This volume provides his first piece of fantastical prose, The Coffee Pot, and his last, Spirite. The latter may seem something of a sequel to the former, continuing to chart a path of male erotic fantasy; but the combination is of greater value for making visible some of the consistencies and evolutions of Gautier's oeuvre as a whole.

"Among the earliest artistic descriptions of the hallucinogenic experience in European literature, the four pieces in this volume document Gautier's and Baudelaire's own involvement in the Club of Assassins, who met under the auspices of Dr Moreau to investigate the mind-enhancing effects of hashish, wine and opium. As well as providing an absorbing account of nineteenth-century drug use, Hashish, Wine, Opium captures the spirit of French Romanticism in its struggle to free the mind from the shackles of the humdrum and the conventional, and serves as a fascinating prologue to the psychedelic literature of the following century."

This volume contains Gautier's biographical essay "The Life and Intimate Memoirs of Baudelaire." The English translator Guy Thorne complements Gautier's writing with selected poems and letters of Baudelaire, and an essay on Baudelaire's influence upon modern poetry and thought. Reprint of the original edition from 1915.