THE “DIVINE DRUG”: THE ART OF SMOKING OPIUM AND ITS

IMPACT IN THE WEST AT THE TURN OF THE NINETEENTH AND

TWENTIETH CENTURIES - by Ami-Jacques Rapin (CAIRN 2003)

Introduction

1. If opium smoking exerted a real fascination on the Western imagination

at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is perhaps as much because
of the sensory experiences it induces as of the cultural context to which it
refers. At a time when China probably has more than ten million addicts,
part of Western opium-addict circles consider the use of drugs as an art, a
process supposed to introduce those who practice it to the mysteries of a
fundamentally exotic Asia. The Far Eastern Thebaic method –or Chinese
method of opium smoking– imposes itself in Europe and North America in
the form of a ritual that sublimates the technical constraints of the practice
of narcotics. Certainly not all Western consumers share the aesthetic
pursuit of a small elite that will leave a lasting mark in the history of
literature. It is nonetheless true that opium addiction will henceforth be
closely associated with East Asia in its narrative or iconographic
representations and that opium will have definitively earned its reputation
as the “divine drug”.

2. The first part of this article sets out the genesis and characteristics of
the Far Eastern Thebaic method. The second briefly evokes the situation of
opium in the West in the first part of the 19th century. As for the third
part, it presents more extensively the conditions of acclimatization in North
America and Europe of the art of smoking opium according to the Chinese
model. In these last two parts, the analysis makes extensive use of a
corpus of texts, already partially exploited by the critics who have studied
the relationship between drugs and literature during the period under
consideration. However, this approach differs from these studies in at least
two respects. On the one hand, its subject relates exclusively to opium and
a specific practice of this substance. On the other hand, the aim is not so
much to grasp the influence of drugs on literary representations, but rather
to approach the representations of drugs in literary production. Defined in
these terms, the object of the study is undoubtedly more modest than are
the syntheses devoted to the imagination of drugs, all substances
combined. It remains no less relevant when it treats this corpus according
to its dual interest as a significant source. Literary evocations of opium
retain a particularly expressive trace of the substance's impact in the West
at a given time, but they also contributed to forging a new conception of
the drug by projecting onto its consumption technique cultural meanings
that go beyond the realm of simple hedonism.

1
3. Each in their own way, the three parts of this article reflect the
specificity of a mode of absorption of a drug which occupies a special place
in the category of psychotropic substances. Adherents to opium consumed
in the form of smoke most often refer to their Drug by using a capital
letter. From Albert de Pouvourville to Nick Tosches via Claude Farrère, Louis
Laloy or Jean Cocteau, they do not hesitate to combine their advocacy with
a condemnation of other narcotics. Cocteau writes on this subject: “To say
'drugs' when speaking of opium amounts to confusing Pommard with
Pernod”. It is precisely the basis of this hierarchical conception of drugs
that this article aims to shed light on.

A) The invention of the Far Eastern Thebaic method

4. Historically, opium was first used in the form of decoctions, lozenges or

external applications, long before it was smoked. In Antiquity, it was most
often mixed with other substances –generally non-psychotropic when it
comes to therapeutic preparations– and its exclusive use then seems only
exceptional. Some clues support the thesis that poppy juice could have
been inhaled during the ancient period, but here again it is only one
component among others of the fumigations recommended by Hippocrates.
On the other hand, there is no conclusive source to confirm that the
substance could have been smoked in a period before the 17th century.
The demonstration by Kritikos and Papadaki relating to the existence of an
ancient opium pipe discovered in a Cypriot excavation dating back to 1220-
1190 BC turns out to be unconvincing. Max Milner's assertion that "the
reputation of opium as a smokable substance, due to the accounts of
travelers in the Orient and going back at least to those of Marco Polo, was
much older than that of laudanum, invented around 1660 by Sydenham",
seems for its part singularly detached from historical references.

5. In reality, there is today a broad consensus to consider that the use of

opium in the form of smoke is of Far Eastern origin and "proceeds from
that of tobacco", according to the expression of Louis Dermigny. Imported
from the Americas by Europeans, tobacco did not spread to East Asia, via
the Philippines, until the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. The success
it meets does not take long to cause its cultural assimilation, to the point
that a few generations later, it is considered a native plant. Long before
opium, it was banned by the Qing Court in edicts of 1637 and 1643.

6. In 17th century East Asia, opium was imported from India, mainly
traded by European merchants. It is therefore not surprising that the
amalgamation of drugs and tobacco most likely took place in Batavian or
Portuguese trading posts in the Java Sea or the China Sea. Jonathan
Spence points to references to the practice of smoking the mixture in both
Batavia and Macao in the early part of the 17th century. The substance
2
that was consumed at that time turned out to be much closer to smoked
madak in contemporary India than to chandoo, that is to say real smoking
opium, the practice of which would become widespread in the Far East.
Dating the appearance of this new practice is far from easy. The author of
the most comprehensive recent study of the Far Eastern Thebaic method
places the invention of the Chinese opium pipe (yan qiang, literally
spear/smoking gun) as an immediate extension of the tobacco prohibition
edicts of the first half of the 17th century. However, everything suggests
that this dating is too early. From the years 1880-1890, several authors
place this technical innovation in the 18th century, which is confirmed by
Doctor Gaide, by means of a very well-argued inductive reasoning, in a
1938 issue of the Bulletin des Amis du Vieux Hué, then Jonathan Spence
in his contribution to a collective work of 1975, this time based on Chinese
sources.

7. For the French doctor, innovation would be placed in the first part of the
18th century, for the British sinologist rather in the second. This last
interpretation is the most plausible, for two main reasons. On the one
hand, the testimonies of Western travelers attest that the mixing of
tobacco and opium was still widely practiced in China at the turn of the
18th and 19th centuries, when this mode of consumption, which required
a simple tobacco pipe, will tend to fade away. On the other hand, this
period corresponds to a significant growth in Indian opium imports, which
obviously reflects an increase in Chinese consumption. However, it is not
prohibited to suppose that this increase, correlatively with its geographical
extension in the interior provinces of the Empire, was stimulated by the
development of a new technique of smoking the drug which from now on is
emancipated from the tobacco. Moreover, it is useless to seek to precisely
date an innovation which undoubtedly results from a long process of
experimentation. As we will see, the Far Eastern Thebaic method is based
on a complex technique, both from the point of view of the instruments it
uses and that of the preparation of the substance that is consumed. The
development of these instruments and the determination of manipulations
capable of improving the quality of chandoo involved successive trials,
cumulative refinements which ultimately led to the most sophisticated and
fascinating mode of consumption of a psychotropic substance.

