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  Having scaled the approach steps, I found myself at the base of one of those immense flights of stairs built in the days of Louis XIV, and in which a modern house could easily be contained. An Egyptian statue of a chimera in the style of Lebrun, with an Amor astride it, stretched out its paws on a pedestal and held a candle in its claws which were curved into the shape of a sconce.

  The gradient of the steps was a gentle one; the cleverly spaced rests and landings bore witness both to the genius of the old architect and the grandiose life of the past, and as I ascended that noble flight of stairs, dressed in my thin frockcoat, I felt out of keeping with my surroundings, usurping a right that was not properly mine: the service staircase would have been good enough for me.

  Paintings, mostly without their frames, and copies of the masterpieces of the Italian and Spanish schools, lined the walls and, above in the shadows, there loomed a great mythological ceiling painted in fresco.

  I reached the designated floor.

  I recognized the apartment by its revolving door, whose crushed and shiny Utrecht velvet, yellowing braid and battered studs bore witness to long service.

  I rang. I was admitted with the customary precautions and found myself in a great room illuminated at one end by a few lamps. On entering, one stepped back two centuries in time. Time, which flows so fast, did not seem to have passed over this house and, like a clock that one had forgotten to rewind, its hand ever pointed to the same date.

  The walls, panelled in white-painted wood, were half covered with darkened canvases bearing the stamp of the period; on the gigantic stove rose a statue that might have been stolen from one of the arbours of Versailles. Over the domed ceiling writhed a slapdash allegory in the style of the Lemoine or perhaps even from his own brush.

  I made my way towards the lit portion of the room, where a number of human forms were restlessly moving around a table and from whom there came, as soon as the light revealed my presence, a vigorous cheer which made the sonorous depths of the old edifice re-echo.

  “There he is!” voices cried in unison, “let him have his portion!”

  The doctor was standing by a sideboard on which was placed a tray laden with little Japanese saucers. He was extracting morsels of paste or greenish conserve, no bigger than one’s thumb, from a crystal vase by means of a spatula and placing them together with a silver-gilt teaspoon on each saucer.

  The doctor’s face radiated enthusiasm: his eyes were sparkling, his cheeks flushed with crimson, the veins at his temples were swollen and his dilated nostrils snuffed the air.

  “This will be deducted from your portion of Paradise,” he said as he handed me my due ration.

  When everybody had consumed his portion, coffee in the Arab style was served, i.e. with the grounds and without sugar.

  We then sat down to dinner.

  This reversal of culinary habits has perhaps surprised the reader; it is, in fact, hardly normal to have your coffee before the soup, and sweets are generally consumed for dessert. The matter certainly demands some explanation.

  2

  In Parentheses

  There formerly existed in the East a redoubtable order of religious fanatics commanded by a sheik, who took the title of the Old Man of the Mountain, or the Prince of the Assassins.

  The old Man of the Mountain was obeyed unquestioningly: his subjects, the Assassins, proceeded with absolute devotion to the execution of his orders, no matter what they were; no danger would deter them, not even certain death. At a sign from their chief, they would leap from the top of a tower, they would stab a ruler in his own palace, surrounded by his bodyguards.

  By what devices did the Old Man of the Mountain elicit such complete self-abnegation?

  The answer: by means of an extraordinary drug of which he held the recipe and which possessed the property of bestowing marvellous hallucinations.

  Those who had partaken of it found real life so sad and colourless by comparison with their intoxication that they would joyfully sacrifice their lives to return to their dream-paradise. For every man killed while executing the orders of the sheik ascended to Paradise as of right and every survivor was admitted once more to the enjoyment of the mysterious compound.

  Now, the green paste which the doctor had just distributed to us was the very same with which the Old Man of the Mountain had secretly dosed his fanatics, leading them to believe that it was within his power to bestow on them the paradise of Muhammad and the houris of the three ranks – in a word, hashish from which is derived hashishin, the eater of hashish, the origin of our word assassin, the ferocious signification of which is amply explained by the sanguinary habits of the henchmen of the Old Man of the Mountain.

