Pont Alexandre III, Paris. February. 0°C. As an icy dust of snow swirls along the sidewalks, Japanese couples pose for wedding photographs with a background of the seventeenth–century Hôtel des Invalides. Grooms in dove–gray cutaways and brides in off–the–shoulder gowns of white tulle grin ecstatically even as their teeth chatter. Above them, unseen, the giant gilded figures of Law and the State struggle to restrain the rearing winged horses representing aspects of Fame, but the newlyweds are too cold to care.
ONE MORNING IN 2010, WALKING DOWN RUE FÉROU, A FEW MINUTES away from our apartment, I found a man balanced precariously on a ladder three meters in the air. He was painting words on the high stone wall around the former seminary, now the Centre des Finances Publiques (the tax office).
Rue Férou, a short, narrow lane running from Place Saint–Sulpice to the Luxembourg Gardens, has more artistic significance than most Paris thoroughfares. When the American surrealist Man Ray returned to Paris from the United States in 1951 with his new wife, Juliet, they shared a tiny apartment there. Next door, Ernest Hemingway lived for a few years with his second wife, Pauline, before they moved to Key West in 1929.
Distracted by these other associations, I looked back at the painter and realized for the first time what he was painting. It was a poem: Arthur Rimbaud’s “Le Bateau ivre” (“The Drunken Boat”).
In 1871, in a city battered by the Franco–Prussian War and the anarchist uprising of the Commune, seventeen–year–old runaway Arthur Rimbaud—delinquent, petty thief, absinthe drinker, hashish smoker, and sometime lover of fellow poet Paul Verlaine—recited his poem in public for the first time, in a room above the café on the other side of the square.
In the poet’s imagining, he isn’t a passenger on the boat but the boat itself, drifting in alien seas and beaching on islands of a strangeness unimaginable in Europe.
I’ve struck Floridas, you know, beyond belief,
Where eyes of panthers in human skins
Merge with the flowers! Rainbow bridles, beneath
The seas’ horizon, stretched out to shadowy fins!
Soon after writing it, Rimbaud left for Africa, abandoning poetry for the life of a merchant. His poems, in particular “Le Bateau ivre,” are glimpses of that portion of the national soul that the French hesitate to acknowledge, since its irrationality offends their belief in order and logic. No surprise that Rimbaud would be embraced by those intellectual smash–and–grab men, the surrealists.
Climbing down, the painter introduced himself as Jan Willem Bruins. He intended, he said, to paint all one hundred lines of Rimbaud’s text on this wall. His painstaking workmanship and the grid of pencil lines on the stone signaled that he was no mere graffiti artist. Though like most taggers he worked in words, not pictures, he didn’t spray his paint. (The best–known French tagger calls himself “Jef Aérosol.”) Instead, he used materials that were old even when illustrators were laboriously illuminating manuscripts in the building on the other side of the wall.
Bruins differed in another way from Aérosol and the rest of the taggers: he had permission. The Tegen–Beeld Foundation began in Leiden. After it funded the painting of 110 poems in public places around the town, it extended its program outside the Netherlands, starting with Paris and “Le Bateau ivre.”
“Well, you chose the right place,” I said.
Across the square, we could see the red awning of the Café de la Mairie, where Rimbaud read the poem for the first time and where, later, Djuna Barnes and Henry Miller hung out and Man Ray sometimes ate breakfast.
Over the next few weeks, I often dropped in on Bruins to check on his progress.
The fact that the poem dealt with the sea and the seasons made perfect sense. There could hardly be a better illustration of that national preoccupation, and the degree to which France differed from Anglo–Saxons in its view of the elements.
Was there a poem in English that viewed the sea with anything like the imagination of “Le Bateau ivre”? I could think of only one: G. K. Chesterton’s “Lepanto.” It celebrated the 1571 battle off Greece in which a coalition led by Don John of Austria defeated the Ottoman Turks. Both sides sailed galleys rowed by slaves—in the case of the Turkish ships, mostly Christians captured during the Crusades.
Drumming this poem into us, the nuns and monks of our school were more concerned with its historical subtext, a classic case of the good guys—i.e., Catholics—defeating the heathens. About that, I could not have cared less. What exhilarated me was its imagery. Errol Flynn in Technicolor didn’t even come close.
Don John pounding from the slaughter–painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!
Chesterton wrote this in 1911, exactly forty years after “Le Bateau ivre,” but for all the differences in style and form, the poems share a family resemblance. Rarely for the time among British poets, Chesterton was a Catholic, and militant. Whether he and Rimbaud liked it or not, they had fed on the same fruit, drunk at the same well, as had I.
Watching Bruins became my obsession. If I was anywhere near Saint–Sulpice, I detoured to follow his progression. On one of these visits, I noted an oddity.
“You’re painting the stanzas from right to left,” I said. “Shouldn’t you be working from left to right, the way you would read it in a book?”
Bruins put down his brush.
“I thought of that. But, you know . . .” He looked back to Place Saint–Sulpice, then up toward the Luxembourg Gardens. “ . . . I felt the poem blew . . .” He made a swoosh motion. “ . . . away from where Rimbaud read it, and along this little street. So that’s how I painted it.”
After completing his work, he added a PS to explain his thinking. It wasn’t necessary. Poetry, like the weather, is its own reason.
A footnote: In all the years since Bruins completed his work, the wall and its poem—in a city where taggers strike largely unchallenged—has never once been defaced by graffiti. It’s not only churches that stand on hallowed ground.