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The other day, I found my friend Alphonse Karr seated on his sofa, with a candle lit, though it was broad daylight, holding a cherrywood pipe fitted with a porcelain bowl upon which he dripped a kind of brown paste quite like sealing wax; this paste flamed and sizzled in the bowl's cavity, and he inhaled through a small mouthpiece of yellow amber the smoke that then spread through the room with a faint scent of oriental perfume.

Without a word, I took the apparatus from my friend's hands and applied myself to one end; after a few puffs, I experienced a kind of dizziness not without charm, rather resembling the sensations of initial intoxication.

Being on feuilleton duty that day, and lacking the leisure to be drunk, I hung the pipe on a nail, and we descended into the garden to bid good morning to the dahlias and play a little with Schutz, a happy creature whose sole function is to be black upon a carpet of green grass.

I returned home, dined, and went to the theater to endure I know not what play; then I returned to bed, for one must inevitably arrive there, and through this death of a few hours, prepare oneself for the final death.

The opium I had smoked, far from producing the soporific effect I expected, threw me into nervous agitation like strong coffee, and I tossed in my bed like a carp on the grill or a chicken on the spit, with perpetual rolling of the covers, to the great displeasure of my cat curled into a ball on the corner of my eiderdown.

At last, the long-invoked sleep sanded my pupils with its golden dust; my eyes grew hot and heavy, and I fell asleep.

After an hour or two completely still and dark, I had a dream.

—Here it is:

I found myself back at my friend Alphonse Karr's house—as in the morning, in reality; he was seated on his yellow lampas sofa, with his pipe and his lit candle; only, the sun did not make the reflections of the stained glass—blue, green, and red—flutter upon the walls like butterflies of a thousand hues.

I took the pipe from his hands, just as I had done a few hours before, and began slowly to inhale the intoxicating smoke.

A languor full of beatitude soon took hold of me, and I felt the same dizziness experienced while smoking the real pipe.

Up to that point, my dream kept within the strictest limits of the habitable world, repeating, like a mirror, the actions of my day.

I was curled in a pile of cushions, lazily throwing my head back to follow the bluish spirals in the air, which melted into cotton-wool mist after swirling for a few minutes.

My eyes naturally turned to the ceiling, ebony black with gold arabesques.

From staring at it with that ecstatic attention preceding visions, it seemed blue to me—a harsh blue, like one of the panels of night's mantle.