8. Within the framework of this article, it is not possible to go into the

details of the preparatory operations for the manufacture of the chandoo.
Let us simply specify that the drug is produced from raw opium to which a
determined quantity of water is added, a mixture which undergoes cooking
and successive filtering. The substance thus obtained is not ready to be
smoked and must undergo further manipulations immediately before
consumption. It is these final preparatory operations, requiring a skill
beyond the reach of the novice, which constitute the first stage of the
3
“ritual” of opium, according to the established expression. In summary, a
long needle is plunged into the container containing the chandoo, then the
small quantity of the substance at its end is subjected to the flame of an ad
hoc lamp, in order to deprive it of its excess humidity by desiccation. The
drop of opium swells under the effect of the heat and, once the chandoo
has reached the desired consistency, it is shaped on the edge of the bowl.
This step will largely depend on the quality of the final product. If the
preparer keeps the drug too long on the flame of the lamp or brings it too
close to it, some of the opium alkaloids will disperse by evaporation, at the
risk of destroying their balance, increasing the toxicity of the drug and
therefore alter its quality.

9. As soon as the opium pellet is shaped, it is charged by a sudden twisting

movement of the needle into the bowl of the pipe, or rather one should say
onto the bowl of the pipe. Indeed, the opium pipe is radically different from
other pipes that allow the consumption of tobacco or any herb. To fully
understand the specificity and innovative dimension of the Far Eastern
Thebaic method, it is important to give some details about its main
instrument. The pipe consists of a pipe 2.5 to 5 cm in diameter and 40 to
65 cm long, usually made of bamboo. About two-thirds of the way down is
a removable bowl, more or less spherical, or half-spherical, most often in
terracotta. On its underside, a socket allows it to be fixed on the metal
saddle which forms a chimney extending the hole made in the bamboo. On
the upper face of the bowl, a tiny hole, 1 to 3 mm, is located in the center
of a small concave surface of about 1 cm16. Loaded into this cavity, the
pellet remains pierced centrally with the hole left by the needle, thus
preventing the bowl from being completely obstructed by the chandoo,
which would prevent the draw when the smoker exerts his aspiration.

10. Next, the smoker –lying on his side, his head supported by a pillow–
places the bowl of his pipe above the glass of the lamp. The pipe is tilted to
the side, the bowl subjected to the flame, so that the opium does not char,
but is volatilized under the effect of the heat. This is a decisive difference
compared to methods of smoking other substances, including madak, since
the opium alkaloids are thus not denatured by the combustion of the
substance. As soon as the smoke is sucked into the bowl, it is subjected to
a significant change in temperature which has the effect of keeping the
heaviest particles there, those which contain a good part of the morphine
contained in the opium. Adhering to the walls of the bowl, these residues
form the dross –much more toxic than the chandoo itself– which will then
be scraped off using a fine curette. The dross can later be added to a new
chandoo preparation, in order to increase the morphine content, or even
smoked, drunk or chewed after having undergone manipulations similar to
those of the chandoo preparation. This “second opium” produces new
residues when consumed in the form of smoke; this dross is even more
4
toxic than the previous one and can in turn be collected and reused. For
Cocteau, “the vice of opium is smoking dross”. Another expert on the
subject, Albert de Pouvourville, considers that “the third opium” or “the
fourth opium” only provides a “repugnant and stupid intoxication”. In fact,
two distinct motivations explain the consumption of dross. In the first case,
the shortage of opium or the poverty of the smoker pushes him to resort
to the residues of opium smoking for the sake of economy. In a second
case, dross is an additive to chandoo, supposed to improve its quality. It is
then up to the chandoo preparer to skilfully dose the quantity of dross so
that it responds to the taste of the smoker, without unbalancing the
alkaloid content of the opium by excessively adding residues rich in
morphine.

11. Once the pipe is loaded and subjected to the flame of the lamp, the
consumer slowly inhales the smoke which he rejects through the nostrils,
most often lying on his back. The small diameter of the furnace chimney,
adapted to the size of the opium pellet, allows this prolonged aspiration by
only allowing the passage of a small volume of air. It also prevents the heat
source from being subjected to a sudden call for air, which has unfortunate
consequences for the heating of the chandoo. The number of suctions
needed to complete a pipe varies among observers. For Dr. Baurac, "a
single inhalation is enough for good smokers", while Charles Lemire notes
that Cochin-Chinese consumers proceed through "twenty inhalations".
Besides the experience of the smoker, the size of the bowl chimney and
the quantity of opium loaded in the pipe, which exert their influence
concurrently, variants in the Far Eastern Thebaic method explain the
dissimilarity of these observations (infra). Either way, the smoke enters the
lungs, from where the opium alkaloids enter the bloodstream and then
reach the user's brain almost instantaneously.

12. The number of pipes consumed varies according to the trajectory of the
smoker, the quality of the opium, its method of preparation, and even
previous uses of the pipe, the stem of which may be impregnated with
dross. Let us simply point out that a novice will start with a limited number
of pipes and that this number will increase according to his experiments.
Peter Lee recommends to the neophyte not to exceed the number of 3 to
5 pipes, smoked in two or three hours; Jean Cocteau estimates that a
dozen daily pipes endanger the consumer's health less than a glass of
cognac or three cigars; Doctor Baurac advances the fork from 40 to 80
pipes; finally, the case of a European smoker taking 100 pipes a day is
mentioned by the Indo-Chinese press. As for the numbers of “three, four
hundred pipes each day; more who knows?” mentioned by Claude Farrère
in one of his short stories, they should probably be considered as part of
literary expression.

