Brussels, 10 July 1873. Paul Verlaine, 29, poet. Arthur Rimbaud, 19, poet. Paul Verlaine holds up a gun. He had bought it to kill himself, now he pointed it at his young lover. He shot. One bullet hit him in the wrist, the other missed. He took him to hospital. His wound was treated and Arthur Rimbaud went to the railway station. He wanted to return to Paris. Verlaine followed him. He picked up the gun again. Rimbaud called the police. Verlaine was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison. The short but stormy relationship between two famous French poets came to an irrevocable end. The pistol Verlaine used to shoot Rimbaud ended up at auction at Christie’s in London at the end of last year. Its starting bid was £50,000. An unknown buyer bid £368,000, or €434,500.
Today, it is the most famous gun in the literary world, because the poems of the men whose lives it has shaped have become part of the cult treasury not only of French poetry, but also of the world’s. A passionate and violent love affair changed them both, as human beings and as poets.
Paul Verlaine certainly did not expect this when, in September 1871, he received a letter and some poems from a talented stranger, 17-year-old Arthur Rimbaud. He had already lived too long.E. He had started running away from his home town of Charleville, where he lived with his four siblings and his mother, who is said never to have had a smile on her face, at the age of 15.
Then he let his hair grow and turned into a rebel, which his father couldn’t tame because he died when Arthur was five and his cold mother couldn’t live with him. She could not complain about his school performance, which was so important to her. The teenager excelled in all his subjects, at least until he decided that poetry and running away from home and his mother were the only things that interested him.
He ran regularly, but had to come back again and again, because he never got far without money, and he didn’t even have enough to pay the train fare. Sentenced to Charleville, he spent his days in the library, obsessively studying poetry when he wasn’t simply stealing books to read at home.
The deeper he penetrated into the history of poetry, the more determined he was to write differently, born to be a poet, as he was convinced. He was going to smash all the established poetic forms and introduce his own. He would not describe nature, as had been the custom, but would look inwards. He would awaken in himself all the senses that man possesses and translate them into poems.
But for now, all that burned inside him was a longing to experience life and a rage that he couldn’t. He could not enjoy reading poetry because he appreciated few poets, but 29-year-old Paul Verlaine was one of them.
A fateful meeting
Hardly known at the time, he was Rimbaud’s living opposite. Arthur may not have been classically handsome, but he was certainly striking, and Paul Verlaine reminded the mother of a friend of his of an orangutan who had escaped from the zoo. His teenage wife later recalled that he charmed her as a 16-year-old after she got used to the fact that he was ugly. She was also helped by the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, which made her naive enough to believe that he too would soon turn into Prince Charming.
She was almost a beast in her home, but she couldn’t have known it at the time. During the months of courtship, Paul kept a close eye on his appearance and behaviour, even though at 25 he was in fact an alcoholic. He was decent in his day, too, a student who had excelled at school, if only in classical languages. Other subjects did not interest him, a congenitally lazy man, and neither did law, although he did go to law school, and was very keen to study absinthe in great depth.
He was so deeply immersed in it that he dropped out of his studies, and no work was forthcoming. A neglected bumpkin, he read and drank all day, published a poem here and there and impressed some of his older colleagues, including the famous Victor Hugo.
His encounter with the charming and naive Mathilde in 1869 briefly grounded him. Despite the opposition of her rather wealthy parents, he managed to persuade her to marry him. He moved into their family home in Montmartre and stopped drinking, found a regular job and went around properly groomed.
“Come, dear great soul. We are waiting for you. We want you”, he wrote to Arthur Rimbaud, a young stranger 14 months after their wedding, enchanted by the poems he had sent him. He enclosed money for his train ticket to Paris in an envelope.
On the appointed day, he was waiting for the young guest at the train station, but he was not there. When he returned home, the blue-eyed young man was sitting in his living room. He had decided long before that he would break down all boundaries and awaken all his senses, but this was not just about poetry. “He also wanted to “re-create” society and love.
An intolerable and dangerous guest
He was now standing in front of Verlaine. He was enchanted by him. He offered him a roof over his head, but he could not stay long. Not only because his father-in-law had returned home, but especially because Arthur was an intolerable but also dangerous guest. He and Verlaine reportedly became lovers soon after they met, although Rimbaud had never shown any homosexual inclination before, while Verlaine had reportedly constantly persecuted his classmates at school.
