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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
In 1880 a taciturn young Frenchman arrives at the Yemeni port of Aden, where he finds work as a foreman in a coffee warehouse. He is the poet and enfant terrible Arthur Rimbaud, author of A Season in Hell – a notorious figure in France but now, at the age of twenty five, determined to start a new life. In this atmospheric study of Rimbaud's 'lost years', Charles Nicholl pieces together the shadowy story of his life as a trader, explorer and gun-runner in East Africa. We follow his trail in Somalia and Djibouti, in the highlands of Ethiopia, in the souks of Cairo: a man on the run from his past, living out his famous teenage pronouncement, 'Je est un autre' – I is Somebody Else.
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Somebody Else
Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880–91
CHARLES NICHOLL
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In Memory of Kevin Stratford 1949–84
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‘Je est un autre…’
Arthur Rimbaud, ‘Lettre du Voyant’
‘You lose yourself
You reappear
You suddenly find
You got nothing to fear …’
Bob Dylan, ‘It’s Alright Ma’
Contents
Illustrations
Section One
Arthur Rimbaud aged seventeen. Photograph by Étienne Carjat.
The Communard: Rimbaud (second from left) in Paris, May 1871. Photograph by Bruno Braquehais.
Manuscript of ‘Première Soirée’, Rimbaud’s first published poem.
Georges Izambard.
Rimbaud in Paris, June 1872. Sketch by Verlaine.
Paul Verlaine.
Un Coin de Table by Henri Fantin-Latour, 1872.
First London lodgings: 34 Howland Street.
8 Great College Street.
Small ads, 1873–74.
Verlaine and Rimbaud in London. Sketch by Félix Regamey.
The family farmhouse at Roche.
The tropical traveller: Rimbaud in Java and back in Charleville. Sketches by Delahaye, c. 1876–77.
Grand Hôtel de l’Univers, Aden, in the early twentieth century and in 1991.
Rimbaud on the terrace of the Grand Hotel, Aden, August 1880. Photograph by Georges Révoil.
Rimbaud’s contract with Viannay, Bardey & Co., 10 November 1880.
Rimbaud at Sheikh-Othman near Aden, early 1883. Photograph attributed to Georges Révoil.12
Section Two
Self-portrait, ‘with my arms folded’, Harar, 1883.
Self-portrait, ‘on a terrace of the house’, Harar, 1883.
Self-portrait, ‘in a coffee plantation’, Harar, 1883.
Constantin Sotiro. Photograph by Rimbaud, 1883.
A ‘maker of daboulahs’. Photograph by Rimbaud, 1883.
The house of Raouf Pasha, Rimbaud’s home in Harar, 1881–84.
‘Bet Rimbo’, 1994.
The tug Arthur Rimbaud, Djibouti port, 1994.
The dhow to Tadjourah.
Caravan inventory, Harar, 24 August 1889.
Mariam, Rimbaud’s Abyssinian mistress.
Alfred Bardey, Rimbaud’s employer.
Danakil chef de caravane.
Alfred Ilg.
King Menelik of Shoa.
Ras Makonnen, Governor of Harar.
Money-bag used by Rimbaud in Harar.
Rimbaud shortly before his death. Sketch by Isabelle Rimbaud.
Commemorative plaque, Hôpital de la Conception, Marseille.
Preface to the Eland Edition
This book about Arthur Rimbaud’s years in Africa was first published nearly a quarter of a century ago. There have been some discoveries since then – two new photographs; a few fragments of reminiscence from those who knew him; some further information about the Abyssinian woman who lived with him in Harar and Aden. I have incorporated these findings into this new edition. We learn a little more, but the story will always remain shadowy: he has covered his tracks too well.
There have also been some books on the subject, offering new insights and interpretations. They include studies by Claude Jeancolas, Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Jean-Michel Cornu de Lenclos and others; and a great biography by Graham Robb, which is as illuminating on the African years as it is on the rest of Rimbaud’s extraordinary life. Details of these can be found in Sources, pp. 379–89.
Another new photograph of Rimbaud is included here, though it belongs to an earlier period: it dates from 1871, when he was briefly involved in the uprising of the Paris Commune. This is its first appearance in a book. I am very grateful to its discoverer, Aidan Dun, for sharing it with me.
Certain journeys lie behind this book. They are not its subject – this is Rimbaud’s story: I am only following him – but it may be useful to know that I was in Aden in 1991, and in Ethiopia and Djibouti in 1994, and that descriptions and comments relating to those places belong to those particular times. The many people who helped along the way are named in the Acknowledgements, but I must mention here my good friend Ron Orders, who covered every inch of the terrain with me, as cameraman, sound-recordist, director and producer of our film about Rimbaud, No Direction Home (Channel 4, 1994).14
I have regularized the spellings of African place names and ethnic groups, though not on any very scholarly basis, and I have indicated differences of usage between Rimbaud’s time and ours – thus the people he calls Galla are now generally known as the Oromo, the Danakil are Afar, and so on.