  Assuredly, those who had seen me leave my home at the hour which ordinary mortals take their dinner had no inkling that I was going to the Ile Saint-Louis, a virtuous and patriarchal neighbourhood if ever there was one, to consume a strange food which had been used centuries ago by an impostor of a sheik as a means of exciting his illuminati to murder. Nothing in my perfectly bourgeois rig could have made me suspect of such an excess of orientalism; I had rather the appearance of a nephew going to dine with his elderly aunt than of a believer on the point of tasting the joys of Muhammad’s heaven in the company of a dozen very French “Arabs”.

  Had you been informed prior to this revelation that in Paris in the year 1845, at that period of stock-jobbing and railway speculations, there existed an order of hashish-eaters whose history had been written by Herr von Hammer, you would surely not have believed it, but nothing could have been more true – as unlikely stories have a habit of being.

  3

  Agape

  The meal was served in a bizarre fashion and a great number of eccentric and picturesque vessels were used.

  The usual glassware, bottles and decanters had been replaced by large Venetian glasses decorated with milky spirals, German beakers illuminated with heraldic devices and mottoes, Flemish jugs in enamelled pottery and slender-necked flagons still in their reed coverings.

  The opaque porcelain of Louis Leboeuf and English floral china, the pride of middle-class tables, were conspicuous by their absence; every plate was an odd one, but nevertheless possessed an distinction of its own; China, Japan and Saxony had contributed examples of their loveliest ware and richest colours; it was all a trifle chipped and somewhat cracked but in exquisite taste.

  The dishes were for the most part enamelled porcelain ware made by Bernard de Palissy or porcelain from Limoges, and occasionally the carver’s knife encountered, beneath the real viands, a reptile, a frog or a bird in relief. The edible eel mingled its coils with those of the moulded adder.

  The honest citizens would have experienced some nervousness at the sight of those guests, long-haired, bearded and moustached, or strangely close-cropped, brandishing sixteenth-century poniards, Malay krises or Spanish clasp knives, and tucking into food which looked strangely suspect in the reflected light of the flickering lamps.

  The dinner was approaching its end and some of the more enthusiastic initiates were already experiencing the effects of the green paste, but for my part I had suffered a complete reversal in my sensations of taste. The water I was drinking seemed to me to possess the bouquet of the most exquisite wine, the flavour of the meat changed in my mouth into that of raspberries and vice versa. I could not have told a cutlet from a peach.

  My neighbours at table began to appear somewhat eccentric; their eyes were as large as a screech owl’s; their noses elongated into trunks; their mouths stretched as wide as bells; their faces took on unnatural shades of colour.

  One of them, with a pale face ringed by a black beard, was laughing madly at some invisible spectacle; another was making incredible efforts to raise his glass to his lips and his contortions in so doing aroused deafening jeers.

  Another, his body agitated by nervous tremors, was twisting his thumbs
with incredible agility and yet another, stretched out in his chair, his arms dangling, had sunk like a voluptuary in the bottomless sea of nothingness.

  I sat leaning on my elbows and observed all this by the light of a vestige of sense that came and went from second to second, like a night-light about to go out. Dull waves of heat traversed my limbs and madness, like a wave breaking in foam on a rock and retreating only to spring forwards again, alternately possessed and quitted my brain before invading it completely.

  Hallucination, that strange guest, had taken up its quarters with me.

  “On to the drawing room,” cried one of the banqueters, “can’t you hear the celestial choirs? The players are already at their desks.”

  And, in fact, delicious harmonies had been reaching us in snatches through the tumult of the conversation.

  4

  A Gate-crasher

  The drawing room was enormous. The walls were decorated with gilt carvings, the ceiling was painted, the friezes depicted satyrs pursuing nymphs in the reeds, the chimneypiece was vast and executed in coloured marbles, the brocade curtains fell in ample folds. Everything breathed the luxury of a past epoch.

