1873 Paul Verlaine’s connection with Arthur Rimbaud began when the latter (at seventeen, ten years the junior of the two poets) began a correspondence in 1871.
Verlaine was the leader of the symbolist school and Rimbaud was ambitious to make his mark. He enclosed his strikingly precocious poem, ‘Le Dormeur du Val’ (‘The Sleeper in the Valley’). The last six lines of the poem, which pictures a sleeping soldier, read:
Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort.
Souriant comme Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme:
Nature, berce-le chaudement: il a froid.
Les parfums ne font pas frissonner sa narine;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine,
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit.1
The last line, shockingly, reverses the reader’s expectation. The soldier is not sleeping, but dead, with two (bullet) holes in his side.
With war memorials to the Franco-Prussian conflict being raised throughout France, the poem had a topical resonance. On reading it, and the accompanying letters, Verlaine (married to a pregnant, seventeen-year-old wife) was instantly besotted. He sent Arthur a one-way ticket to Paris, with the instruction: ‘Come, dear great soul. We await you; we desire you.’ We being Paris and Paul.
Rimbaud duly came from his home in the Ardennes and the two men embarked on a violent, but from the poetic point of view, highly productive relationship. They drank absinthe to excess, experimented with hashish, made love, and wrote wildly.
By September 1872, they were together in London, Verlaine having abandoned his family. They supported themselves by Verlaine’s teaching. Rimbaud passed many hours in the British Museum, which, he said, was warm.
The London experiment failed. The relationship, always volatile, became violent. The final act took place in Brussels. After a bitter argument, Verlaine bought a revolver and shot Rimbaud, on 10 July 1873. Although the wound in the younger man’s wrist was slight, Verlaine was arrested for attempted murder and sentenced to two years in prison.
Disgust at the immorality of the relationship may have been a prejudicial factor. Rimbaud returned home to write what is regarded as his finest work, Un Saison en Enfer, while his lover was suffering in a different, penal circle of hell, in Mons prison. While there he composed his great treatise, Art poétique, separated from his wife, and re-converted to Catholicism.
1 ‘Feet in the gladioli, he sleeps. Smiling like / A sick child would smile, he takes a nap: / Nature, cradle him warmly: he is cold. / Fragrances do not make his nostrils quiver; / He sleeps in the sun, hand on his chest, / At peace. He has two red holes in his right side.’