All translations from the French are my own. I have of course consulted other translators of Rimbaud’s poems, for whom see Sources, pp. 379–89. Quotations from the poems are given in italics: their presence in the narrative is associative rather than documentary – an inner voice from his past. Letters and documents relating to his African years are mostly given here in English for the first time.
Some conversion factors. The chief trading currency in nineteenth-century East Africa was the Maria Theresa thaler, which was then worth about 5 francs; and in Aden the Indian rupee, worth about 3 francs. Other units mentioned in the book are the frasleh (or farasalah), a trade-weight equivalent to about 16 kg; and the daboulah, which is actually a leather pannier for transporting goods by camel, but which was used as a unit in coffee transactions equal to 6 frasleh (100 kg). Two daboulahs constituted a camel load.
INTRODUCTION
At the Empty Inn
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In the year 1880, in the dogdays of August, a young Frenchman disembarks at Steamer Point, in the Arabian port of Aden. He is tall and lean-faced, with chestnut-coloured hair that the sun has faded. His clothes are shabby, his manner brusque. He carries his belongings in a brown leather suitcase fastened with four buckled straps.
He commands attention but is not a curiosity. Aden is a British protectorate, an entrepôt, a transit-camp for travellers both to Africa and to India. There are plenty of Europeans passing through – traders, explorers, engineers, clerks, cooks, all sorts. He might be any of these. He has come, as they mostly do, by steamer through the new Suez Canal, opened in 1869. He has drifted down the Red Sea, short-hauling from coast to coast, looking for any kind of work that was going; and finding none he has come by boat or ship through the straits known as Bab al Mandeb – the Gate of Tears – and along the desiccated littoral of the Yemen, to Aden.
Much of this may be guessed at a glance. The sunburnt face, the scarred portmanteau: they give that sort of account of him. His eyes might suggest other, less decipherable stories. They are extraordinary: a pale, hypnotic, unsettling blue. Decades later a French missionary who knew him in Africa would say: ‘I remember his large clear eyes. What a gaze!’
His eyes are all the more vivid on this particular day because he has a fever. He was very sick up in Hodeidah; he has still not shaken it off.
There are dhows and coal-barges at the wharf, and the shark-fishing boats which are little more than rafts. The eponymous steamers lie off in the glittering water, near the rock called Flint Island, used by the British as a quarantine station. Behind the docks can be seen the principal buildings of the colony: the Governor’s residence, the Post Office, the agencies of the P & O and Messageries Maritimes shipping-lines, and a scattering of white bungalows, 18though not yet as numerous as those seen by Evelyn Waugh fifty years later, ‘spilt over the hillside like the litter of picnic-parties after Bank Holiday’.
As the boat prepares to dock it is surrounded by children paddling little dug-outs. They are mostly Somali, from the nearby coast of East Africa. They leap and dive and call out for coins: ‘Oh! Oh! Sixpence! À la mer, à la mer!’
A cast-iron jetty leads him to the quayside. The heat is intense: 40° is normal at this time of year. The boat’s arrival has brought people out from the shade: Somali porters, Yemeni hawkers, sun-ripened English subalterns in scout-master shorts. In the customs shed, under a tin roof, he completes certain formalities.
He dislikes customs men: their pipes clenched between their teeth, their axes and knives, their dogs on the leash.
On the other side there are cabbies waiting, also Somalis, with their little horse-drawn carriages, or gharries, which another French visitor compares to American stagecoaches. His destination is close by; he is heading for the Grand Hotel, one of two French-run hotels in the colony. Its signboard, painted in letters two metres high, is visible from the wharf: GRAND HOTEL DE L’UNIVERS. This improbably cosmic name brings a momentary reminiscence of his home town, Charleville, and of a certain Café de l’Univers up by the railway station, the scene of all those drunken declamatory evenings with Delahaye, with Izambard, with …
But their names mean little to him now.
He is heading for the Grand because he has a contact there. Back up the coast, at Hodeidah, laid out with the fever, he was befriended by a French trader, one Trébuchet, an agent for the Marseille company of Morand & Fabre. Trébuchet has friends in Aden, furnishes him with letters of introduction. One is to a certain Colonel Dubar, currently employed in the coffee business. The other is to Jules Suel, the owner of the Grand Hotel.
