Christa Giles

156
stimulating him, then inducing a langour
haunted by vague reveries, vitiating his plans,
nullifying his intentions, leading a whole
cavalcade of dreams to which he passively
submitted, without even trying to get away. 423
Solitude was not the only means available to Des Esseintes
to enter into a solipsistic dream world; he also used
hashish, laudanum, and opium. In Baudelaire’s Poem of
Hashish, he connects the idea of the flight from society and
entry into a world of dreams through drugs with an
inescapable solipsism:
Ajouterai-je que le haschisch, cornine toutes
les joies solitaires, rend l’individu inutile aux
hommes et la société superflue pour
l’individu, le poussant a s’admirer sans cesse
lui-même et le precipitant jour a jour vers le
gouffre lumineux où il admire sa face de
Narcisse? 424
Following Baudelaire’s translation of Confessions of an
English Opium-Eater, De Quincey was widely read in
France, and according to Pierrot, at one point, Huysmans
even borrowed from De Quincey’s Consul Romanus
episode from the Confessions for one of Des Esseintes’
hallucinations. 425 Further, De Quincey’s investigations led
into areas of the unconscious that the decadent artist was so