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 and
Alexandre Dumas. Monthly "séances" were held at the
Hôtel de Lauzun (at that time Hôtel Pimodan) on the
Île Saint-Louis. Gautier wrote about the club in
Revue des Deux Mondes in February 1846, where he described his first visit: "One December evening, obeying a mysterious summons, drafted in enigmatic terms understood by affiliates but unintelligible for others, I arrived in a distant quarter, a sort of oasis of solitude in the middle of Paris that the river, surrounding it with its two arms, seems to defend against the encroachments of civilization. It was in an old house on the island of Saint-Louis, the Hotel Pimodan, built by Lauzun, that the bizarre club of which I was a member recently held its monthly sittings where I was to attend for the first time." While he is often cited as the founder of the club, in the article Gautier says he was attending their séances for the first time that evening and made clear that others were sharing a familiar experience with him. The club members often consumed
Dawamesc, a greenish paste made from cannabis resin mixed with fat, honey, and pistachios. During this period
Jacques-Joseph Moreau, who specialized in the sociological concept of
social alienation, studied the effects of regularly consuming hashish. Moreau studied this product according to his travels between 1837 and 1840 in
Egypt and
Syria, and
Asia Minor. Back in France, he continued to experiment on himself and published an 1845 book entitled
Hashish and mental alienation in which he establishes an equivalence between dream, hallucination, and hashish delirium. This book was the first written by a scientist about a drug. Gautier and Baudelaire eventually stopped attending the sessions. Gautier writes: "After a dozen experiments, we gave up forever this intoxicating drug, not that it hurt us physically, but the true writer needs only his natural dreams, and he does not like his thought to be influenced by any agent." ==References==