The hotel is a long, low building set back from the sea. It stands on a curving street named Prince of Wales Crescent in honour of a royal visit in 1874. The frontage stretches for thirty metres, 19stone-built arcades on the ground floor, small wooden rooms with latticed shutters all along the first: an Indian architectural style fairly common here. To the right of the entrance is the dining room, à la terrasse, open to the meagre sea-breeze. To the left is the hotel shop, full of exotic souvenirs – leopard skins, oryx horns, ostrich feathers, Danakil swords, Bombay silk, Turkish delight. Behind rise the hills of scalded, dun-coloured rock that glare down on every corner of Aden, on every day that is spent here.
He climbs the broad, flint-block steps and disappears into the shadows of the vestibule.
* * *
This brief episode took place more than a century ago. There are no living witnesses, and it was anyway quite unremarkable. Or rather, what is remarkable about it only becomes apparent with hindsight.
The scene I am describing is the arrival in Aden of the poet Arthur Rimbaud (or as one should certainly call him by this stage, though still only twenty-five years old, the former poet Arthur Rimbaud). My account owes something to a visit I made to Aden in 1991, on the centenary of Rimbaud’s death, but mostly it derives from documentary sources. The bare facts can be gathered from one of Rimbaud’s letters, and from the memoirs of the coffee-trader Alfred Bardey, who was shortly to meet him and to become his employer. The surroundings are based on old photographs and descriptions of Aden. The suitcase can be seen at the Musée Rimbaud in Charleville-Mézières, his birthplace in the French Ardennes. The unsettling blue eyes are described by the poet Verlaine, who had looked into them often enough.
It is not, of course, a definitive account: it is more like some scratchy old home-movie. The faces around him have blurred. There are jump-cuts due to lack of information. There are guesses. The shadows of the vestibule are an area of blackness in an old photograph.
And then there are his poems, and the use one is entitled to make of them. I do not really know that Rimbaud disliked customs 20men. One might suppose so from his poem ‘Customs Men’, which according to his friend Delahaye recorded a run-in with the customs in Belgium, but a poem is not exactly an opinion, so this too is a guess. This is expressly not a book about Rimbaud the poet, but it is hard to resist using his poetry as a kind of buried interior voice: a body of images and recollections and sometimes of strangely prophetic announcements, as if he had dreamed all this up long before.
These are caveats I should enter right away. Rimbaud’s African years, which are the subject of this book, and which I take to begin here with his arrival at Aden in 1880, are full of these illegible shadows. Little has been written about them and, for some periods at least, little is known about them. The sources mentioned above – letters, memoirs, etc. – are tantalizingly thin. The visual record is almost non-existent: a handful of photographs – five at the latest count – including three self-portraits, taken within a few days of one another in April or May 1883.
These are, in the biographical convention, Rimbaud’s ‘lost years’. That is their fascination, and their difficulty.
* * *
Steamer Point today retains that imperturbable British stamp which it doubtless had then, though it is now a quarter of a century since the British pulled out of Aden. You are certainly in Arabia – men in turbans and skirts, goats browsing in vacant lots, hot gusts of grit blowing up off the street – but you are also in this odd little enclave of fossilized Britishness. The port building itself is dated 1919. It is not the tin-roofed one that Rimbaud came through. It is built of grey flintstone, in Victorian neo-Classical style: a displaced town hall or public library. The road curves away from it like some half-remembered high street from the Fifties: a clock-tower, a tin signboard advertising Craven A cigarettes, a triangular traffic sign on a striped metal pole.
In a bookshop there are old postcards, with tinted photographs and ‘Greetings from Aden’ on a background of cake-tin tartan. 21Vintage issues of Photoplay are stacked on a table. My Adeni guide, Mustapha, is transfixed by a still from One Million Years BC– Raquel Welch in a mammoth-skin bikini.
I scented the past easily enough in Aden, but it was often a nostalgic whiff of my own teenage years rather than a glimpse back to Rimbaud’s Aden. This seemed appropriate in a way, but was it history? (Appropriate because Rimbaud is a quintessentially teenage poet, a ‘god of adolescence’ as André Breton put it; appropriate because I was a teenager when he first impinged on me via the songs of Bob Dylan; and perhaps also appropriate because it is in teenage, roughly speaking, that one is supposed to grow out of this business of having heroes…)
From Steamer Point we head off in search of the Grand Hotel, neither by foot nor by gharry, but in the Mitsubishi Galant of Mustapha’s friend Ahmed. Mustapha sits in the passenger seat, twisting round to talk, gold Rolex and amber worry-beads to the fore. The area north of Steamer Point is known as Tawahi, once a fishing village, now a coastal suburb. We arrive at the Crescent, the former Prince of Wales Crescent. The royal name has dropped off the address: an atrophied part of Aden’s long history. This used to be a thriving Jewish quarter, Mustapha says. They had all the concessions – ‘Rolex, Pentax, you name it’ – but now they have closed down. We see an empty building once called the Tip Top Annexe. This puts me in mind of my uncle, whose chequered career included a stint as a British Forces disc-jockey in Aden.
