Part of my opium collection. The pots with coral stoppers were used to store the opium paste, the lamp to “toast” it until it vaporized and the central containers of metal and bone, decorated with erotic designs, to carry the drug to parties. The pipe is Burmese, c.1920, made of bamboo, soapstone and jadeite, with brass mountings.
Every few weeks, someone I’m taking on a literary walk around Paris will ask “How did you happen to start doing these?”
It’s an innocent question, so my answer usually surprises them.
“Well…actually,” I tell them,“opium”.
Back around 2010, I was helping out on the Paris Writers’ Workshop, which offered ten days of classes to writers-to-be from all over the world. For light relief, we scheduled some café dinners, musical soirées and literary walks.
Academics were hired to lead the walks - successfully as a rule. But when that year’s clients lurched back, glassy-eyed, from the first, we sniffed trouble, a suspicion confirmed when one of them intimated that, should the Health Service even run low on soporifics, their guide could more than make up the deficiency.
“What are we going to do now?”, I asked the director.
“I thought you might take over,” she said.
“I’m no guide!” I protested. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“Oh, nonsense,” she said.”Just tell them some of your stories.”
The next day, I found myself facing seven people in varying degrees of expectation or – news of the first walk having got around – trepidation.
There was plenty of the latter on my side also, since I’d belatedly realised that the corner of Montparnasse where classes were held didn’t contain a single site of literary or cultural interest.
If I could keep them interested until the Jardins du Luxembourg, maybe its plethora of significant sites would make up the deficiency. However, with four or five blocks to go, inspiration flagged. Fortunately chance provided a solution. On the corner where we paused was an antique shop. And among the items in its window was an opium pipe.
It’s been said that “Hollywood in the eighties can’t be understood except with reference to cocaine”. The same was true of opium in the Paris of the belle epoque. The gum of Papaver Somniferum, the opium poppy, permeated its cultural life. The elite of art and literature indulged at fumeries scattered across the city or at private parties, for which dealers supplied not only the drugs and equipment but also staff to demonstrate the process and keep the pipes coming.
My interest in the pipe must have been obvious. I may even have muttered “Gosh, that’s a nice one. Wonder what they want for it…”
But remembering my clients, I turned away from the window.
“Sorry about that,” I said. “Just another block or two…”
But nobody showed an inclination to move.
“Go on,” urged one man.
“About….?”
“Opium.”
Someone else peered at the pipe in the window.”How does it work? There doesn’t seem to be a bowl.” And one of the women, with a delicious shiver, murmured “Were there really… opium dens?”
This was startling. Maybe I’d been on the wrong track with my anecdotes about Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. Perhaps it was the untold story that people wanted; the stuff they didn’t get in Modern Lit.
“Well,” I said, “if you just come a little closer…”
And in that instant we were no longer pedant and audience, teacher and class. The mystery united us. We had become conspirators.
Asia overwhelmed the artists of the nineteenth century. In particular, France’s Decadent movement found it fascinating. Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec admired Japanese woodcut prints, which first appeared in Europe as wrapping paper for imported porcelain. The stories and poems of Pierre Loti and Pierre Louys created a vision of China and Japan as cultures of sage philosophers, sexually accomplished courtesans, and opium.
France’s provinces of Annam and Cochin, later to become VietNam, provided a rich source of ther drug. Poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Jean Cocteau celebrated its power to suspend time, to let the users “step off the express train of life” and watch existence race by while they hovered in the eternal Now of an “artificial paradise.”
Baudelaire argued that great art required a "long, immense and reasoned disorder of all the senses" which could only be achieved with the use of drugs. Arthur Rimbaud rated him "the first seer, king of poets, a true God." He became convinced that only by "absorbing all the poisons and keeping only the quintessences" could one “arrive at the unknown."
When Thomas de Quincey published his 1821 Confessions of an English Opium Eater, opium was already widely known and used by European artists. Alfred de Musset smoked it, as well as translating Quincey’s book into French. Lord Byron drank it dissolved in spiced alcohol, as laudanum. In India, where it had been cultivated for centuries, the British East India Company enjoyed a monopoly on its trade. The Chinese had stamped out its use by imposing high import duties but in the “Opium Wars” of the 1840s, Britain forced them to lift these and accept inferior Indian opium – rejected by the Chinese as “Foreign Mud” - in payment for their most precious export, tea.
Though opium’s chemically-refined forms, morphine and heroin, provided a faster, more intense sensation, artists and thinkers preferred the drug raw. Smoking it allowed them to spend an entire evening in s world transmuted into pure movement and form. To a culture that created the vine-like curlicues of art nouveau, Monet’s water lilies, and Debussy’s evocation in music of fountains, clouds and the sea, it was the ideal narcotic – organic, transcendent, and ostensibly benign.
Opium represented a badge of intelligence; the membership of an elite. In the late 1920s, when the Hungarian photographer Gyula Halasz, aka Brassai, created Paris Le Nuit, his classic documentation of the city’s demi-monde, his exploration took him to a fumerie. Among its clients was a beautiful actress. Brassai asked to take her picture. Her response condenses vividly the sense of opium smokers as privileged, set apart.
“Of course! And you have my permission to print it. I’m proud to smoke…They say that after a while drugs, opium, will destroy you, make you thin, weaken you, ruin your mind, your memory; that it makes you stagger, gives you a yellow complexion, sunken eyes, all of that…Rot! Look at me. And tell me frankly, am I not beautiful and desirable? Well, let me tell you, I’ve smoked opium for ten years, and I’m doing all right…..”
Woman in fumerie by Brassai, c.1926.
THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF A FIVE-PART ESSAY ON OPIUM AND ITS ROLE IN THE CULTURAL LIFE OF EUROPE IN THE BELLE EPOQUE. THIS PART IS AVAILABLE TO ALL BUT THE NEXT FOUR WILL BE RESERVED FOR PAYING SUBSCRIBERS.