MM. Smith, Gastinel and Decourtive
Smith, Edmond Decourtive and Joseph-Bernard Gastinel are identified by the author as a collective who “aimed to arrive at the discovery of the active principle of hashish” but failed. As historical personages, their significance is of not great consequence. The names appear together as though working on concert early on in the text—Chapter II—but in fact they were not exactly all gathered together in a lab hard at work on discovering the active principle. Nor does that matter. What matters in the long run is that this chapter opens with an allusion to Marco Polo’s world travels before giving way to similar quick references to the great historian Herodotus, the harvesting process of hemp and the extraction of hashish from hemp using a process perfected by “Arabs.” Baudelaire is very quickly trying to establish that this work will be a scientific enquiry into the use of drugs to empower the imagination. The argument almost immediately collapses under the weight of his excessive urge to prove a point without any actual scientific evidence.
Thomas de Quincey
The very next chapter is emblematic of this failure. The chapter was, according to Baudelaire, “inspired by Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Eater of Opium (1822).” And here we run headlong into a major problem: de Quincey’s is exactly what the title promises: an account of a man addicted who became addicted to laudanum because he labored under the delusion that the drugs expanded his imagination and improved his literary output. Unfortunately, both de Quincey’s and Baudelaire’s literary output on this subject is given to hyperbolic exaltations of the validity of the premise which by the very nature of their overindulgence calls that premise into question.
Edgar Allan Poe
It is a testament to Baudelaire’s “scientific method” for arguing on behalf of the positive effects of mind-destroying narcotics that they have the power to unleash creativity that he saw as evidence of his argument the works of noted American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Perhaps no finer example of the failure on Baudelaire’s part to make his case can be found than in this statement—stunningly assertive considering the lack of any supporting evidence other than defamatory rumors—about Poe’s addictions: “in how many marvelous passages does Edgar Poe, this incomparable poet, this unrefuted philosopher, who must always be cited in connection with the mysterious diseases of the mind, does he not describe the dark and endearing splendors of opium?” The answer to that question is, well, none. Baudelaire’s insight into Poe’s opium use and its impact on his creative imagination is fueled entirely by the now discredited accusations made by a rival named Rufus Wilmot Griswold. The accusations that Poe was an opium addicted were quite conveniently only made following Poe’s untimely death.