The Grand itself has also closed down, though it was still in business when Evelyn Waugh came here in late 1930, having covered for The Times the coronation of Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa. It was, he complained, ‘as expensive as Torr’s in Nairobi’. He left this piquant description of it:
The food has only two flavours – tomato ketchup and Worcestershire sauce; the bathroom consists of a cubicle in which a tin can is suspended on a rope; there is a nozzle at the bottom of the can encrusted with stalactites of green 22slime; the bather stands on the slippery cement floor and pulls a string releasing a jet of water over his head and back; for a heavy extra charge it is possible, with due notice, to have the water warmed; the hall-porter has marked criminal tendencies; the terrace is infected by money-changers. The only compensating luxury is a seedy, stuffed sea-animal, unmistakably male, which is kept in a chest and solemnly exhibited – on payment – as a mermaid.
The Crescent is recognizably crescent-shaped, but has lost its sea-view and become a sleepy side-street. The Grand was certainly here, but Mustapha is unsure exactly where. We kerb-crawl up the street, looking for clues from the old photograph.
‘I think it was this one,’ he says, pointing into a shambolic apartment-block probably dating from the 1950s. ‘Look, you can see the old lift.’
It took a while to pinpoint it, but there it undoubtedly was – the eleven arcades, the little shuttered windows on the first floor, the squat building on the hill above. The signboard above the entrance has gone, but I can see the nails which once held it. The Grand Hotel of the Universe has fallen on hard times. The masonry has crumbled, the lattice-work has rotted, the arcades are boarded up, but the main entrance is still open, grand in size at least. Three steps up, this leads into a tall passageway, with a sign at the end, just discernible in the sudden interior darkness: ‘SMART TAILORS – Tailors & Drapers’. The shadows of the vestibule turn out to be real shadows after all.
The place has been split into tenements. What had once been a garden behind is also filled with shack-housing. The only interior trace of its former life is a broad wooden staircase, with the remains of its banister, though after the first turn this too is closed off with panels of wood and tin.
Another, smaller staircase leads to the upper rooms, in one of which Rimbaud probably stayed on this first day, and one of which he certainly used as a base a few years later.23
Mustapha has melted away, as he tends to when my inquisitiveness crosses certain bounds. Having little Arabic other than courtesies, I wander round like a lost sightseer, brandishing my old photo of the Grand. The name of Rimbaud elicits no response other than the customary confusion with Rambo. (This confusion pursued me throughout my researches in these countries, where the bandannaed psychopath is still very popular. I soon took to describing Rimbaud as the ‘real Rambo’, or the ‘original Rambo’, which earned him a certain vicarious admiration.)
A young man invites me into one of the tenements. His wife stands in the front room, bows in greeting. The room is bright with linoleum, coloured glass, plastic flowers, a three-piece suite in orange plastic. A radio plays one of those racing Arab laments to the tune of an oud.
There is a smaller, barer room partitioned off: a mattress, a few piles of cloth or garments, the wooden walls shed-like, painted with a chalky blue wash.
I lean out of the window: Mustapha and Ahmed lounging against the flank of the Galant, yawning in unison.
Mustapha calls up, ‘What’s it like?’
‘It’s someone’s home.’
Perhaps this was once Rimbaud’s room. Who knows? Does it really matter if it was here, or somewhere down the corridor? Probably not. In coming to Aden I had hoped to find some clue to these ‘lost years’ of Rimbaud’s life, had hoped perhaps to find some moment of empathy of the kind he himself expressed in his prose-poem ‘Bad Blood’:
I visited the inns and flophouses he had hallowed with his presence. I saw with his eyes the blue sky and the busy, flowering fields. In cities I sniffed out his destiny.
He is talking of his early fascination with the figure of the criminal, but could not I also ‘sniff out’ the runaway poet’s destiny in his old haunts in Aden and Africa?24
Standing in that little cubicle at the Grand it was another of his lines that came to mind, one of his mysterious pronouncements: ‘You follow the red road and it leads you to the empty inn.’ The Grand Hotel was the first of many such ‘empty inns’ I would visit. There are no ghosts here, no jolts of recognition, no physical traces. There may be a neatly carved ‘A.R. 1880’ on some obscured wainscot, but I doubt it. This is just an old address. One comes here, perhaps, not so much to take something from the place, as to bring something back to it.
