Le Club des Hachichins (Gautier 1846)
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| Author | Théophile Gautier |
|---|---|
| Language | French |
| Published | 1 February 1846 |
| Publisher | Bureau de la Revue des Deux Mondes |
| Place | Paris |
| Volumes | 1 (an article in the Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. 13) |
| Total pages | 16 pages |
| Volume | Vol. 13 (1846) |
|---|---|
| Pages | pp. 520–535 |
| Regions documented | Paris (place of use) |
| Preparations | A green paste of hashish, eaten before dinner (dawamesk) |
| Uses documented | Recreational, at the monthly meeting of a private club |
| Digital facsimile | View on Wikisource |
|---|
Le Club des Hachichins ("The Hashish-Eaters' Club") is a first-person account by the French writer Théophile Gautier of an evening at which he and the members of a club in Paris ate hashish. It appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes on 1 February 1846.[1] The article describes how the drug was served and what Gautier says it did to him, and it is evidence of how a Paris writer of the 1840s pictured hashish and the "Orient" as much as a record of the drug. Gautier himself called the evening an "excès d'orientalisme".[1]
Setting
The club met once a month at the Hôtel Pimodan, an old house on the Île Saint-Louis built by Lauzun (the Hôtel de Lauzun). Gautier writes that he had joined the club recently and was attending for the first time, on a December evening. He places the order of hachichins in Paris in 1845.[1]
The article
The account runs to ten short chapters, from the arrival at the house ("l'hôtel Pimodan") through the dose taken before dinner ("de la moutarde avant dîner"), the dinner ("agape") and the hallucinations that followed ("fantasia", "kief", "le kief tourne au cauchemar"), to the end of the evening at eleven o'clock. In the third chapter ("parenthèse") Gautier tells the story of the Old Man of the Mountain and repeats the derivation of assassin from hachichin, "eater of hashish".[1]
Hashish as documented
Before dinner a doctor at a sideboard took pieces of a greenish paste or jam, each about the size of a thumb, from a crystal vase with a spatula, and set one beside a silver-gilt spoon on each of the small Japanese porcelain saucers on a tray. Each member ate his share, coffee was served "à la manière arabe", with the grounds and without sugar, and the company then sat down to dinner. Gautier notes the reversal of the usual order, coffee before soup and jam before dessert. One member took none of the drug, to keep watch over the others.[1]
Gautier describes a change of taste during the dinner, so that water tasted to him like wine, then laughter, visions of grotesque figures, a period of calm that he calls by the name the "Orientaux" give it, kief, and finally a nightmare in which time seemed to stop. The effects had passed by the time he reached home.[1]
In 1868, in a notice on Charles Baudelaire, Gautier wrote that the circle had met at the Hôtel Pimodan to take dawamesk, that these were the sessions he had described in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and that he gave the drug up after about ten trials. He called dawamesk a decoction of Cannabis indica mixed with fat, honey and pistachios to the consistency of a paste or jam.[2]: 58–59
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Gautier, T. (1 February 1846). "Le Club des Hachichins". Revue des Deux Mondes (in français). 13: 520–535 – via Wikisource.
- ↑ Gautier, T. (1868). "Charles Baudelaire". Les Fleurs du mal. Œuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire (in français). Vol. I. Paris: Michel Lévy frères. pp. 1–75 – via Wikisource.