to suit them, they begin boasting incredulously which is very amusing to those who how about the way hashish works. It is not one of the least comic things to see the first effects appear and multiply themselves right in the middle of this incredulity. First a certain absurd and irresistible hilarity comes over you. The most ordinary words, the most simple ideas take on a strange new aspect. This gaiety becomes insupportable to you, but it is useless to revolt, The demon has invaded you, all the efforts you make to resist only accelerate his progress. You laugh at your own silliness and folly; your companions make fun of you, and you are not angry, for benevolence has begun to manifest itself.
This languishing gaiety, uneasiness in joy, insecurity, unhealthy indecision usually lasts only a short while. It sometimes happens that people not at all suited to word games improvise interminable series of puns, bringing the most improbable ideas together, made to mislead the strongest masters of this absurd art. After several minutes the relationships become so vague, the threads which connect your conceptions are so tenuous, that only your accomplices, members of the same religion, can understand you. Your folly, your bursts of laughter seem extremely stupid to anyone who is not in the same state as you.
The sobriety of this unfortunate person amuses you boundlessly, his composure pushes you to the last limits of irony; he seems to you the most insane and ridiculous of human beings. As for your comrades, you understand them perfectly. Soon you will only communicate with the eyes. The fact is that it is a very amusing situation: people enjoying a gaiety which is incomprehensible to anyone who is not situated in the same world as they are, regard him with profound pity. From then on the idea of superiority dawns on your mental horizon. Soon it will increase immeasurably.
I was a witness to two rather grotesque scenes during this first phase. A famous musician who knew nothing about the properties of hashish and who had probably never heard of it, arrived in the middle of a group where almost everyone had taken it. They tried to make him understand its, marvellous effects. He laughed it off politely, like a man who is willing to pose for a few minutes in a spirit of propriety because he has been well brought up. There was a lot of laughter; for the person who has taken hashish is endowed with a marvellous awareness of the comic during the first phase. Bursts of laughter, incomprehensible enormities, inextricable word games, baroque gestures continued. The musician declared that this 'charge' was bad for artists, and that besides it must be very tiring for them.
The joy increased. He said 'This charge may be good for you, but not for me.' One of the intoxicated egotistically replied 'It suffices that it be good for us.' Interminable bursts of laughter filled the room. The man got angry and wanted to leave. Someone locked the door and hid the key. Someone else kneeled down before him, and, speaking for the whole group, declared with tears in his eyes that although they were moved by a most profound pity for him and for his inferiority, they would not be any the less animated by an eternal benevolence.
He was begged to play some music, and finally agreed. The violin had hardly begun to be heard when the sounds spreading through the apartment took possession of some of the intoxicated here and there. Nothing but deep sighs, sobs, heartbreaking groans, torrents of tears. The horrified musician stopped, he thought he was in a lunatic asylum. He approached the one whose beatitude was making the most noise, and asked him if he was suffering very much, and what should be done to help him. A down-to-earth person, who also had not taken the beatific drug, suggested lemonade and bitters. The intoxicated one, ecstasy in his eyes, looked at him with unutterable contempt, only pride preventing the most serious insults. Indeed, what could he more exasperating to someone sick with joy than to want to cure him?
Here is a phenomenon that seems extremely curious to me: a servant who was asked to bring tobacco and refreshments to people who had taken hashish, upon seeing herself surrounded by strange heads with enormous eyes, by an unhealthy atmosphere, by a collective insanity, burst into hysterical laughter, dropped the tray which broke with all its cups and glasses, and fled in horror as fast as she could. Everybody laughed. She admitted the next day that she had felt something strange for several hours, to have been 'all queer, I don't know how'. However, she had not taken hashish.
The second phase announces itself by a sensation of coolness at the extremities, a great weakness; you have, as they say, butter-fingers, a heavy head, and general stupefaction in all your being. Your eyes get bigger, they are as if pulled in all directions by an implacable ecstasy. Your face becomes pale, then livid and greenish. The lips withdraw, shrink, and seem to want to enter the interior of your mouth. Raucous and profound sighs escape from your chest, as if your old nature could not support the weight of your new nature. The senses become extraordinarily delicate and sharp. The eyes pierce the infinite. The ear hears the tiniest sounds in the middle of the loudest noises.
The hallucinations begin. External objects take on monstrous appearances. They reveal themselves to you in previously unsuspected forms. Then they deform themselves, transform themselves, and finally they enter into your being, or else you enter into theirs. The most singular ambiguities, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place. Sounds have a colour, colours have a music. Musical notes are numbers, and you solve with frightening rapidity prodigious arithmetical calculations while the music unfolds in your ear. You are seated and you are smoking; you think that you are sitting in your pipe and it is you that your pipe is smoking; it is yourself that you exhale in the form of blue clouds.
You feel well, there is only one thing that bothers and worries you. How will you manage to get out of your pipe? This hallucination lasts for an eternity. An interval of lucidity permits you to make a great don and look at the dock. The eternity has lasted one minute. Another current of ideas carries you off; it will carry you for a minute in its living whirlpool, and this minute will be another eternity. The proportions of time and of the being are upset by an innumerable multitude' of intense sensations and ideas. One lives several human lives in the space of an hour. That is certainly the subject of Peau de chagrin. There is no longer an equation between the organs and the joys.