* * *
Jules Suel, the suave and genial manager of the Grand, was known to all the Europeans in the colony. He was a tall man in his late forties, an old hand. Alfred Bardey describes him as ‘alert’, a quality implicitly contrasted with the lassitude which overtook so many in Aden. He wore, Bardey notes, ‘the colonial costume, which consists of trousers and jacket of thin white cotton, canvas shoes, and a very thick but light helmet’. The latter is presumably the pith sun-hat generally known as a ‘topee’. This faintly comic headgear, it should be noted, was never Rimbaud’s style.
So let us guess once more. Let us imagine Monsieur Suel seated among compatriots and customers on the hotel terrace. He rises to greet the new arrival, the young man with the burning blue eyes, the bringer of salutations from Trébuchet.
The young man’s name is familiar to him, but not in the way it is to us. It is familiar to him simply because there is another Monsieur Rimbaud already in Aden. He appears on the records as ‘J.-B. Rimbaud’ – perhaps Jean-Baptiste – and is described as a ‘driver’ working for the Aden branch of the Messageries Maritimes. Rimbaud will later complain of letters being misdirected to this namesake, and of the ten centimes surcharge this incurs.
It is the wonderful anonymity of it which catches my fancy. Rimbaud is at this moment a complete unknown. That is the keynote of the scene: what Suel does not know about him. He does not know that this young man is somewhat famous: a poet of the 25kind soon to be styled poètes maudits, the cursed or outcast poets; a cult figure at the least, infamous if not yet quite famous. He does not see before him the revolutionary author of A Season in Hell and the Illuminations; the brutal young man who commandeered and ultimately wrecked the life of his fellow poet Paul Verlaine; the preacher of ‘a long, immense and systematic derangement of the senses’; the smoker of hashish and drinker of absinthe:
Like a most delicate and diaphanous garment is the drunkenness you get from this sage-bush of the glaciers, this absomphe. But then afterwards to lie down in the shit.
All that is forgotten now: the poems, the debauches, ‘those fine games I played with madness’. Not the least extraordinary thing about Rimbaud’s poetry is that almost all of it is teenage poetry. He wrote nothing, as far as is known, after 1875. ‘No more words! I bury the dead in my belly.’ For others, though, his fame was just beginning. News of it would one day reach him out here, but when asked about these poems that were causing such a stir back in Paris, he just growled that they were ‘rinçures’ – slops, dregs, leavings – and abruptly changed the subject.
His unendorsed fame has continued to grow. By the time of his death in 1891 he was already hailed as a ‘Master’ by the Symbolists and Decadents of fin-de-siècle Paris, and he has continued to be acknowledged – and to some extent reinvented – by every significant modernist movement from the Surrealists to the Beats. That he was a ‘major’ poet does not need to be argued here. His influence is acknowledged by a whole gamut of writers: a selective list would include Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Claudel, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, Albert Camus, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and Patti Smith – not to mention chansonniers like Jacques Brel and Leo Ferré, and film-makers like Jean-Luc Godard, and the footballer Eric Cantona. For me he was well summed up by an elderly schoolteacher on a train near Charleville, who told me that she hadn’t read any 26Rimbaud, and didn’t much like the sound of him, but that he was after all ‘le premier des poètes modernes’ – the first modern poet.
But for now he is safe, unknown, literature-free. No one on the terrace at the Grand that day would describe him, as Verlaine once did, as having ‘the perfectly oval face of an angel in exile’. They see the serious-looking moustache; the flecks of grey hair on a man still young; the big, work-roughened hands. They see also, perhaps, the scar of a gunshot wound on his left wrist.
But they do not ask. Your past is your own affair: that is the law in these cross-road towns.
The only actual description of him around this time is from Alfred Bardey, who met him a few weeks later. He simply says that he found him ‘sympathique’ – nice! – and describes him as a ‘tall, pleasant young man who speaks little, and accompanies his brief comments with odd little cutting gestures with his right hand’. More piquantly, Bardey also records that when asked which part of France he was from, Rimbaud replied that he came from Dole. This was a lie. Dole, in the Jura region, was actually his father’s birthplace. Bardey did not learn the truth, that Rimbaud was an Ardennais from Charleville, till some while later.
Standing in front of the bricked-up arcades of the Grand, I try to see him as they would have seen him. He is really nothing special: a down-at-heel young Frenchman, a bit of a drifter. He is taciturn but seems nice enough; he is no relation to Rimbaud of the Messageries.
He is another Monsieur Rimbaud.
* * *
So begins, with these casual yet complex anonymities, the story of Rimbaud’s African years. They have a fascination of their own – a life of dangers and discomforts, a life on the edge of the unknown – but even more they fascinate in their contrast with what went before them. They are remarkable because of who he was and because of what he left behind him. They are, in a sense, defined by what he was trying to escape from. I suppose this is a comment on our own 27priorities. We would not really be interested in this obscure French trader had he not previously been a remarkable French poet. We cannot allow him this anonymity he seeks. We know, as Suel and Bardey and the rest did not, who this young stranger is.