5
13. In 1873, Fernand Papillon reported in the Revue des Deux Mondes an
interesting variant of the technique previously exposed. If the pipe he
describes conforms in every respect to the Chinese opium pipe, its method
of preparation and consumption differs somewhat from the previous one.
According to this author, a special “spoon” is used to draw the opium
extract from its container. This extract is then applied to the edges of the
central opening of the bowl of the pipe to "form a kind of bead", which is
directly presented to the flame of the lamp, so that "the opium burns
bubbling and filling the inside of the pipe with smoke". This operation has
the effect of blistering the opium which then obstructs the chimney of the
furnace. Smokers remedy this inconvenience “by passing, after each
inhalation, a needle through the middle of the bloated mass, and thus re-
establishing the communication of the air with the interior of the pipe”.
The duration of consumption of a pipe is lengthened accordingly to about
five minutes, at the rate of twelve to fifteen aspirations. The originality of
this method does not really lie in the loading of the pipe, since some forty
years later the Manager of the Saigon Opium Factory also described the
technique consisting in making the opium adhere to the edges of the
bowl's opening. It is at the level of preheating and heating of the pellet that
a distinction is made with respect to the method previously described.
According to Papillon, this variant ignores the prior desiccation of the
chandoo and its shaping for the loading of the pipe. Moreover, everything
suggests that the opium is subjected to more intense heat than in the
previous technique. Papillon specifies that the flame is "sucked in so as to
direct it onto the opium", then that this flame is "employed to burn the
narcotic extract", whereas Pouvourville clearly indicates that the upper end
of the glass garnish of the lamp, "through which the smoker cooks the
opium", allows air and heat to pass, "but noticeably exceeds the level of
the flame".

14. Is the technique described by Papillon in 1873 a pure variant of the

classical Thebaic method or should it rather be considered as a less
elaborate practice, the improvement of which leads precisely to this
method? Although the two techniques coexist in Asia during the 19th
century, it is quite plausible that they do not date from the same period
and that one was temporarily maintained, despite the improvements made
by the other. In fact, the preparation and preheating of the opium pellet,
as well as the process aimed at avoiding its carbonization at the time of
aspiration, lead us to consider the method described by Baurac and
Pouvourville as a genuine improvement in the smoking room of the dope.

15. To summarize the above, a quick comparison will be made between the
Far Eastern Thebaic method and other modes of opium consumption.
Compared to madak, chandoo is a substance that does not contain
adjuvants and therefore has a much higher level of alkaloids, in particular
6
morphine. Unlike madak, it does not ignite but is transformed by
volatilization into a smoke that retains the balance of its alkaloids and has
an unparalleled aroma. The configuration of the bowl of the opium pipe
somehow counterbalances the richness in morphine of the substance by
allowing the fixation of part of the toxic principles of the chandoo. The
differences from opium taken orally are just as important, prompting
Cocteau to write: “Never confuse the opium smoker with the opiophage.
Other Phenomena." Apart from the preparatory stages to which opium
decoctions or pellets to be ingested are not subjected, the main differences
lie in the mode of action of the drug on the body. Assimilated through the
digestive system and not through the respiratory system, opium exerts
delayed, less intense and more lasting effects on the consumer due to the
gradual diffusion of its alkaloids into the blood system. Furthermore, oral
absorption leads to the assimilation of practically all the alkaloids contained
in the substance consumed, whereas in the case of chandoo smoking a
significant part of the alkaloids is dispersed in the atmosphere in the form
of smoke or remains in the bowl or the stem of the pipe. With sophisticated
technology, the Chinese opium pipe is the instrument where a subtle
rebalancing of opium alkaloids takes place. As long as the drug is of good
quality and has undergone the required preparatory manipulations, this
pipe offers its user the best conditions for consumption. From the smoker's
point of view, the absorption of decoctions or pellets is an inferior practice,
it is only a last resort linked to a shortage of chandoo which certainly
provides him with certain effects of the drug, but in no case the satisfaction
of smoking. Finally, it is worth pointing out a specificity of the Far Eastern
Thebaic method related to the time required to practice it. The duration of
the preparatory stages, the need to repeat them for each successive pipe
that is consumed and the cumulative time of the aspiration of these pipes
oblige the smoker to devote a long time to his passion. Cocteau expresses
this by writing: “[Smoked] opium does not support impatient adepts,
spoilers.” The smoker is in a way rewarded for this temporal investment by
the new relation to time to which the drug gives him access.

B) Opium in the West in the first part of the 19th century

16. At the time when the Far Eastern Thebaic method was spreading in
China and South-East Asia, i.e. at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries,
opium was mainly consumed in the West in the form of laudanum, i.e. say
of an alcoholic tincture of opium. In the form of laudanum or pills to be
swallowed, opiate preparations were widely used in popular pharmacopoeia,
before a generation of writers skillfully introduced the substance into the
literary field. Coleridge, De Quincey, Poe and Baudelaire are “opium eaters”,
or rather we should say opium drinkers for these consumers of laudanum.
Solidly rooted in Western culture, opiophagy was maintained over the
course of the century and only gradually yielded to the new practice
7
constituted by the Far Eastern Thebaic model, which the still limited
exchanges with Eastern Asia did not allow to impose itself instantly.

17. Although the writings centered on opiophagy do not belong to the

subject of this article, it is important to examine the themes which are
already present there and which will be largely developed by the authors of
the end of the 19th and 19th centuries. beginning of the 20th century.
The early presence of some of these themes is not in itself surprising.
Despite the specificities of each substance and each mode of consumption,
opium is always contained in preparations whose effects on the body
cannot be radically different. From one substance to another, from one
absorption technique to another, however, significant semantic shifts take
place among the authors who report on them.

[Link] De Quincey's work constitutes the first source to be examined,

not only because the British author treated as a precursor the ambivalence
of opium with great evocative force, but also because of its influence on
French authors who later made drugs a component of their own works.
The theme of the sanctification of drugs, without being central, is already
present in De Quincey, as evidenced by the famous formulation of the
Confessions of an opium eater: "You alone give to man these treasures,
and you possess the keys of paradise, O just, subtle and powerful opium!”
Other religious evocations are also included. The drug imparts to the
faculties of the opiophage "divine health"; it reveals to him "divine
pleasures"; it allows one to feel that the “divine part of one's nature is
sovereign”. Even more explicitly, De Quincey evokes his “prostration before
the dark idol”, the last part of this metaphor being regularly taken up by
writers who will later deal with opium. These references to the divine
universe correspond to a transposition onto the substance itself of the
sensory experiences it induces in the consumer. However, they are not
related to the practice of opium as such. In other words, De Quincey
cannot associate the taking of laudanum with a real ritual and spin the
religious metaphor to the paroxysm reached by some of the authors who
are mentioned later in this article.

