SOURCE: "Gautier: From Hallucination to Supernatural Vision," in Yale French Studies, No. 50, 1974, pp. 42-53.

In the following essay, Cockerham discounts the notion that Gautier relied on drugs or alcohol for creative inspiration.

"I am like the hippopotamus" [Gautier wrote in Poésies complètes, edited by René Jasinski, 1932]: The legend of his insensitivity, which Gautier seems at times almost to have willed into existence, has been, over the past twenty-five years, if not buried, then at least brought under control. The "threader of pearls" is now credited with imagination, perhaps even with vision, and in the course of the slow revaluation of his work, we have been reminded more than once of Gautier's place alongside Baudelaire and Balzac as a student of artificial stimulants to the creative imagination.

Certainly none of Gautier's works on intoxicants can be said to approach in seriousness of purpose Balzac's Traité des excitants...