43 Out!

But with the usual randomness, of course the kid did not drown himself. Instead, he returned to 14 rue Nicolet confused and humiliated—out of control. And so, summoning all his powers, the next day he got even.

“Monsieur Rimbaud! Rimbaud! Down here! Where is he! Where?”

It was glorious. It was M. Mauté downstairs, bellowing at the top of his lungs. A moment prior, as was his tedious custom, M. Mauté had been timing, to the second, the chimes of his many disparate clocks—a clearly hopeless task which, for that very reason, occupied large portions of his day.

When he saw it.

It was his trophy wall of tiny stuffed deer heads … and everything was wrong.

The twig horns. The dubious smiles. On those dozen hare-sized heads everything had been altered—everything. The glass eyes. The smiles. Even the diameter of the nostrils. It was diabolical. It must have taken hours, this outrage, hours daubing black paint with a brush of perhaps three hairs. Detectable but to one man, now about to have heart failure.

“Monsieur Rimbaud! Now! Get down here!”

But of course, the boy came right away. The whole household was there.

“Look at this!” cried the old man, now armed with a magnifying glass. Rimbaud looked quizzically at his host, with perfect, malevolent innocence.

“Ah, Monsieur, I came right away. Did something happen?”

“YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED!” Fiercely, M. Mauté looked to the women for support. “You see! Of course you see. Here!” he pointed. “And here! See? See? Do you not see what he did?”

The women looked at one another, puzzled.

“Look!” cried M. Mauté, now nose to nose with the third specimen from the right. “Notice the smile—almost gone. And that eye—now dull. And that nostril—ruined. As was your foul intention, Monsieur!”

“Intention?” asked the boy.

“Yooou.” He bellowed. “Yoooooou—”

“But, Monsieur,” inquired the boy, now going in for the kill, “I am confused. Is it this one? Or wait—is it this one here that bothers you …?”

And yet, even after his three-week siege, with a new infant in the house—and now with this fiendish assault on his host—the lad was shocked. Actually shocked when Verlaine called him down to the foyer. There, by the door, stood a new valise purchased in advance for this great day, along with several shirts and undergarments. And there, atop it, was a fat envelope containing thirty francs of good riddance.

“What is this?” demanded the kid. He waved the envelope in Verlaine’s face. “What is this?”

“Severance pay. Come now,” said Verlaine good-naturedly, “you’ve thoroughly abused our hospitality—you’ve been brilliant in every way. Now come say a proper good-bye. I’ve booked you a room.”

“Judas! Go screw yourself.” The kid stormed out.

Let it be said: it did look odd, exceedingly, for a grown man with a valise to be chasing a boy clearly not his son. A horse cab clopped by. Verlaine hailed it, then directed the driver to troll beside the still cursing refugee, head down, beating down the street.

“Arthur!” he said, hanging out the window. “Come on now—in. I’ll pay for your room. We’ll eat, then we’ll both get plastered.”

“All right,” he agreed. “But only if you shut up.”

And so in silence, riding through old Paris, they came to a medieval, almost undersea wreck of a hotel on the faubourg Saint-Denis. Truly the end of the line. Buckling timbers, bleary windows, rotting walls plastered with peeling posters. It had about it a kind of horrifying grandeur, snaking up the riverine street.

They got the key. They climbed the creaking, listing stairs, two floors to No. 8, in which they found a cot, a grimy table thick with tallow, and a small window the hue of a stagnant pond.

“Well, well,” joked Verlaine, setting down the valise. “Comme … chez soi. Home sweet home.”

Boom. Dazed he lay on the floor—felled with a vicious rabbit punch.

“Asshole! Liar!” Slapping him, Rimbaud had him by the throat. “We’ll see who’s the bitch here!”

Double man and double boy. Slapping and kicking, rolling and wrestling, they were soon laughing, then not laughing at all, as they popped buttons and shucked shoes. White-fleshed youth. Rimbaud stood at full and erect attention. Jutting, pink and bouncing, he was not overlarge but, as only sixteen can manage, most impressively vertical.

No question how this was going to go. The elder poet was on his knees, and here, above him, like a young god, fingers locked on his throat, was his muse and master. Joy incarnate as Verlaine opened his bearded lips—well-versed lips that expertly covered his teeth, stroking and tonguing, gumming and humming to a tom-tom beat.

Mamma’s boys together. So it began, really, as only it could have begun, their two-year rampage through Paris, London, and Brussels. Leaving just four people, all women, of course, to pick up the pieces: Mme. Rimbaud, Mme. Verlaine, and Mathilde Mauté Verlaine—dewy-eyed no more. And of course their leader and strategist, the ever resourceful Mme. Mauté.

Le scandale! Enter police and solicitors, the wronged, the fleeced, the injured. The mad race was on.