19. The association of opium with the Orient constitutes a second theme
already present in De Quincey, but in an atypical register compared to
other writers of the first part of the 19th century. The journey to the
Orient was then a subject of inspiration for European authors, and since
the drugs consumed in Europe came from the Near East, it is not
surprising to note such an association in their accounts. For example in
Balzac who describes in these terms the expectations of the two
protagonists of one of his short stories: "They asked opium to show them
the golden domes of Constantinople, and to roll them on the divans of the
seraglio in the middle of the women of Mahmoud”. The originality of the
8
oriental referent in De Quincey lies in the fact that it does not only concern
the near or middle East, but also the Far East. His opiate dreams transport
him to “Asian paintings” which are a source of respect for the grandeur of
the civilizations to which they refer and of dread because of the
immemoriality and otherness to which they bear witness: “In China
especially [.. .] I am terrified of the ways of life, of the customs, of an
absolute repugnance, of a barrier of feelings which separate us from it and
which are too deep to be analysed.” It is important to note that this
dreamlike and repulsive Asia is not directly linked to the practice of drugs.
The laudanum is simply the origin of a series of inferences which the
stimulated mind of De Quincey operates following the visit of a “Malay” to
the Dove Cottage in Grasmere. De Quincey affirms that this Malay
transported him to Asia; Baudelaire will add in his comments that it had
multiplied and had become Asia itself. In short, the Malay is itself only the
starting point of the dreamer's opiate inferences which allow the
resurgence of a personal interest in exotic civilizations.

20. The theme of the modification of sensory states induced by opium can
only be approached by quoting the famous lines of the poem “Le poison”
published in Les Fleurs du Mal:

“Opium enlarges what has no bounds,

Extend the unlimited,
Deepens time, digs into voluptuousness,
And of black and gloomy pleasures
Fills the soul beyond its capacity.”

21. However poetic it may be, this definition of the effects of opium refers,
in part, to the different modes of action of the drug on the senses of the
user. Although Baudelaire is referring here to laudanum, his general
considerations remain valid for opium taken in the form of smoke. The new
mode of consumption that constitutes the Far Eastern Thebaic method
nevertheless increases the quality of the consumer's sensory states, thus
making De Quincey's opium even more "subtle" and "potent".

C) Western appropriation of the Far Eastern Thebaic method

22. Contrary to what Barbara Hodgson asserts in her recent history of

opium, the practice of smoking it was not “introduced to the West in the
1850s by European travelers and sailors from China, and by Chinese
immigrants”. In Europe, this mode of consumption is indisputably earlier,
as evidenced by the doctoral thesis in medicine defended by Paul Émile
Botta in 1829 or the rumors relating to the existence of a society of
Opiophiles -bringing together smokers of opium– in the Paris of the 1840s.
In the literary field, the autobiographical short story published by Théophile
9
Gautier on September 27, 1838, in La Presse, also illustrates the early
presence of the practice. The French writer gives a brief description of an
opium pipe, which gives its title to the story, as well as the technique of
smoking the drug. On this subject, Max Milner may have advanced too
quickly by speaking of a “canonical device”. If the bowl of the pipe described
by Gautier –a “porcelain mushroom”– could be similar to that of a Chinese
opium pipe, on the other hand the “stem of cherry wood”, the fact that the
smoker “made drip the opium on the bowl, that the "dough" was heated
on a candle and that it "flamed" in the chimney of the mushroom, or even
that it gave off only a "vague smell of oriental perfume", suggest that it's
more of a rudimentary smoking technique.

23. Whatever the technique used by Western smokers, it is certain that

this mode of consumption remained marginal in the first half of the 19th
century compared to the dominant consumption of laudanum. The practice
of smoking opium did not spread to European and North American societies
until later, manifesting itself both in the proliferation of dens in port cities
and urban centers and in a craze within specific social categories. From this
point of view, we must consider Paul Émile Botta, Théophile Gautier or his
friend Alphonse Karr, also staged in La pipe d’opium, as precursors. But
how to explain this historical gap between the experiments of the product
by these Parisian smokers and the delayed expansion of the practice in
Western societies?

24. Two distinct processes seem to characterize the spread of opium

smoking in Western countries. As a general rule, Chinese emigration
constitutes the privileged vector for the international propagation of the
practice. The great migratory waves of the second half of the 19th century
naturally affected Southeast Asia, but also the United States, Canada and
Australia. The concomitance of these population flows and the development
of this new form of drug addiction is sufficiently obvious for contemporaries
to be able to estimate that “wherever the Chinese appear, opium appears
with him”. In the United States, the thousands of Chinese workers
employed in the construction of the transcontinental railroad brought with
them a practice that soon spread throughout the country. As early as the
1870s, the American press was alarmed by a phenomenon that would
affect, a few years later, nearly 20,000 people in the city of Chicago alone
and one million nationwide. In England, it was also the “disastrous use” of
Chinese sailors which, already in 1853, aroused the concern of a press
denouncing the existence of dens in the East End of London.

25. In France, the process of dissemination of the smoking establishment

responds to a logic different from that of Anglo-Saxon countries. It was not
until the increase in the movement of people between Metropolitan France
and the Indochinese territories that the habit of “drawing on the bamboo”,
10
acquired in Asia, accompanied the return of sailors, soldiers, traders or civil
servants to their homeland. If it would undoubtedly deserve to be nuanced,
the description of this process proposed by Georges Miraben in 1911
remains no less instructive. According to this author, it was first the ports
of Toulon and Marseille that were "contaminated" by a practice that
gradually spread to other port cities, such as Rochefort, Brest and
Cherbourg, before reaching Paris. or Lyon. Inevitable fall place for seafarers,
brothels strongly contributed to establishing the use of opium in
metropolitan ports, an additional service acquired through contact with
sailors that prostitutes were quick to offer to their entire customer base. As
a naval officer and bamboo enthusiast, Claude Farrère is particularly well
informed on the subject. In his novel Les Petites Alliées, the plot of which
takes place in 1908, he depicts the middle of the demi-mondaines of the
war port of Toulon. According to Farrère, the "fashion" of smoking opium
had taken ten years earlier, in the 1890s, to the point of supplanting
alcohol in the recreational practices of sailors on stopovers or on break. At
that time, a single street in the port had no less than 60 opium dens.

