“One had, in the late eighties and early nineties, to be preposterously French.”
—VICTOR PLARR
The mid-1800s saw the onset of a new conservative movement in England, ushered in by a change of leadership in the royal family. The Victorian era lasted from Queen Victoria’s crowning on June 20, 1837, until her death on January 22, 1901. It was an affluent and peaceful time. The “enlightened” morals that had accompanied the Enlightenment were reined in, as romanticism and mysticism gave way to religious evangelism.
Youth, of course, would have none of it.
Long-haired young men such as Robert Louis Stevenson declared they were ready to “disregard everything our parents have taught us.” Stevenson’s parents were less than happy with his behavior: “You have rendered my whole life a failure,” his father told him. His mother dramatically added, “This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me.” While Stevenson would eventually go on to write the gothic horror novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he was also notable as a harbinger of things to come as the Victorian era of expansion and prosperity wound down.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a new generation of writers with wild hair and even wilder prose emerged with the intent to scandalize the populace. The press branded the cadaverously thin, pale young men “decadent.” The youths adopted the name and wore it as a badge of honor. The poor working class watched with wonder as the Decadents, who appeared to them to have been born with all the advantages in the world, revolted. As Arthur Symons, editor of the Decadent-friendly journal The Savoy, observed, “The desire to ‘bewilder the middle classes’ is in itself middle-class.” Many of the Decadents were French, and those who weren’t were obsessed with French culture.
Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891)—pale, disaffected, young, middle-class, and French—fit the decadent bill perfectly. Victor Hugo called him an “an infant Shakespeare,” and for good reason: Rimbaud produced his best work as a teenager, and by age twenty-one had given up on literature altogether.
As a child, Rimbaud ran away from home multiple times to escape his overbearing mother. When he turned sixteen, Rimbaud entered his rebellious teenage phase: he drank alcohol, stole books, spoke rudely to adults, and grew his hair long. “Parents: You have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own,” he wrote in a tantrum. In summary, he acted like an adolescent. Unlike your average teenage rebel, however, Rimbaud was an absurdly good poet.
Rimbaud started writing poetry in his early teens, encouraged by a tutor his family had hired, and published his first poem when he was only fifteen. Like many of his contemporaries, he believed that he had to “derange” his senses to achieve true, poetical vision. “The sufferings are enormous,” he wrote to his former teacher Georges Izambard, “but one must be strong, be born a poet, and I have recognized myself as a poet.” He believed in “art for art’s sake,” a phrase coined by French poet Désiré Nisard earlier in the century. When one of Rimbaud’s friends encouraged him to write to Paul Verlaine (1844–1896), Rimbaud sent the established poet some of his poems.
Verlaine replied with a one-way ticket to Paris. “Come, dear great soul,” Verlaine wrote back. “We are waiting for you; we desire you.”
Verlaine’s unhappy childhood can best be summed up with this anecdote: although he was the only child in his family to survive childbirth, his mother held on to her miscarried fetuses. Once, in a fit of rage, Verlaine smashed the jars containing the pickled corpses of his brothers and sisters. Let’s just say that tensions flared after this incident. To say he was happy to leave home for college is an understatement.
He started college with the goal of becoming a lawyer, gave up, and settled for a bachelor’s degree. What he really wanted was to be a poet like Charles Baudelaire. But after his father, favorite aunt, and beloved cousin all died, Verlaine spent his early twenties in a drunken haze. “It was upon absinthe that I threw myself, absinthe day and night,” he wrote, calling the green-colored liquor a “vile sorceress.”
Since the mid-eighteenth century, European distilleries had been churning out new and novel intoxicating spirits such as brandy, gin, and rum. The Decadents’ drink of choice, however, was la fée verte: absinthe—the Green Fairy. The anise-flavored liquor was extremely high in alcohol (ranging from 55 percent to 72 percent by volume) and was alleged to have hallucinatory effects. “The first stage of absinthe is like ordinary drinking,” Oscar Wilde wrote. In the second stage of drunkenness, “you begin to see monstrous and cruel things, but if you can persevere you will enter in upon the third stage where you see things that you want to see, wonderful curious things.” While many creative types indulged in absinthe for inspiration, the high alcohol content led many of them, including Verlaine, to become run-of-the-mill alcoholics. He worked at an office during the day and spent his nights drinking, “not always in very respectable places.”
