The same day that young Arthur was taken to Mazas Prison, September 1, 1870, the French armies of Napoleon III fell on the battlefield of Sedan, routed by the forces of King Wilhelm of Prussia and his general Helmut von Moltke, with the modest participation of a twenty-six-year-old soldier and nurse born in Röcken named Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. So it was that Napoleon III handed over his sword to spare the lives of his soldiers, and on September 2 agreed to surrender.
But that defeated France wasn’t the only one, and so, taking advantage of the chaos and confusion, the Republicans proclaimed the Third Republic and issued a decree ousting Napoleon III. And to defend the Republic, the Committee of National Defense was created. The French Empire might have lost the war, but there was another France able to rise up and carry the torch.
Faced with this, King Wilhelm I sent troops to encircle Paris. He wasn’t going to have his military triumph spoiled by a handful of romantic Republicans. The recurring problem of struggles between weak Davids and powerful Goliaths is that the Davids usually win, but in this case German foresight, as well as their relentless superiority, managed to overturn the biblical tradition, and in spite of the fact that the Republican Minister of Defense, León Gambetta, was able to break the siege of Paris and organize guerrillas to attack the Prussians from the rear, in the end it was all futile. It merely served to inspire the hearts of men for a time.
Georges Izambard, Rimbaud’s putative father, was one of those men who threw himself into the fight. And even Rimbaud himself, who despite being a minor (he was still only fifteen!) presented himself to the National Guard and took part in training with broomsticks, since there were no weapons available. Who was this young man, ready to give his life for the same France that very soon afterwards he would hate and would leave in a state of bitterness, spitting on its soil before leaving? Let us not forget that in this young man’s story, the army of France represents his absent father, who is still alive in his memory. Arthur longs for the hero to look at him and acknowledge him, perhaps even say a few affectionate words to him. What would art and literature be without absent fathers? What serves literature does not always serve life. But the young Rimbaud does not know that. It is, quite simply, something that is inside him.
At the beginning of the siege of Paris, Arthur returned to Charleville, taken there by Izambard. When Vitalie saw them arrive, she hit her son and confined him to his room, and of course insulted Izambard. As far as she was concerned, the teacher was responsible for everything bad that had happened. She knew that the demon of poetry was inside her son and she wanted to exorcise it. But to no avail, since two weeks later Rimbaud again disappeared. Now he was heading north. Izambard, like a hunting dog, followed him from Charleroi to Brussels, with all the towns in between. The fugitive poet was traveling on foot, like prehistoric men. He himself was his own cart and horse, and he was living . . . on what? According to what he said later in a letter, “on the delicious smells from kitchens.” At each stop he made, Izambard was given information about his pupil, although he was unable to track him down, even in Brussels, so he returned to Douai, and on reaching his house, what a surprise! Arthur opened the door to him.
Izambard hated him, but everyone succumbed to his wicked smile. The world falls in love with certain angels and devils. The poems he had been writing during his wanderings show the impulsive freedom that he felt being alone on the road, sleeping in ditches, perhaps seeking shelter from the rain or the cold or the wind—it was already October—in some abandoned barn.
My shelter was the Great Bear
The stars in the sky emitted soft sighs
And I heard them as I sat by the roadside.
Two weeks of daydreaming, solitude, and travel. It is hard to image a young man of sixteen wandering alone through a country at war. Enid Starkie, his biographer, says that on the way he encountered a dead soldier, who inspired one of the poems he brought with him when he returned, “Le Dormeur du val.”
A young soldier, his mouth open, his head bare,
His neck bathing in cool blue cress,
Sleeps stretched out on the grass, under the sky,
Pale on his green bed where the light pours down.
It is impossible not to think of another, much later poem, written by someone from another world. The scene is almost the same: a dead soldier in a field, perhaps in a ditch. The poet observes the lifeless body and speaks to it. He begs it to come back to life. The poet is César Vallejo, who must have read Rimbaud. There is a kind of music that echoes behind their poems. This is how Vallejo’s vision of a dead soldier begins:
At the end of the battle, with the fighter dead,
a man came to him and said:
“Do not die, I love you so much!”
But alas, the corpse continued to die.
I think Rimbaud would have approved of these lines.
Let us return to his story. Young Arthur is already back home. Vitalie can breathe a little and stop worrying for the moment. Her little genius had always been her biggest headache!