  Tapestried furniture, couches, armchairs and bergères wide enough to accommodate the skirts of a duchess or a marquise, received the hashish-eaters in their soft and ever-open arms. A low fireside chair made me advances, I established myself in it and abandoned myself unresistingly to the effects of the fantastic drug.

  In a few minutes, my companions began to disappear one after the other, leaving nothing but their shadows on the wall by which they were soon absorbed, much as the brown stains made by the water on the sand disappear as they dry.

  And from this stage, as I was no longer conscious of their activities, the reader will now have to content himself with the plain recital of my personal impressions.

  Solitude reigned in the drawing room, which was starred by a few vague points of light. Suddenly a red flash of lightning shot under my closed eyelids, a great number of candles it up of their own accord and I felt myself bathed in mild, gold-toned light. My surroundings were indubitably the same but with the difference between a sketch and a finished painting; everything was bigger, richer, of greater magnificence. Reality merely served as a jumping-off ground for the splendours of the hallucination.

  As yet I had seen nobody, but nevertheless sensed the presence of a multitude.

  I could hear the rustling of stuffs, the creaking of dancing pumps, voices which were whispering and murmuring, lisping and mumbling, stifled laughter, the sound of a shifting armchair or table. China was clattering, doors were opening and shutting; something unusual was happening.

  An enigmatic personage appeared to me of a sudden.

  How had he come in? I did not know, but his appearance did not frighten me at all; he had a nose curved into a bird’s beak, green eyes surrounded by three dark circles, which he frequently wiped with an enormous handkerchief; a high-fitting white starched cravat, through whose knot had been slipped a visiting card on which was printed the words: Daucus-Carota, At the Sign of the Golden Pot, strangled his thin neck and caused the skin of his cheeks to hang down in rubicund folds; a

  square-tailed black frock-coat from which dangled clusters of gewgaws, imprisoned a torso bulging like a capon’s breast. As for his legs, I must own that they were composed of a mandrake root, bifurcated, black, rough, covered with knots and warts, and which appeared to have been recently torn up, for fragments of earth still adhered to the root-threads. The aforesaid legs were quivering and criss-crossing at great speed and when the little body supported by them was standing directly in front of me, the strange personage burst into tears and, rubbing his eyes vigorously, said to me in a most pitiable voice: “It’s today that we are to die of laughter!”

  And tears as big as peas rolled down both sides of his nose.

  5

  Fantasia

  I looked up at the ceiling and perceived a host of bodiless heads like those of cherubs, whose comic expressions and jovial and blissfully happy physiognomies forced me to share their hilarity. Their eyes wrinkled, their mouths spread in wide grins and their nostrils open wide; the resulting grimaces would have tickled the God of Spleen in person. These comic masks were moving in bands spinning in different directions, the effect of which was dazzling and vertiginous.

  The drawing room had gradually filled with extraordinary figures unknown outside the etchings of Callot or the aquatints of Goya: it was a jumble of tawdry finery and picturesque rags, of human and bestial forms; on any other occasion I should have been uneasy in such company but the monstrosities seemed harmless enough. Roguishness rather than ferocity sparkled in those eyes. Good humour alone had bared those immoderate canines and sharp incisors.

  As if I had been the king of the revels, each figure in its turn approached me in the brilliantly lit circle of which I occupied the centre and, with an air of grotesque deference, mumbled in my ear certain jests all of which I have forgotten though at the moment I found them exquisitely witty and inductive of the wildest gaiety.

  At each new apparition, laughter – Homeric, Olympian, deafening and awakening echoes to infinity – exploded about me like thunderclaps.

  Voices, which screeched and rumbled in turn, were crying: “No, it’s too funny, don’t, you are killing me! God, what a joke! Better and better!” “Stop, I can’t go on… ha, ha, ha… What a glorious farce… what a lovely pun!” “Stop, I’m choking! Don’t look at me like that… put me in a straitjacket or I’ll burst…”

  Notwithstanding such partly comic, partly supplicating protestations, the tremendous hilarity grew ever greater, the uproar increased in intensity, the floors and the walls of the house rose and fell like a human diaphragm as they were shaken by frenetic, irresistible implacable laughter.