Yet also this moment of anonymity is entirely typical of Rimbaud, is classically Rimbaldien or Rimbaudish, because his whole life is a story of departures and flights, of disappearances and reappearances. His abandonment of poetry was only the most famous, the most regretted, of his departures. He is on the move, in transit, always turning up somewhere new, always the stranger:
Seen enough: viewed all these scenes in every possible light.
Had enough: the sounds of the city at evening, or in the sunlight, or any time.
Known enough. The haltings of life; the sounds and the visions.
Setting out for new feelings, new noises. [‘Departure’]
In this sense his African years are not, as they are often taken to be, some long blank coda at the end of a brief and brilliant career, but an expression of something that was always there, in his life and in his poems and in his desire to tear them up afterwards.
In his stirring teenage manifesto of 1871, generally called the Lettre du Voyant (‘The Seer’s Letter’), he makes his famous, syntactically improbable pronouncement: ‘Je est un autre’.
I is somebody else …
He was speaking of the transforming powers of the imagination, of poetry as a kind of latter-day shamanism, but I hear this phrase echoing on throughout his driven, restless, nomadic life. He is a man on the run. He has turned his back on family and friends, on the comforts of home, on his own brilliant future as a poet. He has broken the ties which bind the rest us, the ties which most of us are, sooner or later, glad to be bound by. He has seen enough and known enough; he is out in the wilderness of Africa, ‘far from everywhere’, hurrying on towards that last, impossible freedom, which is to lose yourself, to become somebody else entirely.28
We are close here to ideas of Africa explored by Conrad in works like Heart of Darkness: ideas of severance from ‘civilized’ norms, of disappearance and loss of self, of hard-bitten heroes who have ‘refined away everything except disgust’. The connection between Rimbaud and Conrad is chronological rather than literary. Conrad’s years of roving, in Africa and elsewhere, are contemporary with Rimbaud’s – indeed they began, like so many of Rimbaud’s journeys, aboard a French vessel out of Marseille – but he did not actually begin writing until the mid-1890s, by which time Rimbaud was dead. It should also be noted that Conrad’s terrain is the dark, steamy, profuse interior of equatorial Africa, whereas Rimbaud’s is the dazzle of East African deserts and mountains: not a darkness but an emptiness, a silence.
Piecing together the story of Rimbaud’s African years, one starts to see it as a sort of existential adventure which has in itself a certain poetry. The French have a phrase (they always do) – l’oeuvre-vie: the ‘work of life’, as opposed to the work of art. It might be argued, in other words, that Rimbaud’s life of adventure and wandering in Africa was actually his masterpiece. ‘After the poetry of the word, the poetry of action’ (Giuseppe Raimondi, ‘Rimbaud Mercante in Africa’).
To see it in this sort of way is not to deny more down-to-earth explanations – that he could never settle down because emotionally damaged, frozen-up inside, unable to form a stable relationship, and so on. This is probably true, but it is rather like saying that Hamlet was a bit of a worrier. It is a question of scale, of extremity. This is a human story, but there is also an archetypal or legendary aspect to Rimbaud, which radiates out of his poetry, which magnifies his gestures and loads his curtest utterances.
One tries in a way to mediate between these two Rimbauds: between the damaged young man and the existentialist hero; between je and l’autre. I do not know if it is possible to become ‘somebody else’. The upshot of Rimbaud’s story is probably that it isn’t, at least not by physically walking out on yourself. It is a restlessness in the heart, an impossible desire: one which all travellers in some measure feel, and which Rimbaud comes dangerously near to achieving. He sums it up succinctly in Season in Hell:29
Does he have the secrets for changing life? No, I told myself he is only searching for them …
I begin with an account of his earlier years. They have been exhaustively studied already, unlike the African years, but some idea of them is essential to the story. They are the prelude to this August day in Aden – the route that has brought him here, the bridges he has burned, the past he does not choose to speak of.
Postscript
In 2010, nearly twenty years after I was searching for them in that empty inn, the ghosts appeared – six men and one woman, snapped by a photographer on the terrace of the Grand Hôtel de l’Univers in August 1880, among them a young man with a thin moustache who is very plausibly (if not quite incontestably) the newly arrived Arthur Rimbaud.
The photograph was discovered by two Paris book dealers, Jacques Desse and Alban Caussé. Desse relates its unpromising provenance: a carton of books and documents, ‘such as we see every day’, on sale in a second-hand-book market. The books were of little value but some old photographs attracted their attention – scenes of nineteenth-century Aden: ‘a nice change from the sempiternal views of Rome’. And so, on the kind of inspired whim which often leads to historic discoveries, they bought the lot.