From time to time the personality disappears. The objectivity which some pantheist poets and great actors have becomes so great that you confuse yourself with external beings. Here you are a tree moaning to the wind and recounting vegetable melodies to nature. Now you are flying in the blue of an immensely enlarged sky. All pain has disappeared. You resist no longer, you are carried away, no longer your own master and no longer caring. Soon the idea of time will disappear completely. From time to time still a little awakening takes place. It seems to you that you are leaving a fantastic and marvellous world. It is true that you retain the ability to observe yourself, and the next day you will be able to remember some of your sensations. But you cannot make use of this psychological ability. I defy you to sharpen a pen or a pencil; it will be a labour beyond your strength.
At other times music recites infinite poems to you, placing you in frightening or fantastic dramas. It associates itself with objects that are before your eyes. Paintings on the ceiling come to life in a frightening way even if they are mediocre or bad. Clear enchanting water flows. Nymphs with radiant flesh look at you with large eyes clearer than water and the sky. You take your place and your part in the most mediocre paintings, the crudest pictures hung on the walls of hotel rooms.
I have noticed that water takes on a frightening charm for artistically inclined natures illuminated by hashish. Running water, fountains, harmonious waterfalls, and the blue immensity of the sea roll, sleep, and sing at the bottom of your being. It might not be a good idea to leave a man in this condition on the bank of a clear stream; like the fisherman in the ballad, he might allow himself to be carried away by a water-sprite.
One can eat towards the end of the evening, but this operation is not accomplished without difficulty. You find yourself so much above material facts that you would certainly prefer to remain sprawled out in the depths of your intellectual paradise. Sometimes, however, the appetite develops in an extraordinary way, but it takes a lot of courage to move a bottle, a fork, and a knife.
The third phase, which is separated from the second by a redoubled crisis, a dirtying intoxication followed by a new uneasiness, is something indescribable. It is what Orientals call the 'kief', it is absolute happiness. It is no longer something spinning and tumultuous. It is a calm and motionless beatitude. All philosophical problems are resolved. All the difficult questions about which theologians argue and which make reasonable men despair are clear and transparent. All contradiction has become unity. Man has become god.
There is something in you which says: 'You are superior to all men, no one understands what you think, what you are feeling now. They are even incapable of understanding the immense love you have for them. But you must not hate them for that, you must have pity on them. An immensity of happiness and virtue is opening itself before you. No one will ever know what degree of virtue and intelligence you have reached. Live in the solitude of your thoughts, and avoid harming others.'
One of the grotesque effects of hashish is the fear of hurting anyone at all, which is pushed to the point of the most meticulous folly. If you had the strength, you would even disguise the extra-natural state in which you are in order to avoid upsetting the least important people.
In this supreme state among artistic and tender spirits lovemaking takes on the most singular forms and abandons itself to the most baroque combinations. Unbridled debauchery can be mixed with an ardent and affectionate fatherly feeling.*
My final observation will not be the least curious. The next morning, when you see daylight in your room, your first sensation is one of profound astonishment. Time has completely disappeared. A little while ago it was night, now it is day. 'Have I slept, or have I not slept? Did my intoxication last all night, and the notion of time being suppressed the whole night flashed by in a second for me? Or else have I been buried in the veils of a sleep full of visions?' It is impossible to know.
You seem to feel a well-being and a marvellous lightness of spirit, no fatigue. But as soon as you stand up the aftermath of the intoxication manifests itself. Your weak legs carry you timidly, you are afraid of breaking yourself as though you were a fragile object. A great languor, which is not without its charm, takes over your spirit. You are incapable of work and active energy.
It is a merited punishment for the impious prodigality with which you have spent so much of your nervous energy. You have scattered your personality to the four winds, and now you have difficulty in regathering and concentrating it.
I do not say that hashish produces all the effects I have just described on all men. The phenomena I have described usually took place, with a few exceptions, among people of an artistic and philosophic spirit. But there are temperaments upon which the drug only develops a noisy insanity, a violent gaiety that resembles vertigo, dances, leaps, stamping, bursts of laughter. It can be said that their hashish is entirely materialistic. They are intolerable to those of a spiritual nature, who have great pity for them. The ugliness of their personalities becomes obvious. Once I saw a respectable judge, an honourable man, as people of this type call themselves, one of those men whose artificial gravity is always so imposing, at the moment when the hashish invaded him, suddenly begin to leap around doing a most indecent dance. The true internal monster revealed itself. This man who judged the actions of his fellows, this 'Togatus' had in secret learned how to do the can-can.
Thus it can be affirmed that this impersonal quality, this objectivity which I previously mentioned and which is only the excessive development of the poetic spirit, will never be found in the hashish of those other people".
*The hashish jam which Baudelaire ate probably contained cantharides and other drugs.
source: Bohemia Books
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