the address
The Hôtel de Lauzun, Quai d'Anjou
The building is still there. A grand seventeenth-century townhouse on the Quai d'Anjou, on the Île Saint-Louis, known then also as the Hôtel Pimodan. In the 1840s parts of it were let out as apartments, and among the tenants were the writer Théophile Gautier and, for a period, the young Charles Baudelaire.
The gatherings that took place there were called the Club des Hachichins. The attendance list is the reason anybody remembers them:
- Théophile Gautier, who wrote the famous account of it
- Charles Baudelaire, then in his twenties
- Gérard de Nerval
- Alexandre Dumas
- Honoré de Balzac
- Eugène Delacroix, the painter
Gautier published his description, Le Club des Hachichins, in the Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1846. It is theatrical, deliberately overwritten, and enormously entertaining: the ritual of the darkened room, the spoonful of green paste administered with mock ceremony, the slow onset, the hallucinations described with a colourist's attention. It is also, structurally, the ancestor of every trip report ever written.
the substance
Dawamesk, and the doctor who brought it
What they were taking was not smoked. It was dawamesk, a hashish confection from North Africa, a greenish paste of cannabis resin worked together with sugar, fat and spices, eaten with a spoon. Oral dosing, which is worth noting because it is slow, hard to titrate, and produces a far heavier and longer experience than smoking. The extravagance of the accounts is partly an artefact of the route of administration.
And it was supplied by Dr Jacques-Joseph Moreau, generally called Moreau de Tours, a practising psychiatrist who had encountered the material travelling in the East and who was not there for the party.
Moreau's interest was clinical and, for its date, remarkable. He published Du hachisch et de l'aliénation mentale in 1845, in which he argued that the states hashish produced could serve as a model for mental illness, that a physician might, by taking the drug himself, gain some access to what his patients were experiencing. This is a psychiatrist proposing self-experimentation as a route to clinical empathy, in 1845.
The most famous drug club in literary history
was, from one chair in the room, a research protocol.
Balzac attended and, on Gautier's telling, declined the dawamesk, he wanted to watch. Whether that was scientific caution or the instinct of a novelist who would rather observe a room than be in it is not recorded.
1860
Baudelaire's verdict, which is not the one you expect
Baudelaire is the name most associated with this club, and the association is used, constantly, as a kind of endorsement, the poet of decadence, the artificial paradise, the romance of it.
The book that phrase comes from is Les Paradis artificiels, published in 1860. And its argument is against.
Baudelaire's objection is not medical and it is not moral in the ordinary sense. It is about the will. His charge is that hashish offers the sensations of transcendence without the work that would earn them, that it delivers a counterfeit of the ideal, and that a man who accepts the counterfeit has traded away the faculty by which he might have reached the real thing. The paradise is artificial: the adjective is the accusation, not the decoration.
He is not writing as an outsider. He is writing as somebody who was in the room, who described the effects with more precision than anyone before him, and who concluded that the price was the part nobody mentions.
The most quoted man in the history of this plant
was its most serious critic.
, and he had done the reading
We include this because leaving it out is the standard move. A cannabis business quoting Baudelaire is nearly always quoting the atmosphere and never the conclusion. If we are going to claim the glamour of the Hôtel de Lauzun, we can carry the verdict that came out of it.
what it actually invented
A genre, and a problem
The club's real legacy is a form. Before Gautier there was medical description of intoxication and there was moral denunciation of it. What the Hôtel de Lauzun produced was something else: first-person, literary, deliberately observed accounts of altered consciousness, written by people whose profession was precision with language and who treated the experience as worth describing exactly.
Every subsequent example of the genre, De Quincey's descendants, Huxley, the whole twentieth-century shelf of it, is working in a form these dinners established.
It also established the genre's permanent problem, which is that this writing is unreliable in a specific direction. The dose was large, oral, and unmeasured. The setting was a theatrically staged room full of people who had come to have an experience. The authors were professional stylists with a strong incentive to make the account extraordinary. Gautier's hallucinations are magnificent prose and terrible data.
Moreau, sitting in the same room, was the only person present taking notes anybody could use.
why a price site cares
The oldest marketing problem in the subject
Here is what makes this story useful rather than merely decorative.
In 1846 the two things written about this plant were a gorgeous, wildly exaggerated literary account, and a doctor's monograph nobody outside medicine read. Those are still the two things. The gorgeous version travels; the careful version does not. The romance is quotable and the data is not.
A shop selling flower is standing exactly where Gautier stood, with exactly his incentive: describe the experience extravagantly, because extravagance sells and nobody can check you. It is the reason this industry is full of strain descriptions that read like wine writing crossed with astrology.
We would rather be Moreau at that table.
Less fun to read. Worth more to you.
Which is why the only thing this site asserts about any product is what a laboratory measured and what it costs per gram. We will tell you the history for free. We are not going to tell you how the flower will make you feel, because Gautier already did that better than we could, and Baudelaire spent a book explaining why you should not believe him.
Next: what the certificates actually say →