“He had a truly boyish face, round and fresh on top of a long bony body, strangely like that of a teenager who has grown too fast,” Verlaine described somewhere the young man who completely dazzled him. Only he didn’t mind that he was neglectful, destructive and of inappropriate behaviour.
For example, a naked man was sunbathing in front of his family’s house in Montmartre. His room was a dingy den, even though he had brought only enough clothes from home to change. He destroyed a cross that was part of the family heritage. Lice crawled in his long hair and he found it amusing. He tried to pass them on to passers-by on the street.
When he was kicked out of the house, he moved from one of Verlaine’s friends to another until no one wanted him under their roof anymore. One gave him a room, but on the first night he stood naked in front of a lighted window and threw clothes full of lice into the street.
The host would have forgiven him, but when he sold some of his furniture and broke the china in his room, he showed him the door. Verlaine could not take his eyes off him. The boy with the face of the “exiled angel” was supposedly the embodiment of his sexual fantasies, but also reminded him of himself from his days as a bachelor.
He started drinking again, thanks to Rimbaud, who had not yet reached the age of majority. He drowned himself in absinthe and took drugs. He quit his job and returned to his former image as a cleric. He made no secret of his affair with a young man whom one of his acquaintances said was as cold as a killer.
Their public display of passion sent shockwaves through Paris, but the scandal has not shaken Verlaine one bit, perhaps because he is now writing again. In the 14 months of their marriage, he had put his life in order and stopped drinking, but he had also stopped writing. Now Rimbaud was deliberately awakening in him the passions he had repressed and plunging him into new depths. Different verses indeed came out of them, but his marriage changed too.
In fact, he was gone. He had been violent towards his teenage wife before, and now he was even more so because of Rimbaud. With the birth of his son Georges, a month after Arthur’s arrival, his anger only intensified. He became increasingly angry with his wife. He reportedly threatened her with death every day, but somehow she managed to hide the violence from her parents, even though they lived in the same house.
When, in January 1872, he threw his three-month-old son into a wall and choked her so hard that his fingerprints were left on her neck because she refused to give him money for a drink, the truth finally came out. Her father immediately sent her and her son away from home to his family, leaving Verlaine alone with his lover.
The relationship with him was also violent. They argued and sometimes fought, and they even resorted to knives now and then. Rimbaud knew no mercy towards his lover. Verlaine was blindly in love with him, but for Rimbaud he was more or less an experiment and another of the boundaries he had to cross on the way to realising his plan: he had to stir all the senses and break down all ossified structures. Although the word love rolled off his tongue easily, his heart was more or less icy.
Torn between wife and lover
Verlaine was no longer the gentleman he had been for some time as his wife’s husband. He had become a bit of a clown again, only now he was more or less living off charity with his lover. When one by one his friends disappeared, he did not even notice it, but when Mathilde left him, he came to his senses. He was, after all, a petty bourgeois, but he begged his young lover to come home, even if it was only to the extent that he could tempt his wife back.
Six months after his arrival in Paris, Rimbaud returned to his mother, who was as practical as ever and as cold as when he was a child and longed for her love. He rebelled against her with his unbridled life in the only way he knew how, but he turned to her and her sober efficiency every time something went wrong in his life.
He ran away from her until his death and returned to her again, only this time his plans did not work out. Mathilde returned and Verlaine found a job, but behind the veneer of a decent man, he was already writing passionate letters to his lover, reflecting on their life together.
Arthur returned to Paris in May 1872, but did not find the old Verlaine there. He could not decide between his family and his lover, but he tried to be a good father on the one hand and a bohemian lover on the other.
But Rimbaud was not born to live in the shadows. He wanted to live, he wanted to travel, and Verlaine soon fell again. In July they set off for Brussels, but this time Mathilde, determined to preserve her marriage, went with her mother to see them off. She only filed for divorce when Verlaine calmly left her at the train station and travelled with Arthur.
