Séraphin-Médéric Mieusement (1840–1905) - Hôtel de Lauzun, Paris
The Club des Hashischins (sometimes also spelled Club des Hashishins or Club des Hachichins,
"Club of the Hashish-Eaters") was a Parisian group dedicated to the exploration of drug-induced
experiences, notably with hashish.
The club was active from about 1844 to 1849 and counted the literary and intellectual elite of Paris
among its members, including Dr. Jacques-Joseph Moreau, Théophile Gautier, Charles
Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Eugène Delacroix, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac and
Alexandre Dumas. Monthly "séances" were held at the Hôtel de Lauzun (at that time Hôtel
Pimodan) on the Île Saint-Louis.
Here, ritualistically garbed in Arab clothing, they drank strong coffee, liberally laced with
hashish, which Moreau called dawamesk, in the Arabic manner. It looked, reported the members,
like a greenish preserve, its ingredients a mixture of hashish, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, pistachio,
sugar, orange juice, butter and cantharides. Some of them would write of their "stoned" experiences,
although not all. Balzac attended the club but preferred not to indulge, though some time in 1845
the great man cracked and ate some. He told fellow members he had heard celestial voices and
seen visions of divine paintings.
It was inevitable that Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), author of the 1857 collection of poetry
Les Fleurs du Mal, joined the club. He had a reputation for debauchery and a taste for the exotic,
which would surely have predisposed him to a new drug, but the truth was that he rarely, if indeed
ever, indulged. He wrote on hashish with great acuity, but it was from his studious note-taking,
rather than any in-depth personal experience.
Gautier, writing an essay on the poet, noted that, "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 induces to that of a maniac for whom painted canvas
and rough drop-scenes take 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 [Hôtel Lauzun], where our club met..."
As Baudelaire put it, "wine makes men happy and sociable; hashish isolates them.
Wine exalts the will; hashish annihilates it."
Baudelaire's best piece on hashish was published in 1860 and entitled "Les Paradis Artificiels"
(Artificial Paradises) - a comparison of hashish and wine "as means of expanding
individuality". For him, "among the drugs most efficient in creating what I call the
artificial ideal, leaving on one side liquors, which rapidly excite gross frenzy and
lay flat all spiritual force, and the perfumes, whose excessive use, while rendering
more subtle man's imagination, wear out gradually his physical forces; the two most
energetic substances, the most convenient and the most handy, are hashish and opium".
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Honoré Daumier, The hashish smokers, 1845
"Ah! What an Oriental pleasure I am starting to feel, I have the sensation that I am
riding a camel! - and me, I believe I am being beaten with baseball bats…"
Honoré Daumier, 1845
Hôtel de Lauzun - Bedroom, ground floor
Gautier wrote about the club in an article entitled "Le Club des Hachichin", published in the Revue
des Deux Mondes in February 1846, recounting his recent visit. While he is often cited as the
founder of the club, in the article he says he was attending their séances for the first time that
evening and made clear that others were sharing a familiar experience with him.
"One December evening... I arrived in a remote quarter in the middle of Paris, a kind
of solitary oasis which the river encircles in its arms on both sides as though to defend
it against the encroachments of civilisation. It was in an old house on the Ile St Louis,
the Pimodan hotel built by Lauzun, where the strange club which I had recently joined
held its monthly séance. I was attending for the first time."
After a description of the hotel's interior, Gautier arrives in a room where "several human shapes
were stirring about a table, and as soon as the light reached me and I was recognised, a
vigorous shout shook the sonorous depths of the ancient edifice. 'It's he! It's he!' cried
some voices together; 'let's give him his due!' "
His "due", of course, was his potion of dawamesk. "The doctor stood by a buffet on which lay
a platter filled with small Japanese saucers. He spooned a morsel of paste or greenish
jam about as large as a thumb from a crystal vase, and placed it next to the silver spoon
on each saucer. The doctor's face radiated enthusiasm; his eyes glittered, his purple
cheeks were aglow, the veins in his temples stood out strongly, and he breathed heavily
through dilated nostrils. 'This will be deducted from your share in Paradise,' he said as
he handed me my portion..."
There follows a banquet. By the time the meal ends, the hashish is beginning to take effect. His
neighbours begin to appear "somewhat strange. Their pupils became big as a screech owl's;
their noses stretched into elongated probosces; their mouths expanded like bell bottoms.
Faces were shaded in supernatural light". Meanwhile "a deadening warmth pervaded my
limbs, and dementia, like a wave which breaks foaming on to a rock, then withdraws to
break again, invaded and left my brain, finally enveloping it altogether. That strange
visitor, hallucination, had come to dwell within me." (...)
Louis Édouard Fournier, Hôtel Lauzun, 1898
The Club des Hachichins had broken up by the middle of the 19th century but in strictly scientific
terms it had done its work. In 1846 its instigator, Dr Moreau, published his major work on cannabis:
the 439-page book De Hachish et de l'Alienation Mentale - Études Psychologiques (Hashish and
Mental Illness - Psychological Studies).
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