Things turned around for Verlaine after he published his first book in 1866. In 1870, he married Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville. His new in-laws conveniently provided them with lodgings and support.
When Rimbaud arrived in Paris at Verlaine’s behest, they fell into each other’s arms and didn’t leave each other’s sight. Verlaine later blamed their explosive relationship on the younger man, claiming that Rimbaud had “diabolical powers of seduction.” It’s difficult to believe this was the case, for while the older poet had had homosexual experiences in the past, this was Rimbaud’s first such relationship.
They bonded over hashish and absinthe, shocking Paris literary circles with their illicit relationship. Verlaine soon abandoned his young wife and infant son to accompany Rimbaud to London. Leaving his family behind was probably for the best. Verlaine once tried to set his wife on fire; another time, he threw their infant son against the wall. (Thankfully, the child survived.)
Verlaine and Rimbaud lived together in poverty, scraping by with teaching gigs and a meager allowance from Verlaine’s mother. Verlaine’s drinking, which had caused a rift within his family, poisoned his relationship with Rimbaud. Verlaine and Rimbaud argued constantly, while rumors of their homosexual relationship spread through town.
One day, Verlaine showed up on his friend Camille Barrère’s doorstep, his face streaked in tears, “People are saying I’m a pederast, but I’m not! I’m not!” he pleaded. Of course this was a lie. Not only were Verlaine and his underage protégé romantically involved, they were also fond of swordplay: they frequently sparred in their apartment using long knives wrapped in towels to avoid causing serious injury. This was but a prelude to the violent turn their relationship was about to take.
On July 3, 1873, when Verlaine returned home from the market, his appearance inexplicably struck Rimbaud as humorous. “Have you any idea how ridiculous you look with your bottle of oil in one hand and your fish in the other?” Rimbaud said, laughing uncontrollably.
Verlaine smacked Rimbaud in the face with the fish (historians are split on whether it was a herring or a mackerel). “I retaliated, because I can assure you I definitely did not look ridiculous,” Verlaine wrote. He left London without packing his bags and returned to Paris. The penniless Rimbaud stayed at their apartment and was forced to sell Verlaine’s clothes to feed himself. Rimbaud wrote a letter to Verlaine:
Come back, come back, dear friend, my only friend, come
back. I swear to you I’ll be good. My grumpiness was just a
joke that I took too far, and now I’m more sorry than one can
say. I haven’t stopped crying for two whole days. Come back.
Take heart, dear friend. Nothing is lost. All you have to do is
make the return journey. We shall live here very bravely and
patiently. Oh! I beg you. It’s for your own good anyway.
Listen only to your kind heart.
Tell me quickly if I’m to join you.
Yours for life, Rimbaud
P.S. If I am never to see you again, I shall join the navy or
the army. Oh come back! My tears return with every hour.
Verlaine had decided that if his wife would not take him back within three days, he would “blow his brains out.” He wrote Rimbaud back with this information, requesting Rimbaud’s presence so that they could embrace one last time before he was rotting in the ground. Rimbaud wrote back that Verlaine’s threats were simply a tantrum, and that there was no way he would kill himself—especially over a woman.
Rimbaud’s mother, who also received a suicide note from Verlaine, wrote back to her son’s estranged lover, now in Brussels. “I do not know in what manner you have disgraced yourself with Arthur, but I have always foreseen that your liaison would not end happily,” she wrote. Rimbaud met up with Verlaine at a hotel in Brussels on the morning of July 8, where they had a stormy reunion. They pledged to work things out.
Two days later, a heavily intoxicated Verlaine bought a 7mm handgun and fifty cartridges. When Rimbaud asked what the gun was for, Verlaine only said, “It’s for you, for me, for everybody.” Rimbaud, nervous about his friend’s new purchase, decided to leave for Paris—yet he had no money to do so, so he stuck around the hotel and went to lunch with Verlaine and Verlaine’s mother.
When they returned to the hotel, Verlaine locked everyone in the room. “He was still trying to prevent me from carrying out my plan to return to Paris. I remained unshakeable,” Rimbaud said. “I was standing with my back to the wall on the other side of the room. Then he said, ‘This is for you, since you’re leaving!’ or something like that. He aimed his pistol at me.”
Verlaine fired two shots at Rimbaud. While one of the bullets missed, the other hit Rimbaud squarely in the wrist.
