Club des Hashischins

Unknown members included Charles Baudelaires lover Black Venus, the owner of the Hotel Lauzun (Pimodan) Jerome Pichon, Fernand Broissard who hosted the initial events in his room, and Louis-Remy Aubert Roche who worked with Jacques Joseph Moreau growing cannabis on the grounds of Bicetre Mental Asylum.

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,[5] Eugène Delacroix and Alexandre Dumas.

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.

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.