Sifting through the box’s miscellaneous contents, they found two general views of the Grand Hotel at different stages of its development; a photograph inscribed to the hotel’s proprietor, Jules Suel; a note, also addressed to Suel, written by Alfred Bardey. What they had here, it soon became clear, was a small archive of memorabilia formerly belonging to Suel, who had died without issue in 1898. And so a possibility dawned. They were not Rimbaud experts but they knew his story, knew they were circumstantially close to him – the hotel he stayed at; the hotelier he knew; the coffee-merchant Bardey who employed him.
A small group portrait, 9.6 x 13.6 cm, in parts somewhat bleached and blurred, soon caught their eye. It had no inscription or date, but 30the location was certainly the Grand: the group is disposed in a vague semi-circle in front of the hotel’s main entrance; the flint-block steps are clearly visible below them. Who were these people? And, more particularly, who was that man second from the right, in a loose white shirt, his right elbow resting on a table, his expression seeming rather distrait – bored, dreamy, somehow dulled – until one sees the cold eye staring intently into the lens?
This was in 2008. Two years of ‘systematic enquiry’ would follow before the publication and exhibition of the photograph. ‘Little by little the veil was lifted.’
The photographer is identified beyond reasonable doubt as Georges Révoil, who produced hundreds of images of Aden and the Horn of Africa in the 1880s. The photograph was produced using the new gelatin-silver bromide process developed in the late 1870s. An invoice shows that Révoil purchased materials for this process in the summer of 1880, shortly before embarking on the voyage to East Africa which resulted in his book, La Vallée du Darror (1882), illustrated with photographs of ‘types, scenes, landscapes and panoramas’ of the region. He travelled out of Marseille on a Messageries Maritimes steamer, the Pei-Ho, which docked at Steamer Point on 7 August 1880. This is the earliest possible date, the terminus post quem, for the photograph.
The taller of the two standing figures in the group, with the arrogant good looks of a Latin matinée idol, is a French explorer, Henri Lucereau, then thirty years old. His presence gives further dating evidence, for in August 1880 Lucereau left Aden in search of the source of the Sobat, a tributary of the Blue Nile; he died on this expedition two months later. The last record of him in Aden is a letter dated 18 August. The previous day Rimbaud had written to his family in France, describing his arrival in Aden and his engagement as a foreman in Bardey’s coffee warehouse. This gathering on the terrace of the Grand is thus tightly corralled into a couple of weeks in August 1880 when Rimbaud was certainly present in Aden.
Only two others in the group are identified with certainty. The man standing next to Lucereau is Édouard-Joseph Bidault de 31Glatigné, a photographer who had been in Aden since about 1878; he will later stay at Rimbaud’s house in Harar, where a fellow-trader refers to ‘Bidault et son ami Rimbaud’. He gazes across at the woman sitting at the edge of the group – his wife, Emilie Augustine née Porte, the step-daughter of Charles Nedey, the manager of Aden’s other French-run hotel, the Hôtel d’Europe. She is six months pregnant. The marriage will not last; her second husband was a Swiss-Italian trader and explorer, Pietro Felter, also known to Rimbaud in the later 1880s. The central figure, sporting that odd checkered outfit which has earned him the alias of ‘Pyjama’, remains elusive. It could be our genial host, Jules Suel, though there are no certain portraits of him in anything but long-shot, where he looks taller and a lot suaver. Or possibly it is Bardey’s second-in-command, Colonel François-Aimable Dubar, who hired Rimbaud sometime before 16 August (and who was also Suel’s brother-in-law).
The researches of Desse, Caussé, Jean-Jacques Lefrère and others offer a detailed context for Rimbaud’s presence in this picture – the right place, the right time, the right people – but in the highly combative world of Rimbaud studies the identification remains controversial. Does he actually look like Rimbaud? Isn’t he too round-faced, too clean-cut, too bland? (One doubter describes him as ce gueule de con – ‘a bit of a prat’ would be one of the politer translations of this phrase.) I think we can allow Rimbaud this momentary guise of blandness, some of which is, anyway, a photographic guise: the face is blanched through over-exposure and also slightly blurred (the blur, probably due to a jogging of the photographic plate, is particularly noticeable over the checkered chest of ‘Pyjama’). This evasive young man, half-concealed behind the comfortable contours of Madame Bidault, seems to me just right for the ghost of Rimbaud at the Grand. He does not quite belong where he finds himself; he does not quite look how I expected him to; he does not wish to be troubled with further enquiries.