Separated from his idol Izambard (who was at the front), Arthur resumed his old childhood friendship with Ernest Delahaye, with whom he went for walks in the countryside and woods around Charleville and Méziers. It must have been very strange to wander amid beautiful bucolic landscapes while France was heading inexorably toward the abyss. Beauty and horror in the same plowed fields. Two young men strolling, talking endlessly, reading anything they could get from a besieged Paris.
According to a later account by Delahaye, it was on one of these afternoon walks that Rimbaud mentioned his admiration for the poet Paul Verlaine. They read each other poems from two books that could still be obtained, Poèmes saturniens and Fêtes galantes. Verlaine’s work showed Arthur new possibilities of playing games with form. He realized that poetry could be more flexible and sensed that his desire was to blow things up, to destroy the rigid molds in which poetry was traditionally cast. And not just poetry. Life, too, which seemed even more rigid and fixed.
Everything has to be demolished for the world to bloom again, perhaps from the new seeds of poetry! Poets are fiery, arrogant gods who aspire to recreate the universe and elevate the human soul. In a letter to Izambard, Rimbaud talks of “necessary destructions” and claims that in the new free nation (perhaps in its new Republic) luxury and pride will have disappeared.
Rimbaud’s first heroic, death-defying act was on behalf of his friend Delahaye, when the Prussians bombed and burned Méziers in December 1870. Vitalie confined her children to the house, but Arthur got out through a window and went to Méziers to look for Delahaye. I imagine Rimbaud running up a deserted, rubble-strewn street that leads to the hill, between buildings with smoking roofs and walls laid flat by cannon fire. There is a strange smell, like that of damp, rotting vegetables. Where is this young man going, alone amid so much desolation? Couldn’t another burst of gunfire come from some dark corner and finish off anything still alive? We do not know if the young man had these thoughts, but he went on anyway.
The Prussians had taken the city. Seeing a young Frenchman in these parts might upset them, some still nervous soldier might open fire or decide to arrest him. But none of these things happened. Arthur’s childlike appearance, which had made the French army reject him as being too young, even though he was now sixteen, now protected him.
Delahaye and his family had taken refuge in a house in the country and it was there that Rimbaud now arrived. Why was he so determined? He was eager to have his friend read two books he had recently gotten hold of: Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, translated by Baudelaire, and Le petit chose by Alphonse Daudet.
The siege of Paris lasted 135 days, until the lack of food became unbearable, and at the end of January 1871 the armistice and surrender were signed, although the chaos continued. The National Guard refused to withdraw, but the city filled with thieves who came to plunder it, under the pretext of defending it. There were rich pickings to be had! In the rest of France, life returned to a degree of normality. Arthur, though, refused to go back to school. Vitalie tried to force him, but he maintained his position: the country was in danger and he had to take action, join the National Guard, and serve in the defense. On February 25 he returned to Paris, but it was a squalid sojourn. He spent two weeks eating out of trash cans, begging, and sleeping under bridges in the middle of the winter. The cold of February is the worst, but this young man had an unusual ability to bear adversity when he himself had sought it out. When it comes down to it, this is quite natural. When pain depends on you, it is easier for you to bear. Arthur had to coexist with rats and cockroaches, remove strange putrid liquids from the leftover food he put in his mouth. He was training himself to withstand whatever he might have to face. In A Season in Hell he talks of rain-sodden bread that he had to fight the pigeons for.
On March 3, the Germans finally entered Paris with their army, did an about-turn, and left again. Then the Parisians lit fires in the streets they had walked down in order to purify them, but in the end nothing of what had been feared happened. With the setting up of the Commune, France now had two governments: one in Paris and one in Versailles. It is uncertain whether or not Rimbaud was there at this time. Delahaye says yes and that he fought with the Commune until the troops from Versailles overran the city. His biographer Starkie says no, basing her assertion on the dates of some of his letters. What is certain is that his rapidly growing awareness of life, the way he left each stage behind him, and the avalanche of experiences that he incorporated into his poetry in those few months were really remarkable. Given his rebellious spirit, it would be logical to think that he fought with the Commune, but at the same time he was already starting to be a strange Attila leaving devastated fields behind him. It is odd that the biographers cannot agree about this, since in those days something happened that was to leave its mark on his life and even his soul forever. It was the moment when reality decided to lift him up into the air and abruptly let him fall to the ground with a resounding thud. It was as if the tide of life in all its cruelty trapped him, struck him a savage blow, and in doing so, in leaving him hurt and humiliated, awoke completely the poet who was already within him.
