Hashish, Wine, Opium

Charles Baudelaire

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 27 juin 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714548364
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Hashish, Wine, Opium
Th é ophile Gautier
Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Maurice Stang
Introduction by Derek Stanford




alma classics ltd London House 243-253 Lower Mortlake Road Richmond Surrey TW9 2LL United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
The Opium Pipe first published in French in 1838 Hashish first published in French in 1843 The Club of Assassins first published in French in 1846 Wine and Hashish first published in French in 1851
Hashish, Wine, Opium first published in this translation by Calder and Boyars Limited in 1972 Translation © Calder Publications Limited, 1972 This edition first published by Oneworld Classics Limited in 2009
Cover design by Will Dady
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe
isbn : 978-1-84749-093-3
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.




Contents
Introduction
Théophile Gautier
The Opium Pipe
The Club of Assassins
Hashish
Charles Baudelaire
Wine and Hashish
Notes



Introduction
T he sketches and essays brought together here have three claims upon our attention. First, they constitute a body of picturesque documents on an aspect and phase of French Romanticism. Secondly, they explore and analyse, through the words of two great masters of language, the experience and effect of three psychedelic elements: opium, hashish and wine. And thirdly, they help to explain – in terms of the status accorded these two authors – a certain vein of experiment and escape in our own literature of the 1890s: that represented, say, by such poems as Arthur Symons’ The Opium-Smoker (“I am engulfed, and drown deliciously…”), The Absinthe-Drinker (“Gently I wave the visible world away…”) and Haschisch * (“And yet I am the lord of all…”), or that escapade of the poet Dowson (“whose copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal was annotated from cover to cover”) in which he, Symons and a group of young people from the Stage took hashish together. Alas, the experience of this “elaborate experiment in visionary sensation” was not a very successful one: “it ended in what should have been its first symptoms, immoderate laughter”. Arthur Symons was, by the way, a translator of Baudelaire’s verse, his prose poems and Les Paradis Artificiels – a book of analytic and poetic prose on the procedure, experience and effect of taking hashish and opium. While Ernest Dowson – who took “bhang” (or hashish) three times when at Oxford – resorted, in his early manhood, somewhat over-liberally to absinthe – a drink made from wormwood and wine, probably the most potent and virulent of alcohols consumed in the West (“O Lord! O my liver! O my nerves! O my poor blasted constitution!”). He also recorded his devotion to this spirit in a poem Absinthea Teatra (“Green changed to white, emerald to an opal; nothing was changed”).
Many of the naughtinesses of fin-de-siècle English culture appear as no more than belated imitations of French attitudes and achievements current up to thirty or forty years later. The chapter entitled “Opium and Hashish” in the history of French Romanticism opens in the 1830s. It is a large and fertile chapter in which some of the eminent names are those of de Musset, Dumas, Gautier, de Nerval, Baudelaire and Merimée. It reveals, too, what can be described as a medical-literary collaboration – an interest both scientific and aesthetic.
Here, one can give only a pr é cis; a simplified chronology of dates and events. In 1838, Théophile Gautier published in La Presse , a newspaper of the day, a short story called The Opium Pipe . The tale combined fantasy and fact in a manner which Gautier often employed, and featured Gautier being initiated into opium-smoking by his friend Alphonse Karr. This was followed in 1843 by a piece of factual subjective reportage, published in the same paper and entitled Hashish . In this article, Gautier did not reveal by name the source from which he had obtained the drug; but in a learned work published in 1845 – Hashish and Mental Alienation – a Doctor Moreau of Tours released the story behind the scene. Moreau reprinted Gautier’s article, in its entirety, in his book, prefacing it with a few lines in which he told how its author had expressed a keen desire to judge for himself the powers of the drug, though little disposed to believe in them. He tells us that he was able to grant Gautier his desire, and that the effect of its administration was “lively and satisfying”.
