According to Michel Butor, this book that Baudelaire wrote about drugs, hashish and opium, plays a very precise role in the whole of his work. In addition to the social considerations that he establishes about the results of drug addiction and after studying the "multiplication of individuality" produced by hashish and opium, which interests him as an artist, Baudelaire converts Paradises into "his fundamental work on the nature of Poetry, and the products in question play in them the role of two great images to which you can first compare it and then oppose it. " Texts by Gautirer and Rimbaud, written under the effects of opium, complete this edition of a beautiful book, in whose first lines Baudelaire makes a statement of principles: "true reality is only in dreams."