26. In Toulon, opium has become acclimated to France under the slang
denomination of “jam”, given to it by local prostitutes. But it does not take
long to recover all its Far Eastern attributes, as soon as it finds its
supporters in part of the country's intellectual elite. This passage from the
common practice of the substance to its literary representation constitutes
a significant factor which explains, in part, the fascination of Belle Époque
France for opium smoking. From this point of view, Miraben is mistaken in
asserting that this "vice" was unknown in his country during the thirty
years which preceded the time of his writing. As early as the 1850s, opium
was probably smoked in certain French ports; but it is still a marginal
practice, which acquires social visibility only when the substance ceases to
be a simple narcotic to become a drug charged with meaning.

27. Between the initial appearance of the Far Eastern Thebaic method in
French ports and its great vogue a few decades later, it was another
substance –derived from opium– which dominated the metropolitan
narcotics market. The popularity of morphine in the aftermath of the
Franco-Prussian war of 1870 thus illustrates the delayed impact of opium
smoke in France, while testifying to the importance of fashion effects in the
structuring of the market for narcotics. Isolated at the beginning of the
19th century, morphine, the main alkaloid of opium, could be injected as
soon as the hypodermic syringe was developed in the middle of the
century.

28. If this analgesic initially arouses therapeutic enthusiasm, it does not

take long to cause what Arnould de Liedekerke describes as a “surprising
vogue, unprecedented in the annals of drug addiction, and in which one
11
could see the first phase of the 'History of Modern Drugs'." In the 1880s,
the profile of drug addicts was sufficiently established in the eyes of
contemporaries for each type of drug to refer to its category of user. A
journalist from Le Figaro can write about this: “Morphine has done the
same damage to women as opium has done to the Chinese. It relieves
them of their nerves, consoles them of their sorrows, and lulls them into
dreams of fortune and pleasures." In other words, opium smoking has not
yet emerged from its marginality in France, where the representation of
the practice remains closely associated with its ethnic principle. It was not
until the turn of the century that opium smoking met a public of aesthetes
and experimenters who would greatly contribute to anchoring in Western
mentalities an unprecedented representation of the Far Eastern Thebaic
method. Unlike laudanum, ether or morphine, previously practiced in the
West, opium smoking refers to a cultural context whose connotations go
beyond the fields of therapy or hedonism strictly limited to the effects of
psychotropic substances that are consumed. Jean Cocteau captures
perfectly the distinct perception and evaluation by the consumer of the
various narcotics available on the market at the beginning of the 20th
century:

“Opium is the opposite of the Pravaz Syringe. It reassures. It reassures by

its luxury, by its rites, by the anti-medical elegance of the lamps, bowls,
pipes, by the secular development of this exquisite poisoning."

29. A technique imported from the Far East, smoking does not owe its
success in France to the same causes as in Asia. For the intransigent critic
of drug addiction that is Doctor Dupouy, “our [metropolitan] opium
smokers are taken, so to speak, among the cerebral”. More precisely, in a
specific category of "cerebral", that of "imaginative", "sensitive", "poets"
and "artists". The author attributes to them a motivation linked to a taste
for "strangeness" and the "new", and the only common point which binds
the Western consumer to his Asian counterpart resides in this
consideration, all imprinted with the stereotypes of the time:

“Opium recruits its enthusiasts among minds [...] avid for an ideal of great
calm and great rest. Now, this ideal is precisely that of the Oriental,
fatalistic and lazy, rushing through dreams to superhuman nirvana,
enjoying above all the rest of body and mind and cherishing nothing so
much as his divan and his pipe."

30. In the ethnocentric perspective of Dupouy, the causes of drug addiction

relate in one case to the distinctive cultural traits of a people, in the other
to a form of deviance of a group of individuals. Western opium addiction,
whether in the colonies or in France, would thus be based on two main
factors: “mental imbalance” and “contagion by example”. Notwithstanding
12
his argumentative errors, Dupouy glimpses the significant elements of the
process of transposition of opium smoking from Asia to the West. From a
phenomenon of mass intoxication in the Far East, the practice is
transformed into an aesthetic vogue in France. Of course, a fad cannot by
itself explain experimental behavior in the field of narcotics. However, it
would be a mistake to neglect the psychosociological factors that motivate
the consumer to move towards a specific type of product. A new substance,
imbued with its Far Eastern attributes, smoking opium is part of strategies
of distinction that aim as much to establish a –partially fictitious–
relationship with distant horizons as to take a clear distance from the
repellent normality of the native society. With Claude Farrère, this
perspective gives rise to a pleasant inversion of the analyzes proposed by
Dr. Dupouy:

"I also know that other neighboring intelligences sink simultaneously into
intoxication, and this fills my soul with fraternal joy and affectionate
security. Opium, really, is a homeland, a religion, a strong and jealous bond
that binds men together. And I feel more like a brother to the Asians who
smoke in Fou-Tchéou-Road than to the inferior Frenchmen who vegetate
in Paris where I was born. Formerly, I believed these Asians separated from
my race by an abyss [...]. But I now know that opium can wonderfully
bridge the chasm. Opium is a magician that transforms and
metamorphoses."

31. A fairly elite practice in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th
centuries, opium smoking, far from affecting very large sectors of the
population like opiophagy in England, remained confined to certain social
categories who were directly –sailors, soldiers, civil servants, merchants,
settlers– or indirectly –artists, men of letters, socialites, night owls,
prostitutes– the influence of the colonial model of opium. In the French
case, between the phase of precursors and that of the enthusiasm of
metropolitan consumers, smoking is above all an eminently Indochinese
question.

32. Two periods mark the initial interest of French authors in opium
smoking. First, descriptive approaches –medical monographs, travelogues
and ethnographic sketches– account for the practice in Asian populations.
Then it becomes a significant fact of society in the overseas territories, as
soon as it affects European expatriates. Until then, opium addiction was
considered an indigenous and more particularly Chinese specificity,
exploited without qualms by the colonial authorities. Its expansion to
European administrators changes the facts of a problem considered to be
all the more worrying as it tends to become generalized, as shown in an
article in the Avenir du Tonkin of March 10, 1891:
13
“The proportion [of European addicts] is becoming frightening today, and
we cannot raise a sufficiently resounding cry of alarm again […]. The
current situation is too serious; our troubled provinces must not be
administered from the height of a camp bed and between the smoke of two
pipes prepared by a coolie."

