Carré Jean Marie - A season in hell : the life of Arthur Rimbaud

J EAN-ARTHUR RIMBAUD was bom in Charleville, in the Ardennes, October 20th, 1854. Charleville and Mzires are twin cities whose every alley he explored and where he passed his impatient boyhood. Mzires, fortress and seat of the prefecture, its ancient citadel enclosed within ramparts once defended by the Chevalier Bayard, had become the home of bureaucrats and petty officials, and slept peacefully in the shadow of her tall cathedral. Charleville, her young rival, was already richer and more populous, proud of her commerce and industry, flourishing under the rule of her garrulous and enterprising middle classes. Neither city can claim Rimbaud as her own. He did not love them.

Both towns are situated on the banks of a lovely river, whose silver meanderings his eye would follow longinglyeternal invitation to wander! The Meuse, coming from the east at this point, just touches Mzires and then swerves aside; it winds around the peninsula of Saint-Julien, digresses whimsically, and then returns a second time to caress its moldy ramparts. From there it flows on toward Charleville, gains the passes of the Ardennes, and flows toward the north amid the blue rocks, the grottoes and the woods of its romantic valley. Insensitive in general to the misty harmonies of his native soil, Rimbaud retained only one memory: the song of the river, the call of the waters in flight toward the unknown.

With every fiber in his body he would respond to this imperious call. Like Verlaine, he was an army officers son; and the spirit of his father, a Burgundian of Provenal extraction, clashed sharply with the rigid self-restraint of the old Ardennes folk. The father was an adventurer, with all the daring and vivacity of the country of wine and sunlight. Awarded a commission by the Duc dAumale after serving in the ranks, Captain Rimbaud had campaigned in Algeria with the Chasseurs dOrlans, and had led, before his marriage, the free and boisterous camp life of a soldier in Northern Africa. On his return to France, he found that he got on very poorly with his wife, whose severity sorely tried his impulsive and restless nature. Immediately after the birth of his second son, Arthur, he left France to take part in the Crimean War. Returning again, he dragged his growing family moodily from garrison to garrison, until he quit them finally for the Italian campaign. In 1860 his wife obtained a permanent separation, and came back to Charleville, where her fifth child, Isabelle, the poets favorite sister, was born.

The poet was destined to have more than one feature derived from his father: the high swelling forehead, the keen blue eyes, light auburn hair, short nose slightly uptilted, full and sensual lips. From his father also he would inherit an unhealthy instability, a capricious and violent temper, an insatiable curiosity, and a taste for travel and foreign languages.

From his mother, however, Rimbaud inherited qualities typical of the Ardennes. This tall, thin woman fitted into the rugged setting admirably; the gloomy horizons, the neutral tones of the landscape, the rude climate suited her temperament. What did she give to her son? First, her height; her long gnarled hands, her sharp voice, her firm cheeks which seemed bitten by the north wind, and last, and above all, her boundless pride, her obstinacy, her iron will.

A daughter of great landed proprietors of the Basse-Ardennes, she was a woman of steel, haughty, avaricious, bigoted, commanding. She never permitted any difference of opinion in her family. She was incapable of any yielding or spontaneous gesture. There was nothing sentimental about her; she was never seen to smile. In the vexations of their sad conjugal life, her husband was certainly not always in the wrong.

She was to exercise an absurd tyranny over her child, and under her he would serve his apprenticeship of revolt. Before setting himself against religion, against society, against literature, he would rebel against the familythrough her.

Amazingly enough, she was to triumph in the end. Rimbauds spirit would become a sad battleground on which opposing forces would confront each other ceaselessly: forces of expansionthe vagabond restlessness of the father, the desire to squander his energies, to accumulate experiencespitted against the spirit of conservation and peasant-like craftthe joys of acquisition and ownership, the delight in profit-taking, and finally, that thirst for property, that longing for money which was, at bottom, the hollow echo of his mothers spirit in him.

The first half of Rimbauds life would be dominated by the spirit of adventure, but during the second half (whatever reasons he might have for renouncing literature and fleeing into the desert) he was destined to become as avaricious as the sea, and would drag his horde of gold along in his colonists belt despite weariness and pain.

In turn a desperate idealist and a furious positivist, he would heed alternately the call of his opposing hereditary instincts. As an adventurer in ideas he was to end in an impasse, against a stone wall. But when you find him, an earthly adventurer, penetrating into the heart of burning Ethiopia with his caravans, do not attribute his daring to supreme courage. He no longer enjoys the sense of danger. Under his Bedouin tent he piles his gold high, and his mother, from afar, smiles at him.

Even the birth of the poet, if one may believe his too obliging biographer and brother-in-law, Paterne Berrichon, had something of the prodigious about it. Mme. Rimbaud was delivered at the home of her father, M. Cuif, a retired farmer living in a comfortable apartment on the main street of Charleville (now 12 rue Thiers). At the very hour of his arrival in this world, when the first attentions were being given him, the doctor stated that he already had his eyes wide open. And, as the nurse engaged to swaddle the infant placed him on a pillow on the floor, in order to look for some forgotten article of clothing, she was astounded at seeing him get off the pillow and crawl, laughing, toward the door of the apartment giving on the stairs.

Really? But why should he have stopped there? The stairway should have been very tempting for a future explorer! And the street, that animated, humming thoroughfare which runs from the square of the Avenue de la Gare to the Place Ducale! Why not there, where on market days crowds of countrymen all dressed up in their blue Sunday smocks swarm behind the light carts with their green awnings?

No, we can do without these pious legends. This life he cursed so often Rimbaud did not greet with a smile. Besides, his precocity is so truly amazing that there is no need for exaggeration. That the child, put to nurse with a good nail-makers wife, should have played all alone in the salt bin, that he should have walked boldly and without assistance at eight monthsthese things have no interest for us.

When Madame Rimbaud left her husband and came back to Charleville to give birth to her daughter Isabelle, Grandfather Cuif was dead and she had to find other lodgings. She had to content herself with a flat in the old rue Bourbon. It was different from the pleasant quarter in which they had formerly lived; different from the broad street with its expensive shops, among them that of the book-dealer Letellier, whose Epinal prints and Christmas gift books had so delighted the Poet of Seven Years.

A sept ans, il faisait des romans sur la vie
Du grand dsert ou luit la Libert ravie.
Forts, soleils, rives, savanes! Il saidait
De journaux illustrs, o, rouge, il regardait
Des Espagnols rire et des Italiennes....

At seven he wove great romances about