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Paul Verlaine: The Fallen Man Crowned Prince of Poets

by Michel Desforges
ON 21ST JANUARY 1986, ELISA Verlaine, Paul's mother, died in Paris. She was watched over and then accompanied to the cemetery by the mystical poet Louis Le Cardonnel, a future priest at the church of Valence, while, from the dark room which he occupied on the ground floor, her son. bedridden by hydrarthrosis of the left knee, could only see unknown hands lower, through the first floor window, the coffin of the old lady, whom he had ruined and driven to despair. It was Mathilde, her former daughter-in-law since the divorce which had been pronounced in February the year before, who was the sole representative of the family and, as such, received the condolences.
Although he was fascinated by poetry early on. Verlaine remained an unstable being whom an existentialist dissatisfaction, expounded in "Aspiration" (1861). drove to reading obscene books and to drinking. In 1862, he obtained his baccalaureat (higher secondary school certificate) but he frequented the cafes in rue Soufflot far more than the Paris Law Faculty and his father, who was quite rightly upset at such Irresponsibility, had him become a clerk in an Insurance company and then at Paris City Hall (1864). This disturbed young man, who was deprived of paternal authority from the end of 1865, got drunk at his cousin Elisa's funeral (February 1867) and that of his aunt Grandjean (February 1869), thus creating a great scandal. Under the influence of alcohol, he also attempted to kill his mother five months later. On 11th August 1870, in the presence of the revolutionary anarchist Louise Michel, he married Mathilde Maute, whom he started to batter barely two months after the wedding. 1871 was a key year as It marked the beginning of his relation with the "Infernal spouse", Arthur Rimbaud, and of their travels between Belgium and London. These tumultuous wandering led Mathilde to begin procedures for a separation, Later, on 10th July 1873, when he returned from a cabaret, after a bout of drinking, Ver-
laine fired at Rimbaud. He was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison.
When he came out on 16th January 1875. with a considerable work he had written after long meditation, he set off for England and became a teacher. On his return to France, he continued to teach, during the 1877-1878 school year, at the Notre-Dame Institution in Rethel in the Ardennes, where he had disturbing feelings for one of his pupils. After living near there, in Juniville, and then in Paris, Verlaine settled in Malval, also in the Ardennes, with his mother, on a farm which she had bought. There, he led a scandalous life, indulging in drunkenness. He sold the farm for just over half of the price that his mother had paid and, on 24th March 1885, was sentenced to one month in prison and to a fine of five hundred francs for assault and death threats that he had made to his mother. Hence, when he and his mother moved to Paris and settled In the Hotel du Midi, 6, Cours Saint-Francois, they were practically ruined.
In July 1886, six months after his mother's funeral, Verlaine was taken to hospital as he was suffering from ulcers on his legs. It was the first of a long series of hospital stays in Tenon. Cochin, Saint-Antoine, Broussais and Bichat. When he was not in hospital, he resided in various hotels each one more modest than the one before, in particular, from March to October 1888, at the Hotel Royer-Collard where, every Wednesday, he received his admirers. These included Auguste Villiers de 1' Isle-Adam, Maurice Barres, Rachilde and Jean Moreas. He was almost completely destitute as he spent the little money that he earned on prostitutes. Apart from a stay In Aix-les-Bains, he only left the French capital to give a series of lectures in Holland in November 1892.
Arthur Symons.
Although he was elected "Prince of Poets" in August 1894, on the death of Leconte de Lisle, Verlaine only survived thanks to the care of his true friends and the meagre grant given by the Ministry of Public Instruction. The
Delzants often received him at their table and even saved the manuscript of "Voyage en France" from the grasping hands of his impatient creditors.
Verlaine was a pilgrim of the absolute. His conversion, which he announced to the chaplain at the prison of Mons, after a night of intense introspection, dated from June 1874. He was also a nomad of the gutter, an ungainly tramp, torn between his contradictory appetites for hell and for paradise. In spite of a pitiful existence which tossed him here and there, Verlaine left some remarkable works, mostly published, between 1884 and 1896, by Leon Van-nier. a publisher who had confidence in him and paid him royalties. From his "Poemes Saturniens" (1865) to “Epigrammes" (1894), not forgetting "Jadis et Naguere" (1884), "Amour'1 (1888) and "Liturgies Intimes" (1892), his poetry with its discreet tones, free syntax and flowing rhythm, composes a gripping internal song which sometimes borders on the sublime and in which bouts of voluptuousness and regrets for lost purity. and the pleasure of the senses and mystical exaltation alternate. It is a seraphic chant which has so far inspired more than six hundred and fifty composers all over the world.
LActuaUte En France