33. Five years earlier, the first “colonial novel” dealing with opium shared
this negative vision of the narcotic, describing the decline of a French
smoker living in the Indochinese colony. Its author, Paul Bonnetain, had
been a Figaro correspondent in Hanoi where he was introduced to drugs.
The conditional is essential insofar as it is not obvious that the descriptions
which appear in the work really result from a direct experience. Thus, the
evocation of the withdrawal symptoms that Bonnetain's hero develops
precisely twenty-four hours after his first pipes or even the fact that this
hero immediately assimilates the method of preparing pipes leaves a
serious doubt.

34. Be that as it may, Bonnetain's work can be considered a transitional

work in the category of literary representations of opium. Relative for the
first time to the classic Thebaic method, it nevertheless remains clearly
behind the works of writers who later celebrate drugs. First, because the
opium is not the central element of a story that focuses mainly on the
disappointed love passion of the hero. Second, because Bonnetain claims to
offer a realistic perspective, in the vein of Zola's L'Assommoir, and in no
way insists on the aesthetic and mystical dimensions of opium smoking.
Third, because the Asia in which his hero evolves is generally repulsive,
whether from the point of view of its landscapes, its population or its
culture. A few passages nevertheless approach the themes that will be
amply developed by a new generation of colonial writers. On the one hand,
an isolated reference to the “God Opium”, which would be soiled in the
hands of an old Annamese “harpy” who ensures the preparation. On the
other hand, an evocation of the penetrating capacity of Asian civilizations
resulting from the use of drugs: "And suddenly he understood that it was
through this cloud that always, to understand it, it was necessary to
contemplate the solemn Asia.”

35. Four years after the publication of "Opium" by Bonnetain, the first
work of French literature exclusively dedicated to the Far Eastern Thebaic
method adopts a radically different posture. Les "Propos d’un intoxiqué" by
Jules Boissière is largely an autobiography in which the author wants to
“analyze [his] sensations as a smoker since the period of the first pipes
[...]”. The colonial administrator develops the whole register of references
to religion. The chandoo is presented as a "holy drug" or even the "God
Opium" which proves to the smoker his "supernatural power". The
instruments of the smoking room are “sacred objects indispensable to the
14
accomplishment of the Rite”. As for the lamp, “it burns as on the altar of a
provincial chapel in honor of Her Divinity Opium”. This singular devotion is
based on the ability of the drug to suppress the pains of the soul and the
flesh, to place the smoker in an "ataraxia", in other words a state which
comes from an ideal of wisdom characterized by absolute serenity of spirit.
The religious analogy is obviously facilitated by the technical constraints of
the Far Eastern Thebaic method which confers a ceremonial dimension to
the preparatory gestures of opium smoking. It is also explained by the
necessary initiation of the novice, as well as by the daily and prolonged
repetition of the operations specific to a practice now assimilated to a rite.

36. The quest for ataraxia was not, however, the primary motivation of
Boissière, who initially practiced opium to penetrate Asian society: "Opium
gave me no pleasure, but it gave me the surest means to see the Chinese
and the Annamites close, to study new customs, to accustom my ear to
the strange ranges that words ascend and descend in the languages of the
Far East.” With practice, the action of opium reveals a "more inquisitive
and efficient" mind, making the smoker's soul "more apt to understand the
distant souls of other races". In this sense, Boissière considers that opium
can be “necessary in these regions for those who want to see beings more
than the surface”. In a collection of short stories published in 1896 and
more specifically intended for the metropolitan public, Boissière continues
on this theme of the knowledge of the Asian soul by recounting situations
where opium is a place of fraternity between colonizers and colonized, even
if they even clash with arms.

37. Albert de Pouvourville's intellectual approach turns out to be even more

radical. An officer in the French army during the pacification of Tonkin, he
was initiated into Taoism under the name of Matgioi, which later served as
his literary pseudonym. From the 1890s, he successively published a series
of works from which emerged a true theory of the Far Eastern Thebaic
method. In The Maître des Sentences, the initiatory character of opium is
assumed, but it cannot fully manifest itself without a prior impregnation of
Asian culture. In other words, the Far Eastern Thebaic method and its
original cultural framework are united by a dialectical relationship, the
understanding of one presupposing that of the other:

“Opium will distract you from your regrets, from past or distant things: it
will console you for inaction by revealing to you the supreme joys of non-
action. But for that you have to live a little in the country, and let your soul
soak up a bit of Far Eastern life. And if you don't come to that, I pity you."

38. The action of the drug on the smoker thus raises him to a level of
discernment that the mind cannot reach on its own. The divine character
of opium resides precisely in this degree of refined perception achieved by
15
the consumer. The smoker enters "the speculative regions of these oriental
conceptions so tenuous, and yet at the same time so synthetic, that an ill-
prepared mind takes them for meaningless words or formless daydreams".
He accesses a "second atmosphere" which, analogically, is related to that in
which "the Saints and Geniuses must speak and reflect [...], for whom
time is henceforth limitless, and who know that, in order to reach divine
understanding, they have immortality”. Atmosphere where conscious
thought and dreamlike thought meet: “He was no longer awake; his body
was inert; but his lucid mind had soared to the heights of intelligence,
where reason only reaches when carried away on the wings of dream."

39. In "L'Esprit des Races Jaunes. L'Opium, sa Pratique", Pouvourville

places himself in the posture of the initiator by exposing to the neophyte
the mysteries of the complex art of drawing the bamboo. As an extension
of this 1903 text, which appeared under the pseudonym of Matgioi, he
published in the 1920s a work entitled "Physique et psychique de l’opium",
this time under the pseudonym of Nguyen Te Duc Luat. The first part of
the text offers a complete review of the preparation of the drug, the
instruments of opium smoking and its technique. The second aims to
develop a “psychic theory of opium”, supplemented by a “psychological
theory”. To tell the truth, Pouvourville seeks to define as precisely as
possible the sensory states induced by smoking, abandoning all poetic
expression:

"The satisfaction of the smoker [...] consists in feeling the perfect balance
of the human compound, of the muscular system, of the nervous system,
an absolute flexibility in the joints, a harmony of all the functions, and,
immediately afterwards, consciousness spontaneous and deep of the full
possession of this organism, of its physical and psychic motors, and of the
certainty of enjoying the plenitude of the performance of this organism,
carried to the highest point of all its possibilities, impressions, sensations
and activities."