What happened?
A group of drunken soldiers raped him in the toilets of the military barracks on Rue Babylone, in Paris. Was it in April or June 1871? It hardly matters. It was a dark, gloomy place, and the rebellious youth had disguised himself as an older man in order to be accepted by them. His political passion was strong and perhaps sincere, and being a barracks it provided food and shelter. The young man had traveled to Paris without a sou, as was his custom, and the barracks was a good solution, given that his ardent desire was to join the Guard. Many of the soldiers who were there had been involved in trench warfare against the Germans and had witnessed their comrades’ bodies rotting beside them or beneath their boots. They were hardened men. The smell of death in those fields was fresh in their memory. Ten thousand bodies lie fallen in the mud, while above them, another twenty or thirty thousand are still fighting, still alive. The bodies become deformed. Blood accumulates in the lower parts of the body and suddenly something bursts. A foul-smelling stream gushes out on top of the mud. The birds circle, pulling out eyes, the worms rise to the surface. That’s what the soldier sees in battle: the bare bones of his friend, the amputations, the perforated skulls. What he has seen remains on his retina. Nobody who has contemplated such horror can ever be the same again. Anyone who survives a war, even unscathed, bears a war wound. He is someone who not only has looked death in the eyes but has lain down with death and kissed it on the mouth, has held it in his arms and sung it lullabies.
These damaged men were sleeping on camp beds in the barracks on Rue Babylone. I imagine that on closing their eyes these scenes of horror came back into their minds, so the best thing to do was to fill up with wine or moonshine until you fell into a stupor. A lot of alcohol in those stomachs that, by some miracle, were still connected to their bodies. And suddenly a kind of hallucination, what is this, shining forth amid the camp beds? An angelic youth, with curly fair hair tumbling over his shoulders. He has blue eyes and a soft innocent look that, to these other eyes, polluted with horror and evil, represents life in the bud. This adolescent looks like a young nymph. The soldiers see him come in and lie down on a straw mattress at the far end. The following day he is given a crust of bread, a cup of coffee, and a spoonful of lard. There are already eyes following him, watching him, and, gradually, desiring him. On one side, bodies sated with war; on the other, this asexual angel. On the third night, they have already been talking and because of all the wine they’ve drunk they start to ogle him. They make up their minds, although they’ll still drink a little more. Then something happens, which is that the curly-haired young man approaches them and asks to drink with them. They give him a few sips. Time passes, it’s bedtime, so they go to the dormitory. But the young poet wants to smoke one last pipe and he heads for the toilet. Many pairs of eyes watch him, on the alert like wild beasts.
Il est là bas! Allons-y . . . !
Arthur sees them coming, with their alcoholic laughter, and offers them his pipe. The men look at each other, puzzled, until one of them, the shortest one, approaches the young man, takes his hand and twists it, grabs him by the neck, and forces him to his knees. Arthur struggles, but the man, toothless, wild-eyed, hits him in the face with his open hand, just as he would do to his wife. That makes them laugh. A trickle of blood emerges from his nose and he jumps back, but two others grab him by the legs, lift him, and pull down his pants. There is a murmur when they see that pink backside, although it’s a little dirty. This, too, makes them laugh. They clean it from a bowl of water and he feels them digging into his flesh. Someone puts a finger in his anus and says, it’s dry! Gobs of spittle rain down on him. Filled with revulsion, Arthur starts shaking, not from fear but from anger. Another finger pushes that disgusting spittle inside him. The soldiers pass each other a jug of bitter, perhaps diluted wine. He feels something tearing and sees a few drops of blood roll down his legs.
Il est vierge, bravo!
They pour a little wine over his buttocks and he feels the burning of it, but in all this humiliation he hasn’t gifted them a single moan or groan. Rather, he insults them, but a hand of steel presses on the back of his neck, making it hard for him to breathe. Already, a first soldier has put his cock in and is about to finish; then comes a second, brandishing something enormous that curves to the left. Quel petit sabre! they say, laughing their heads off. Again they fill him with wine-flavored spittle and the man replies: Petit sabre? C’est une bayonette! Vous allez voir.