Verlaine pressed the gun into Rimbaud’s hand (the one without the hole in it), and threw himself onto his mother’s bed, urging Rimbaud to kill him. Rimbaud refused, and Verlaine’s mother bandaged his wounded hand. The nineteen-year-old Rimbaud, probably in shock from being shot by his mentor and lover, declined to file charges since the wound was not life-threatening.
Later that night, Verlaine and his mother accompanied Rimbaud to a railroad station. (Verlaine’s mother paid for the train ticket; it was the least she could do.) Verlaine, who had retained possession of the gun, continued to act erratically. When Verlaine reached into his coat pocket for the weapon at the train station, Rimbaud ran off, afraid that Verlaine was about to shoot him again. Rimbaud located a police officer and begged him to arrest Verlaine for attempted murder. Verlaine gave himself up to the authorities. He insisted that when he had reached for his gun, it was to shoot himself. Of course, there was no denying that he had already put a bullet through his friend’s wrist, and the police began to question the nature of their relationship.
While Verlaine was locked up in jail awaiting formal charges, Rimbaud was in the hospital with a fever—his wound was infected. Rimbaud stayed there for nine days while prosecutors interrogated Verlaine about their relationship. The court confronted Verlaine with his own letters and his wife’s accusations. They humiliated him by noting that his “penis is short and not very voluminous” and his “anus can be dilated rather significantly by a moderate separation of the buttocks.”
After Rimbaud was released from the hospital, he dropped the charges against Verlaine; the judge overseeing the case sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison anyway, in part based on the “immoral” relationship between the defendant and his accuser. While in prison, Verlaine wrote the poems that would be compiled into his masterpiece, Romances sans paroles (“Songs Without Words”), including the famous line “And here is my heart, which beats only for you.” Rimbaud returned to his home in Charleville and continued writing.
Verlaine, who spent much of his time behind bars in solitary confinement, quit drinking and converted to Catholicism. When the former lovers met after Verlaine’s release in 1875, Rimbaud took offense at his friend’s conversion. Rimbaud got Verlaine rip-roaring drunk and took delight in making him blaspheme against his faith. This reconciliation was bittersweet and ended with Rimbaud beating Verlaine unconscious. It was the last time they saw each other.
Rimbaud gave up on writing shortly after his final encounter with Verlaine. No one is quite sure why Rimbaud left his writing career behind. Was he tired of being the enfant terrible of poetry? Or did he quit out of necessity, intending to work and earn enough money to afford him the time to write at his leisure in later life? Either way, he never published another word. He died of cancer shortly after his thirty-seventh birthday.
Verlaine moved to England to teach French. He began drinking again, slipping out of class halfway through the day to sit at a local bar. One of his students recalls that Verlaine “imbibed so many absinthes that he was often incapable of getting back to school without assistance.”
Verlaine became intimate with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, a precocious seventeen-year-old who reminded him of Rimbaud. They were affectionate with each other in public, but the extent of their sexual relationship (if any) is unknown. School officials simultaneously fired Verlaine and expelled Létinois for unspecified inappropriate behavior.
Verlaine and Létinois retired to the French countryside to become farmers, but the experiment ended in bankruptcy; Létinois died in 1883 of typhoid fever. Verlaine was so hard up for cash that he pulled a knife on his own mother and tried to rob her. In 1886, she passed away, and shortly after, Verlaine’s estranged wife finally divorced him.
Verlaine continued writing and publishing poetry to greater and greater acclaim, but struggled with alcoholism, drug addiction, and poverty. He moved between slums and public hospitals during his final years, and, when healthy, could be seen sipping absinthe at Parisian cafés. His ill health (rheumatism, cirrhosis, gastritis, jaundice, diabetes, and cardiac hypertrophy) meant that much of his later work was cannibalized from earlier poems. He spent his royalties on two middle-aged female prostitutes he lived with off and on, and spent his days in the company of an eccentric transient named Bibi-la-Purée, who acted as a personal assistant and drinking companion. Verlaine also passed time by befriending the next generation of Decadents, including a promising young poet named Ernest Dowson.
In 1894, Verlaine’s peers elected him “prince of poets.” Verlaine was humbled by the honor—until he learned that no monetary compensation accompanied the unofficial designation. He died two years later at the age of fifty-two, poor but celebrated. In keeping with the madcap atmosphere of Verlaine’s final years, Bibi-la-Purée ran off with the mourners’ umbrellas at the funeral service.