Rimbaud by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2024-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

(Elle est retrouvée

Quoi? –L'Eternité)

his lines are obviously the model for Verlaine's:

In the unbroken

Dullness of the plain

The hesitant snow

Glows like sand

(Dans l'interminable

Ennui de la plaine

La neige incertaine

Luit comme du sable)

In another of his poems Verlaine announces that his soul is sad "because of a woman." He specifies:

I am not consoled

Though it was my heart that went away.

In yet another he addresses Rimbaud as if they were both young girls who needed to pardon themselves and wander off far from men and women, "coolly forgetting what has sent us into exile." Verlaine was never one for squarely confronting his problems; at the risk of sounding priggish, one could say that all his glancing ways of staging the tensions of his life make for great verse, if fairly sketchy morality.

Perhaps the civil tone of Verlaine's notes to Mathilde (and her own memories of the good times they'd had as a couple) impelled her to make one last effort to save her marriage. She wrote Verlaine saying that she was coming to Brussels with her mother. She granted him an appointment at the hotel where he'd been staying. By the time she arrived in Belgium he and Rimbaud had checked out, but Verlaine did show up at the designated hotel punctually. He seemed indifferent to Mathilde's talk of a reconciliation until she proposed that they leave their baby with her mother and sail off together for New Caledonia in the Pacific, 700 miles east of Australia—an exotic enough destination to suggest a total renewal of the terms of their union and to fire his imagination. Verlaine agreed to meet Mathilde and her mother at the train station the next afternoon and return with them to Paris. He showed up, to be sure, but drunk and surly, and when they stopped at the border for the formalities, Verlaine slipped away in the confusion and returned to Brussels and Rimbaud. He wrote Mathilde—probably under the supervision of Rimbaud—a nasty little note:

Miserable carrot fairy, princess mouse, bedbug just waiting for two fingers and a pot, you made me do everything, perhaps you have broken my friend's heart; I am rejoining Rimbaud if he still wants me after the betrayal you forced on me.

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