The next phase concerns a loosely constituted group or céracle of artists interested in the drug: Le Club des Hachichins , or Club of Assassins. In the year in which Moreau’s book appeared, Fernand Boissard – a young amateur and patron of the arts – wrote to Gautier in the following terms: “My Dear Théophile, we shall take hashish at my apartment next Monday, 3rd of October, under the supervision of Moreau and d’Aubert Roche. Do you wish to be present?…” D’Aubert Roche, it should be said, was the doctor whose treatise on Typhus in the Orient had turned Moreau’s attention to the nature and behaviour of hashish. Another note from Boissard reads: “Hashish is decreed for Monday the 22nd…”
Those present at these and other gatherings, either as spectators or participants, included the author de Nerval, the painter Chenevard, the musician Barbereau – and presumably Charles Baudelaire. “Presumably”, since Gautier writing his impressions of Baudelaire in 1868, six months after the poet’s death, as a preface to the posthumous publication of Les Fleurs de Mal – though describing him as present (if “but rarely”) at these occasions, says he did not meet him till 1849. Whether or not Gautier’s memory misled him as to the date, he gave a vivid portrait of Baudelaire (“a dandy strayed into Bohemia”). Gautier tells us that Baudelaire came “only as a spectator to the seances at the Hotel Pimodan, where our circle met to take the ‘dawamesk ’ ”, and that “After some ten experiments we renounced once and for all this intoxicating drug, not only because it makes us physically ill, but also because the true littérateur has need only of natural dreams, and does not wish his thoughts to be influenced by any outside agency”.
In 1846, Gautier published his hashish-fantasy The Club of Assassins in the Revue des Deux Mondes , revealing some twenty-two years later that he was describing the seances at the Hotel Pimodan, even as claimed in the fantasy itself. What he did not remark was that this piece of psychedelic writing contains much beside a description of fact.
Gautier’s piece was followed in 1851 by Baudelaire’s essay Wine and Hashish in Le Messager de l’Assemblée , an altogether more intellectual effort than anything from the pen of Gautier. The intellectuality of Baude laire’s approach is, indeed, suggested by the subtitle of the composition: Wine and Hashish, Compared as Means for the Multiplication of the Personality . Although on Gautier’s evidence, Baudelaire “came but rarely and then only as a spectator” to the Club of Assassins, professing that “This happiness, bought at the chemists, was repugnant to him”, he had – prior to this – experimented with the drug. It is known that he partook of it immediately after – possibly even before – his voyage to the islands of Mauritius and R é union, when he was away from Paris between May 1841 and March 1842.
If Baudelaire, though “amorous of new and rare sensations”, declined to take hashish at the Hotel Pimodan, the reason may have been, in part, hygienic. It is fairly certain, or at least highly likely, that shortly after Baudelaire’s return to Paris, he knew he had contracted a venereal infection. His formulation of an attitude of sobriety and austerity (“Orgy is not the sister of inspiration – Inspiration is definitely the sister of daily toil,” he declared in an article entitled Advice to Young Writers published in 1846) may well have been part of a prophylactic programme devised by the poet to guard against a recurrence of exacerbation of the dormant disease.
Whatever the reason behind his attitude, we know that Baudelaire increasingly became both a more chastened man and a less indulgent, more reflective, thinker. Speaking in a lecture at Brussels of his work Les Paradis Artificiels (1860) just three years before his death, he said that he wished to write a book not merely of physiological interest but rather one with a moral concern. “I wished to show that those who search for an artificial paradise create their own hell.”
Baudelaire’s essay Wine and Hashish can be thought of as a prelude to his book Les Paradis Artificiels published nine years later; and nothing reveals his greater stature, compared with that of Gautier , than a juxtaposition of their own attitudes to opium and hashish. In a novel written by Gautier ( The Cross of Berny ) in collaboration with three other authors, the hero Edgar de Meilhan – for whose words Gautier was responsible – declares that “Hashish has nothing of that ignoble heavy drunkenness about it which the races of the North obtain from wine and alcohol: it offers an intellectual intoxication”.
This novel was serialized in La Presse in 1845, and it was another fifteen years, admittedly, before Baudelaire expressed himself fully on this subject in Les Paradis Artificiels . By that time Gautier himself had changed his opinions, stating that he was opposed to opium and hashish, when employed by the artist, since it prevented him, through its side-