40. With the exception of taste, all the senses benefit from the effects of
the drug and possess under its influence "an insight and acuity which are
normally unknown to them". This exacerbation of sensory states is
combined with a “great inner rest” which arouses in the smoker a “state of
euphoria”. It is the latter that is identified with the intellectual
development defined in "Le Maître des sentences". Memory has become
“so flexible that it comes to mind without searching”. The intelligence of all
things develops on the highest plane: “There is, between the fully
developed idea and the mind which conceives it, a conscious equality, a
close communion, an absolute <interpenetration> which make up the
fullness of intellectual satisfaction."

16
41. Pouvourville conceives and theorizes opium in the image of a rite
which, properly respected, opens the way to discernment in general and to
an initiatory knowledge of Far Eastern culture in particular. The
musicologist Louis Laloy does not subscribe to a different perspective. His
extremely rare "Livre de la Fumée" is a triptych in which the "outer book"
retraces the history of opium, the "inner book" exposes the technique of
smoking, and the "secret book" defines the spiritual contribution of opium
Eastern philosophy, mediated by drugs, with a Western soul. The religiosity
of opium reached its peak there: “By the rite of the opium smoking, our
sins will be forgiven, our stains washed away, the state of grace will be
restored to us.”

42. In his book, Laloy calls for the spread of opium in a West given over to
its modernist passions and suffering from a spiritual deficit. What he
considers to be a "necessary and willed transmission by fate" gives rise to a
quite different appreciation among those who see in opium a threat
hovering over Western civilization. In a 1909 novel, Marc Antoine Borie
attributes a flash of conscience to two of his characters, naval officers and
themselves opium smokers. Judging their comrades, “they especially
recognized the presence of the terrible God, the God of Asia who had come
to conquer the Western races”. The period corresponds in fact to bitter
controversies on the danger that opium addiction posed to the French
Navy. The Ullmo affair in 1907 –an incredible attempt at treason by an
opium-addicted ship's ensign– then incidents at sea attributed to opium-
smoking officers fueled a controversy that was revived in 1913 by a press
campaign in Le Matin. According to Rouzier Dorcières' investigation, the
port of Toulon then had no less than 163 opium dens, where the special
correspondent for the Parisian newspaper claimed to have seen naval
officers smoking up to 80 or 100 pipes in a single evening. In the context
of the controversy that followed these revelations, the writers who dealt
with opium were accused of having encouraged the practice of the drug by
presenting it in a too favorable light. In addition to "Fumeurs d'opium" de
Boissière, the collection of short stories by Claude Farrère entitled "Fumée
d'opium", the 1907 novel by Henri Daguerches: "Consolata fille du soleil",
and the poems of Maurice Magre were particularly targeted.

43. Pouvourville responds to these criticisms by refuting the causal link

between literary representations of the drug and the extension of its
consumption in metropolitan France: "At this rate, a young man could no
longer take a girlfriend without burdening the memory of Father Prévost,
author of Manon Lescaut”. If this defense of the freedom of literary
creation honors the author of the "Maître des Sentences", it nevertheless
seems difficult to exclude any influence of the Letters on the vogue of the
opium smoking at the beginning of the 20th century. Admittedly, the
initiatory steps of Boissière, Pouvourville and Laloy remain marginal and
17
the impact of their most metaphysical writings is undoubtedly limited. The
same is not true of the collection of short stories published by Farrère in
1904. According to Arnould de Liedekerke, "Fumée d'Opium" "excited,
conquered" the public and it was not without reason that Doctor Dupouy
considered it a dangerous book, while recognizing the talent of the author.
Even if the text draws the reader's attention to the ambivalence of drugs, a
source of bliss and degradation for the smoker, Liedekerke is not wrong to
consider that Farrère demonstrated an obvious complacency in it, which
does not was other than that of a quiet drug addict. Apart from the themes
classically associated with smoking –the deification of the drug, the ritual
dimension of the mode of consumption, Asian revelation– the author
introduces that of the immemorial dimension of the Far Eastern Thebaic
method. Literary as it is, this representation conveys an idea still rooted in
Western tourists who embellish their stay in Southeast Asia with a few
pipes of opium, namely that they practice one of the oldest hedonistic
methods that know Asian people.

44. Maurice Magre, "the only true opium poet" according to Max Milner,
also helped to spread this vision of an age-old drug deeply linked to Asian
culture. For example in the opening lines of the soberly titled poem “The
Opium”:

“I am the dark bird of old bitter evenings,

I have jet wings, I am magical and beautiful,
I bewitch hearts when I preen my feathers,
The spirit of dead Buddhas lives in my brain.
I who am the inhabitant of thousand-year-old temples,
I come to glide this evening among the civilized.
I am the lonely man's strange friend
And of all those whose courage has been broken."

45. Because of their evocative power, let us cite other verses by Maurice
Magre. First of all an extract from a “Prayer” which introduces a collection
of poems devoted to opium:

“Give me the book where the stories are

From poets who have written nothing,
I will find there their illusory soul
And the golden laurel that did not bloom.

Give me the shoulder and the hair,

Give me your hand, give me your heart,
Give me form and creature
Which has neither contours, nor blood, nor warmth.

18
Give me the oblivion of the one I love,
Stifle the voice, lull the desire,
Erase the mirror lake, emblem
Of old image and memory.

Give me peace, shade and silence,

So that, solitary and motionless,
I feel rising invincibly
Pure thought and clairvoyance.”

6. Then the lines, better known, which introduce and end the poem
entitled “The Soul of the Dead Poppies”:

"The souls of dead poppies rise in the smoke...

I contemplate, stretched out, the human faces,
Delicate furniture, beloved things
Cradled on the vessel of divine opium. [...]
Thus, I see, in the evening, thousands of images
That the soul of the poppies spreads on the cushions,
I trace the course of races and ages,
Cradled on the vessel of divine opium.”