  Presently, instead of presenting themselves singly, the grotesque phantoms assailed me en masse, flapping their long Pierrot sleeves, tripping over the folds of the their magician’s robes, flattening their pasteboard noses in absurd collisions, the powder from their wigs coming away in clouds, and singing out-of-tune wild ditties to impossible rhymes.

  Every type invented by the satirical verve of artists and nations were gathered there but to the tenth and hundredth power. It was a strange rabble; Neapolitan Pulcinella patted the hump of English Punch; Bergamesque Harlequin rubbed his black muzzle against the flour-plastered mask of French Paillasse who replied with fearful cries; Bolognese Dottore threw snuff into the eyes of old Cassandra; Tartaglia galloped astride a clown and Gilles kicked Don Spavento in the backside; Karagheuz armed with his obscene staff fought a duel with Osque the buffoon.

  Further on teemed the fantasies of ribald dreams: these were hybrid creatures, monstrous mixtures of man, beast and utensil – monks with wheels for legs and cooking-pots for bellies, warriors encased in cooking vessels brandishing wooden sabres clutched in bird’s talons, statesmen activated by the mechanisms of an automatic spit, kings plunged to the waist in pepperbox turrets, alchemists with heads in the form of a pair of bellows and limbs twisted into alembics, jesters composed of a heap of pumpkins with bizarre swellings, all that might be delineated in the hot fever of the pencil by a cynic whose elbow has been jogged by drunkenness.

  All this swarmed and crawled and scurried and skipped and grunted and whistled, as Goethe says in his Walpurgis Night.

  To escape the weird throng of these quaint personages, I fled to a dark corner from which I could see them abandoning themselves to dances unknown to the Renaissance in the time of Chicard or the Opéra in Musard’s reign – Musard, king of the wild quadrille. The dancers were a thousand times better than Molière, Rabelais, Swift, or Voltaire as, with an entrechat or a balance, they indited such profoundly philosophic comedies, satires of such deep significance and piquant wit, that in my retreat I had to hold my sides for laughter.

  Daucus-Carota, though still wip
ing his eyes, contrived to execute incredible pirouettes and somersaults for a man whose legs consisted of a mandrake root and who continued to repeat in a comically pitiful voice: “This is the day we shall die of laughing!”

  You, O Reader, who have admired the sublime stupidity of Odry, the hoarse-voiced nonsense of Alcide Tousez, the pompous folly of Arnal, the baboon grimaces of Ravel, and who think yourself a judge of comic farce, if you had been present at this Gustave’s ball evoked by hashish, you would agree that the most killing comedians of our boulevard theatres are by comparison fit to be carved on the corners of a catafalque or tomb.

  What strangely convulsed faces! What eyes winking and sparkling with irony beneath the ornithological membrane! What grins fit to adorn a piggy bank! What mouths stretching from ear to ear! What facetiously dodecahedral noses! What paunches pregnant with Rabelaisian mockery!

  It was strange how through the teeming but carefree nightmare there flashed sudden irresistible likenesses, caricatures that would arouse the envy of Daumier and Gavarni, fantasies that would make those wonderful Chinese artists, Phidiases of the tumbler-toy and porcelain grotesque, faint with delight.

  Not every vision, however, was as monstrous or burlesque; beauty could be detected in that carnival of forms: by the fireplace, a little head with cheeks like a peach was spinning, framed in its blonde tresses, showing in an endless fit of gaiety its thirty-two teeth no bigger than rice grains; its laughter high-pitched, vibrant, silvery, drawn-out, graced with trills and musical pauses, pierced my ear-drums and drove me by virtue of its nervous magnetism to commit a host of extravagances.

  The joyous frenzy was at its climax; you could hear nothing but convulsed sighs, inarticulate moans, laughter which had lost its true ring and had begun to turn into a snarl; pleasure was succeeded by spasm; the refrain of Daucus-Carota was about to come true.