To avoid a scandal in Paris, Verlaine and Rimbaud lived between Brussels and London. There they settled in Soho and enjoyed their time among French expatriates. They walked and read. After learning a little English, they earned money by teaching French. In between, they drank, smoked hashish, enjoyed opium and openly showed affection for each other in public. They made no secret of the fact that they “loved each other like tigers”, as Rimbaud wrote.
But their relationship was becoming increasingly strained. Arthur was becoming more and more unmanageable, Paul more and more despondent. He knew well the depressive periods when he was tormented by suicidal thoughts. They were frequent. This time the depression was triggered by the divorce papers. He could not accept that his marriage had failed and that his wife of 18 years and their son refused to continue waiting for him at home.
Slowly, his lover had had enough. He went back to his mother for a little while. Verlaine was now completely on the floor. The master of desperate letters had no difficulty in getting his mother to come to him immediately, and Rimbaud’s mother was now sitting by his bedside.
Things soon returned to normal. A slightly better period followed, albeit still fraught with alcohol and quarrels, and in April 1873 the lovers left the safety of London. Verlaine, still not giving up on his marriage, went to live with his wife, Rimbaud with nowhere else to go but to his mother. With a whole new life experience and his senses truly shaken, he began to write a collection, later entitled Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell).
He didn’t finish because in July he and Verlaine were back in London, only this time they were no longer the most welcome. They successfully upset the local public with their explosive and frank attitude. Verlaine would not have minded if he had not been consumed by fear: he had more or less lied to his ex-wife about Rimbaud. He was worried that the rumours would reach Paris and her ears. He was still not ready to give up his marriage.
But with Rimbaud, they sank lower and lower. They drank even more than before, and their quarrels escalated. Verlaine could take no more. He picked up his belongings and fled to Brussels. He was again so low that he was obsessed with thoughts of suicide.
They were his frequent companions. In his letters, he regularly complained about all sorts of things, but his problems were always the fault of others, never of him. He often wrote that he was going to kill himself or put an end to everything, but he never did, not even later, when he was in an even worse state.
Always Stay Up to Date
Subscribe to our newsletter to get our newest articles instantly!
Life in the cell 252
Nevertheless, his mother now came to him and sent a telegram to Rimbaud. He came, not because he missed his lover so much, but because he was completely penniless. It was easier to live with Verlaine than alone, but he wanted to live in Paris. Verlaine didn’t want to go there, and they argued fiercely again.
On 10 July 1873, after another argument under the influence of alcohol and drugs, Rimbaud announced that he was leaving for Paris for good. Verlaine took the pistol he had bought for 23 francs at a time when the monthly rent for his flat was 6 francs and shot his lover with it.
The police arrested him. During the search, letters written by Rimbaud and Rimbaud to each other were found in his and Rimbaud’s pockets. They were passionate, and a humiliating medical examination was added to the routine investigation because of possible homosexuality. The police doctor wrote: “Mr Verlaine bears the marks of regular pederasty, both active and passive.”
Another minute said: “This Raimbaud (wrong spelling of surname in the minutes), aged between 15 and 16, was and is a monster in terms of morals and talent. He can write poems like no one else, but his works are completely incomprehensible and disgusting.”
Although homosexuality was not a criminal offence in Belgium, it influenced Verlaine’s sentence. Rimbaud did not want to sue his lover and did not want him to be convicted, and it was clear that Verlaine did not want to kill him, even though he was shooting at him, but he was still sentenced to two years in prison.
From behind bars, he wrote to Victor Hugo, asking if he could help. His distinguished colleague wrote back, telling him to be patient. They both knew that he really had no power, but he had already done a lot with his letter. When the prison governor saw that Verlaine’s friends included a giant of French literature, he made prison life much easier for him.
When Paul went behind bars, Arthur returned to his mother, only now he was different. For the first time, he realised first-hand how devastating it can be to break down all boundaries and push the senses to their limits. The experience shocked him enough to make him want a new life, and he started it at home with hard work.
He spent the summer of 1873 locked in an attic room, writing “cruel stories”, as he described them in a letter to a friend. The poetry collection A Season in Hell, which he had begun to write earlier, now took on a new, more realistic form.
