Pierre Michon: Rimbaud the Son

On the gare de l’Est platform in a derby hat Verlaine enters the story, we know; and his own story here without the least hesitation firmly enters the Mons prison, the cask of absinthe and the tragic clowning, the pallet and the Golden Legend; and beside that pallet, nuns from the almanac and whores, young Létinois who was a tall young girl; but all of them, and wretched as they were, we see leaning over Verlaine, who looks to be lower than they are, as though brought down: because he was brought down and remained there, just as Izambard had been.

He did not need Rimbaud certainly, he was great enough to bring about his fall all by himself, and he had the will to do so; but Rimbaud was the good excuse, the stone over which fate stumbles. And more than anything in the world, Verlaine loved to stumble.

For the moment he has the derby hat, he sleeps in a beautiful bed with a beautiful wife. He alone knows that he stumbles with every step, he is young, it doesn’t show yet. It is said that with or without his hat, stumbling or not, he pleased Rimbaud, and it was reciprocal: without dissembling, without any other ulterior motives except the one of being first, which they confessed to each other, we know that they each loved the writings of the other, believed him to be a seer or pretended to believe so — since it was the fashion of the time to imagine that in seeing , ineffable, secret, postulated nebula, the most distinct poems are born, the most beautiful planetary-like systems where trees grow in twelve syllables, where the universe is embodied; embodied a second time; and regarding that second incarnation each one told himself that perhaps the other had the key. Both were happy to note that the key, if it existed, was held by an accomplice to his liking. But we know that a few days after the gare de l’Est, both of them young and seething, they pleased each other in a different way: and it happened that in a dark room behind shutters they were naked before one another, erect, and short of cadences and numbers issued from clairvoyance, short of any poem, they joined; behind those shutters they stamped out the blind old bourrée of naked bodies, both of them searching for the purple eyelet in the other, and having found it, lashed themselves to it, and suspended on that mast that was not the rod, it happened that they shuddered and disappeared for a moment from this world, from the dark room, from the shutters of September, the body universally poured forth and nevertheless entirely concentrated in the mast, the eyes dead, the tongue lost. And that first bourrée that they danced together, of which we know neither the place nor the form, of which we all know the feeling, that movement of the great bedroom mast made as much wind in literature as the swell of Hernani , because men of letters are futile. However, there is no doubt about it, tempest or breeze, it passed over the writings of Arthur Rimbaud and improved them: because the young man had had a great hunger for that bourrée, for that eyelet that he may have been seeking the summer before in Charleroi and, not finding it, to summon it and to trick his hunger, he strewed little stones along the path: little stones are charming no doubt but do not suffice for the Work, which is of the race of ogres, and if the length of the rod, along with the pretty girl and the green inn, along with the Wanderlust under the rustling stars, does not also hold the dark ridiculous purple eyelet , then the rod is a bad alloy that will bend, as in the hands of Banville.

It is said that love won over their souls and went wrong, as generally happens when it wins over the soul; it is also said that, playing all the hands and all the roles, that of lover, accomplice, poet, they maddened the wife, the true one, Verlaine’s wife, with the thousand tricks dictated by absinthe; for they were tricksters; they pressed down hard upon the E string of poetic destiny, the one, in short, upon which Baudelaire had pressed so hard that it had gotten stuck on the famous crénom; of the two, Rimbaud is thought to have pressed upon it more heavily; and as for the wife, she had going for her the old E string of Eve, who hears things differently; so that the Orphic puking on all fours at four in the morning on the conjugal steps incurred the old conjugal sanction, and the little wife pointed to the door. The story goes that the two poets, driven from conjugal paradise, after detours and drunken procrastinations with Cros, with Banville, at the Hôtel des Étrangers where the Zutists hung out, took the road east and transported elsewhere the luminous, stamping bourrée, still lively, although the worm of sentiment was within it; and that in Brussels and then in London, perhaps to rediscover the pure radiance from before the sentiment, they summoned more ferociously the green fairy , absinthe, the deep gold of whiskies, ales, the mud of stouts; that from the depths of those pubs, E string against E string, they were then seen in confrontation, flushed, the note stuck; and of course at other times well-behaved and studious the two of them bent over a single poet’s desk in London, in dark, devouring London, like the very mouth of Baal, or the latrines of Baal, over which Capital was squatting behind its smokescreen, caught in the act — because that was the longed-for time of tough capitalism, when one knew who had to hold the gun and who had to be at the other end of it, which rifle butt to gnaw on, in which blood precisely to march; in that Old Testament London, sharing a poet’s desk, one of them, I want to believe, wrote Romances sans paroles , the other Chansons néantes , which he later called something else, pieces wholly of grace, light as air, hardly existing, written in the mouth of Baal but very far above Baal and the mud of stouts; for then they pressed heavily on the E string, each for himself and for the dead; and at that desk in the lull they played jokes on one another, envied one another, forgave one another. Or they recited for one another those aery pieces, one standing, the other seated, like the girls for the king at Saint-Cyr; and the one who was seated heard grace and power and great rhetoric pass; and neither one knew that they would never have such an audience again, such a stage. But, the aery piece taken wing, they remained there (at least that is how they imagined the thing, the flight of the poem and the fall of the body, for in their souls they still surreptitiously wore the red waistcoat), they remained there, they donned their greatcoats and bravely entered the mouth of Baal, which is also its latrines, and in the depths of a pub they sank into stouts. The devout manage to recognize them in the midst of that Old Testament tar, they can easily distinguish what belongs to one and what to the other, here the seer, the innovator, there the poor devil attached to outdated notions, the son of the sun who walks in front, and the son of the moon stumbling behind; the devout have the gift of clairvoyance — I myself can see none of this: in the Babylon smog their features merge, which has the beard, which the scowl? It is too dark to decide which of the two is the mad virgin, which the infernal bridegroom: they have the same violence under equally black waistcoats. They are two identical devourers slipping easily into that pub; and the coachman who carts off what remains of them coming out of that pub at four in the morning takes them by the arms, picks them up, throws them as best he can into the back of the cab with their greatcoats all awry, the coachman above who speaks to the horses in the language of Babel and disappears, he wears the same overcoat. The whip cracks behind the smog, perhaps Rimbaud in the cab cries merde . They are going to the station, they are returning to Europe: because we know that they had a row finally over something to do with herrings; over that matter they left Babylon; and that, thrown back to Brussels for a second time, crazed, terrified, one of them, the derby hat, at three in the afternoon with twelve or twenty green fairies in permanent residence raging about since eight in the morning, went to the galéries Saint-Hubert and terrified bought a Browning, which was not a Browning but a 7-mm six-shooter, what make I do not know, and with it put a piece of lead in the terrified archangel’s wing. And there he is entering the Mons prison and lying down, and the other one leaving for his Patmos, at Roche in the Ardennes, near Rilly-aux-Oies. In the inner closet, Verlaine is quietly stretched out beside Izambard. And the bourrée, insofar as it concerns them, is over.