Putting it in abruptly, the soldier cries, Jocelyn, c’est moi! or something like that, and Arthur feels the blood still running from his torn anus and the men still spitting saliva and wine at him, and another of them takes his turn and then another, there are lots of them, someone wants a repeat go and they fight, he hears a punch and someone falls to the floor, then the man who’d already his turn goes back to the dormitory muttering insults, he’s very drunk, just like the others, and yells at them as he goes out, J’en ai marre de partouzer des gonzesses avec vous, je vous emmerde!
And so they get to the last one, who holds him down by the neck, he thinks, because suddenly he releases him, but the young man can no longer move. A small stream of blood and wine with nauseating white lumps in it flows to the drain. To finish off, they hit him, and when he falls to the floor they say to him, see you tomorrow, petite pute, and leave him.
Arthur crawls until he finds his pants. He tries to stand and falls, twice, three times. At last he manages to support himself on a water tank and with great effort regains his balance. He walks toward the door. In place of a mirror there is just a broken sheet of glass, a fragment that reflects him for a second and Arthur sees a strange gleam in his eyes. He recognizes something overpowering, perhaps the most intense feeling he has ever had: hate.
For now he holds back, although he wants to kill.
He leaves the toilet with effort and walks toward the door of the dormitory. A guard is smoking pensively and on seeing him makes a gesture, as if to say, what’s the matter? Nothing, Arthur says with his hand. He waits for dawn crouching in the yard and by the time first light comes he is already leaving the barracks, walking along Rue Babylone toward Saint-Denis. By noon he has already walked two and a half miles in a northerly direction. He is returning to Charleville, to his hated mother’s house. He has no other refuge and the world is brimming with wickedness. His young body will recover as he advances, but nothing will be the same again.
Before, he had played with words whose meaning life had barely had time to reveal to him, but now they had become real: he had been beaten, humiliated. Out of that pain he heard a strange rhythm, a crazy tom-tom beat that he had never known before. When night fell, still hurting and very hungry, he took notebook and pencil from his bag and began to write, his eyes glowing with that new light he had seen in the broken mirror, and these lines poured out:
Mon triste coeur bave a la poupe
Mon coeur couvert de caporal.
Ils y lancent des jets de soupe.
Life and its strange gods had seen him, had followed his childhood rituals and his dangerous games. And they had decided to strike him. By his third day of walking, he had realized that he was no longer a child, not even an adolescent. It was the moment of destruction and truth. Life might have decided to strike him, but he knew how to return the blow. The young angel had to crouch to give way to the Lucifer they had caused to grow in him.
He reached Charleville and his mother greeted him without the slightest show of affection, but with reproaches and questions. Did she think she had given birth to a devil? The only thing she did, apart from feeding him and helping him to wash, was to ask him about Paris.
“Is it true it’s about to fall?”
He looked at her contemptuously and said:
“No, no. It’s a cursed city but it’s my city.”
Then he wrote Izambard a long letter and included the poem about the rape. Everything was new in these verses, starting with the strange music, but Izambard did not understand it. He thought Arthur was making fun of him and by way of response parodied the poem, making him see that these games were within anybody’s reach.
“Anybody’s?” Arthur asked himself, once again wounded to the core. The only person who could evaluate that disturbing melody that human barbarity had left him with . . . wasn’t capable of appreciating it! Not just that, he made fun of it. Arthur’s response was silence.
The savage poet was digging his claws into the soil of France with all the cruelty and intolerance of youth. Ready to spit, vomit, ejaculate his verses of destruction.
From that moment on, he stopped washing or cutting his hair, and was to be seen begging on the streets of Charleville. People muttered, isn’t that the young genius from high school? C’est lui, c’est lui! That’s him, but he’s gone crazy now! And his mother, the proud mother of the previous year, had been reduced to a shadow, who went out as little as possible, tired of hearing stories about her son.
Vitalie knelt before him and begged him to go back to school, but Arthur stood firm. He had nothing to learn in that mediocre place. Instead he went to the library every morning to read and make notes. At least there was that! But in the afternoons he would sit on the café terraces, drinking, smoking his pipe, and arguing on any subject under the sun with whoever he had in front of him. He hated the idea of God, hated the Church and priests. How could anyone believe, faced with the wickedness and barbarity of the world? If there was a god, even just a small god, he should be able to protect the frail.
At other times Rimbaud would adopt the voice of that cruel god, curse death, challenge it, and laugh uproariously at the sufferings of others. He was hurt in the deepest part of himself and in his tortured heart (coeur supplicié) there was no room for anybody. Perhaps not even for himself.