Verlaine, the so-called “trap nine”, who endlessly laments his relationship with the seductive young man, naturally finds his place in it. For his sake, who was “hardly more than a child”, he forgot “his responsibility to society” and just followed him. He put the words in Verlaine’s mouth: “I go where he goes. I must. He is often furious with me, me, poor soul. The devil! He is a devil, you know, he is not a man.”
A Season in Hell became Rimbaud’s best-known work and a founding text of European modernism, but he was unable to publish it in Brussels in August 1873 because he had no money to print it. He bought only a few copies and distributed them to his few friends. Most of them did not want to have anything to do with him. What he had done to Verlaine was too much for them too, but Paul did not hold it against him. Arthur did not visit him in prison, but sent him a signed copy of A Season in Hell.
Verlaine was not broken by imprisonment, as, for example, Oscar Wilde was. In cell 252, he drew and wrote 32 poems, which are now considered the best in his oeuvre. Now that he had no access to opium and abstinence, which had already taken a fair toll on his health, he spent his 555 days in prison reading and writing in peace.
One life destroyed and one life converted
In January 1875, his sentence finally came to an end. His mother was waiting for him at freedom, Rimbaud was nowhere to be found. The broken Verlaine travelled first to France and then back to England, where he earned a living as a teacher of French, Latin, Greek and drawing.
In the meantime, he jumped to Germany, where he met Rimbaud for the first and last time in his life after the fatal shooting in 1875. He was again completely penniless, although he was coaching French in Stuttgart, having mastered enough German to teach in a few weeks.
He was outraged by Verlaine. He could not believe that he had become religious in prison. He wrote to a friend that Verlaine had stayed for two and a half days and then left at his insistence. Before that, of course, Rimbaud had given him the manuscript of a collection he had written the previous year. It was to be entitled Verlaine and printed. Although he showed no feelings for his former lover, Paul was still unable to resist him.
He titled the book Les Illuminations (The Illuminations)? and actually published it. He received only two more letters from Arthur. The first asked him for money. When Verlaine refused, a new letter full of insults followed. After that, he never heard from Arthur again, although Verlaine never ceased to be interested in what was happening to him. He wrote to him regularly, although he never received a reply. Now and then he only heard news of Arthur from mutual friends.
Paul Verlaine’s life has been destroyed. He was slowly slipping into alcoholism and poverty. Twenty years after his release from prison, he was invited by the most respected writers to Belgium for a series of literary conferences. They were expecting the most important French poet, they were expecting an old man, even though he was only 51 years old.
He was neglected and drunk. Until 8 January 1896, when he collapsed under the weight of pneumonia, he drank, moving from slum to slum, from hospital to inn and back again. He treated his diabetes, stomach ulcers and syphilis with absinthe. He died less than three months before his 52nd birthday, yet five years after his lover ten years his junior, who was now also a famous poet.
The adult had nothing more to say
But it meant nothing to him. Since 1874, when he finished his second book of poetry before his 20th birthday, he has not written another poem. Later, he even denied his former work as “absurd, ridiculous and disgusting”.
He probably wrote all his poems between the ages of 16 and 20. He never spoke again about this period, which leaves all the more room for the question: why did he stop writing when he was and remained the idol of adolescents? Some believe that he continued to write as long as he was compelled to do so by teenage urges such as longing, contempt, emotionality and malice. When he grew up and started to live a real life, he had nothing more to say.
That’s when he started travelling. After his last encounter with Verlaine, his travels took him more or less all over Europe. He tried to earn a living, but failed time and again, and if he wasn’t robbed, he kept returning home completely penniless. He was a keen language learner, especially Russian and Arabic, and was increasingly attracted to music and playing the piano.
Not yet 22 years old, he became a soldier in the Dutch army, but deserted just three weeks after they arrived in Batavia, or present-day Jakarta, in South-East Asia. He struggled to get home and spent the winter there before setting off again in the spring.
This time, he earned his living by translating in a circus that travelled around Germany and Norway. In the autumn, he had had enough of that and went to Alexandria, Egypt, but fell ill on board the ship and ended up in hospital. From there he returned home again, helped on a farm and in the autumn crossed the snowy mountains on foot to reach Genoa, from where he sailed again to Alexandria.