47. For Boissière, Pouvourville, Laloy and, to a lesser extent, Magre, the art
of smoking is inseparable from a spiritual quest that drives them to seek an
initiatory path in the “traditional” thought of Asia. When the fashion for
opium spread in Europe in the early years of the 20th century, confusion
tended to arise between the end and the means; the taking of opium ends
up condensing on its own the entire initiatory process of opiophiles. The
psycho-sociological foundations of the ritual are based on the references
–real or supposed– that Western consumers attribute to smoking. Opium is
more than a drug, it is a gateway to Asia. Its grip goes beyond the
consumption of a narcotic, it is a contact with the gestures of a thousand-
year-old and refined civilization. The place where it takes place is not a
simple place of consumption, it is the reconstruction of a fundamentally
exotic elsewhere. The spread of the fashion for the smoking rooms, here in
the sense of the place where opium is consumed, is inseparable from the
Asian imagery they convey and from the expeditious change of scenery
they provide to metropolitan smokers. When, in July 1903, the Petit
Journal devoted a dossier to the "new vice: opium dens in France", it was
illustrated with an engraving representing a room entirely lined with heavy
Chinese hangings, lit by a large lantern of the same origin and in the
foreground is an equally Chinese waiter, with an inscrutable face, serving
European consumers.

19
48. This same engraving very improperly illustrates the cover of the recent
reissue of Pouvourville's treatise. The latter considered that the Parisian
smoking rooms were part of a “rather ridiculous snobbery”. Snobbery of
which one can get an idea through the motivations of the characters
described in "Lélie, Fumeuse d'Opium", by Willy. We will refer more
particularly to the episode of the smoking event during which Lélie wants
to be "initiated into the rites", while Pentelic is impatient to "see the
dragon", in other words the monster guarding the doors of the secret
garden which contains all the pleasures of opium. Pouvourville's
consideration implicitly denounced the junk exoticism that characterized
the metropolitan craze for the Far Eastern Thebaic method. It also signals
the elite dimension of this author's praise of opium. Pouvourville writes
neither for the smoker who seeks pleasure alone, nor for the experimenter
who lacks the necessary will to control his practice. Since opium is only a
“sensational pretext instead of a method of ideas”, it becomes dangerous
for the European smoker, whose true wisdom should consist in staying
cautiously away from it. Like the other opium thurifers, Pouvourville
emphasizes the ambivalence of the classical Thebaic method. However, he
does not situate the dangers of opium in the substance itself, but in its
consumer:

“There is no demerit in causing misfortune to the ignorant or incapable;

they alone are responsible if they find themselves ill from having used an
instrument beyond their physical powers, or from having scrutinized a
truth beyond their intellectual powers. [...] The book closed, their
responsibility [that of the readers] begins, and relentlessly embraces them.
And they must blame themselves only, not for public unhappiness, a
manifest exaggeration, but for private misfortunes which badly directed
experiences, or badly digested readings, could bring them."

49. According to Jean-Jacques Yvorel, these private misfortunes were not

as numerous as those who saw opium as a scourge beating down on the
West might have feared. According to the French historian, clinical cases of
opium addiction are rare, compared to other forms of addiction during the
period. To his questioning about the cause of this situation, “is it the
constraint of the rite or the very nature of the product?”, it is permissible
to answer by excluding the second term from the alternative. Opium is one
of the most addictive of psychotropic substances, and there is little doubt
that the phenomenon noted by Yvorel is not related to its harmlessness.
The hypothesis of the technical constraint exerted on the occasional
smoker is on the other hand more plausible. If the rite could initially seduce
experimenters eager for new sensations and exoticism, only the true
followers of the drug were likely to devote themselves entirely to it.

20
Conclusion

50. The recent reissues of the works of Boissière, Pouvourville and Farrère
seem to indicate a renewed interest in the West for the Far Eastern
Thebaic method. Paradoxically, what looks like a new fascination for opium
comes at the same time when its practice tends to disappear in East Asia
under the combined effects of policies prohibiting poppy cultivation and the
development of the consumption of new substances (heroin,
amphetamines) devoid of the charms of the "divine drug". Nick Tosches,
who participates fully in the resurgence of this interest, simply defined the
reasons for it: “romanticism”. For the American writer, the notion covers
both a rejection of his society of origin –that of “assholes stuffed with
money”, “rednecks” and “people [who] get high on pills”– and a nostalgia
for the "sanctuary" that was the opium den of yesteryear. The narrative
framework of the Confessions of Tosches is built around the quest for an
art that has almost disappeared today, that of the consumption of the
“Good Drug”.

51. The resurgence of a fascination for opium, after its practice faded away
for more than half a century in the West, can only be explained by the
survival of its representations in the Western imagination. The opiophile
writers of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries left us the stereotypical
images of their own revelation. That of a drug that not only offered
exhilarating experiences, but opened up the mysterious horizons of the Far
East. Everything in the consumption of the drug referred to a seductive
exoticism: its instruments, their skilful manipulation, the time devoted to
the rite of absorption of the chandoo or the stuffy atmosphere of Western
dens. From the ritual dimension projected onto the technical constraints of
the mode of consumption, its Western followers have induced the
centuries-old rooting of the practice in East Asia. Men of letters are not
alone in propagating this ancestral representation of smoking. In 1888,
Ulysse Pila affirmed before the Political Economy Society of Lyon that "at all
times, more or less, the Chinese have smoked native opium". History and
culture were thus supposed to constitute the basis of a practice of initiatory
essence. A singular error of judgement, to which a fan of oriental traditions
like Albert de Pouvourville does not escape. In reality, opium smoking is a
recent invention on the scale of the history of Far Eastern civilizations.
Barely two centuries old when Western writers seized upon it, it owes more
to the determining influence of economic and cultural exchanges resulting
from European penetration into East Asia than the staging of its dimension
would suggest. traditional.

52. Even if the method of consuming opium in the form of smoke is indeed
of Far Eastern origin, it has been wrongly assimilated to a traditional
practice of Asian societies by some of its Western thurifiers. Invented in the
21
immediate extension of the introduction of tobacco in East Asia, improved
in the context of opium imports from British India to China, the drug
smoking is much more identified with a recent creation, a hybrid work,
which owes little to the centuries-old customs of China and the Far East,
but much to the cultural, technological and economic changes introduced
by Westerners in this part of the world.

22