By the early 1840s a group of French writers, among them Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Gérard de Nerval, Dumas, and Balzac, as well as a number of sculptors, painters, and other Bohemians, had formed the now famous “Club des Hachischins.” The club held weekly meetings in damask-hung rooms of the Hôtel Luzan in Ile St.-Louis in Paris.