Instead of Egypt, he landed in Cyprus and became one of the managers of the Lanarka quarry. Six months later, he had to leave because he fell ill with chills. When a friend from his youth visited him in the hospital in Roch, he hardly recognised him. The last time he had seen him, he was about the same age as Verlaine, and he was still all boyish. Now he was 25 years old and a man.
At dinner, a friend hesitantly asked him if he was still thinking about literature. He nodded and replied, with a half-amused, half-nervous smile, “‘I don’t care about that anymore’.” He did not write for himself any more, but returned to Cyprus in the spring of 1880 and supervised the construction of the governor’s residence.
African life
Shortly before his 26th birthday, he finally travelled to Africa. He landed in Aden, Ethiopia, and took a job with Bardey’s and Co., a British import-export company. He was so efficient in his quality control of coffee that three months later he was sent to what is now Yemen, to the town of Harer, where a new branch was opened. There he contracted syphilis but was cured.
For the next ten years he lived between Aden and Harer, trading, walking and riding, sometimes alone and sometimes in a caravan. Because he spoke Arabic fluently and had learnt a few dialects, he could easily converse with the locals.
He once did not understand Verlaine’s clinging to his bourgeois life, and now he himself regretted that he had no family and especially no son to pass on his knowledge to. “But who knows how many more days I have in these hills? I could disappear in the midst of all these tribes without anyone ever hearing from me again…”, he wrote home in May 1883.
In Aden, where it was desperately hot, and in Harare, where he felt a little better, he was lonely, but he reconnected with his family, his only link to Europe. His beloved sister had died of rheumatic fever a few years earlier. He had shaved his head then as a sign of mourning, but now he wrote to his other sister and his mother.
When the company he worked for closed its Harare office, he had to settle in Aden, but he did not return there alone. He was accompanied by a strikingly beautiful Ethiopian girl who smoked and dressed in western clothes, while he wore traditional clothes. They lived together for at least two years. His African friends did not report that he had any lovers, and it is true that he did not have any.
Between 1885 and 1887, he had two business partners with whom he started to deal in arms. Before the first deal could be made, they both died and he had to drive the caravan to its destination himself. He arrived too late and had to sell the weapons at half price, on top of paying the debts of one of the partners.
Life was hard enough, but he never looked at or spoke of the damn, although he was becoming increasingly well-known in Paris, especially after his collection Illuminations was published in Vogue in the spring of 1886.
He wasn’t interested, but rather opened a shop in Harare and got bored. He was not tempted by Europe, even when an old classmate wrote to him that he was now really famous in France.
There was no sign of the old Arthur Rimbaud. In Africa he was known as a silent and withdrawn man, unsociable and almost humourless. He demanded a great deal from his staff, but was equally relentless with himself. He was an honest business partner and a meticulous bookkeeper. He lived simply and almost ascetically. He helped those in need, even though he was still irritable, annoying and mood-shifting.
But in February 1891, his retreating African life came to an abrupt end. At the age of 36, he felt pain in his right knee. Soon he could no longer walk. His condition deteriorated rapidly. He had to go to hospital, but it was 300 kilometres away.
They made him a stretcher and carried him across the pounding desert. The journey was agonising and exhausting, the diagnosis killing: a joint so badly inflamed that the leg would have to be amputated. Later it turned out that he had cancer, and now he has summoned all his strength and closed the business.
In May 1891, he finally returned to France by ship. His mother was by his side when his leg was cut off in Marseilles at the end of the month. Then she left suddenly and he was so upset that he could not forgive her for leaving.
He has always walked a lot, he also liked to run, and now he is learning to walk with crutches and a wooden prosthesis. At just 5 months old, he could only be overwhelmed with sadness at the memories of wandering the hills, beaches and footpaths. “And now, a life hobbled without a leg,” he wrote to his sister. “For me, crutches and wooden and artificial legs are a joke. With them you can only trudge on in despair without really being able to do anything.”
He held out hope for a cure, but his cancer was spreading rapidly. He began to suffer from hallucinations and wished to return to Harare. His death occurred on 10 November 1891, just ten days after his 37th birthday. His poems are still alive today, as are those of Paul Verlaine.