PART ONE
The Runaway
‘We will sleep on the pavements of unknown cities, without comforts, without cares …’
A Season in Hell, ‘Delirium I’
1
Desertions
Jean-nicolas arthur rimbaud was born in the handsome but lugubrious Northern French town of Charleville, at six o’clock in the morning, on 20 October 1854. His birthplace on rue Thiers (then rue Napoléon) is a modest three-storey town house. A rather soulless modern bookshop, part of the ‘France Loisir’ chain, now occupies the ground floor.
He was the second son of an army captain, Frédéric Rimbaud, and Vitalie née Cuif, a local farmer’s daughter. His father, aged forty, was absent at the time of his birth, and would be absent for much of his infancy, and would desert the family for good in 1860, when Arthur was six. His father was all but unknown to him: a faint gallery of childhood images. In the infamous Album Zutique, composed with drunken friends in Paris in 1871, Rimbaud writes:
Sometimes I thought about my father: in the evening, the game of cards and the talk getting dirty, and the neighbour round, and me being told to go away; and the things seen – for a father is scary – and the things dreamt-of; his knee on which he would sometimes cuddle me; his trousers whose flies my finger wished to open…
The absent father: there has been no lack of psychologizing on this theme. The flight of Rimbaud père prefiguring Rimbaud’s own relentless wanderings; those wanderings in themselves a kind of covert search for that missing man. He told Bardey he was from 36Dole: free to invent his own biography he substitutes his father’s. On another occasion – another lie – he claimed to have ‘recently deserted from the 47th regiment of the French Army’. This was the regiment of his father, the original deserter.
His father had served in Algeria, first as a soldier and then an administrator. (He was head of the ‘Arab Bureau’ at Sebdou, near Oran.) He was something of a scholar of Arabic: in this too Rimbaud followed him. He left behind certain ‘Arab papers’ which remained in the family, and which Rimbaud refers to in a letter from Africa:
Tell F to look in the Arab papers for a notebook entitled ‘Jokes, Puns, etc.’ in Arabic; there should also be a collection of ‘Dialogues’, or ‘Songs’, or something of that sort, useful for someone learning the language. [15 February 1881]
‘F’ is Frédéric, the elder brother, named after the father. Never much liked by the younger, wilder Arthur, he lived out his days in provincial obscurity, finally becoming a bus driver.
Rimbaud’s childhood was spent with his mother and Frédéric, and his two younger sisters, Vitalie and Isabelle. In 1860 – the year of Isabelle’s birth, the year of the father’s last desertion – they moved to rented accommodation on rue Bourbon, in one of the poorer quarters of Charleville. This was the lowest point of their social standing.
In an autobiographical poem entitled ‘Seven-year-old Poets’, written in May 1871, Rimbaud evokes this sombre chapter of his childhood – the shabby, depressing town house; the little garden out back with its scabbed fruits en espalier; the chill of his bedroom, ‘a bare room, tall and blue, with the shutters closed, and the sour smell of damp over everything’. Amid these gloomy oppressions come the first awakenings of rebellion and poetry and sex:
And the Mother, closing up the exercise book, went off well pleased and very proud, without seeing in the blue eyes beneath the pimpled forehead that the soul of her son was filled with revulsion.37
All day he sweated obedience; such a bright child, except for those little dark tics, something you’d glimpse in him which suggested certain bitter hypocrisies. In the shadow of the corridors with their mouldy hangings he stuck out his tongue as he passed, and pressed his two fists into his crotch, and in his closed eyes saw spots …
In the summertime, defeated, stupefied, he liked nothing better than to shut himself up in the cool of the privy. There he meditated, at peace, with his nostrils opened wide …
For company he chose only those children who were sickly and bare-headed, whose eyes watered all down their cheeks, who hid their thin, yellow, mud-darkened fingers underneath worn-out clothes that smelt of diarrhoea, who spoke with the gentleness of idiots. When the Mother found out these filthy sympathies, she took fright…
Then the daughter of the workers next door came over: crazy girl, brown eyes, wearing a calico dress. She was eight years old. This little wild-cat got him in a corner, and jumped on his back, and pulled his hair. He was underneath her. He bit her on the bottom – she never wore any knickers – and bruised by her fists and her heels he took away the taste of her flesh to his room.
The baleful presence of his mother is an obsessive theme. She was a peasant’s daughter, proud, strict, rigid, with fierce if limited ambitions for her children. There is a sketch of her by Rimbaud, aggressively scribbled. She is long-faced, hair scraped back and partly covered with a headscarf, dress tightly fastened across her bosom; she is writing a letter. In ‘An Old Idiot’s Memories’ (from the Album Zutique) we hear her climb ‘noisily into bed, like some labourer’s son’. Her nightdress is ‘frayed at the bottom and yellow like a fruit’ and ‘exudes a sour smell’.
To his poetic cronies she was the overbearing ‘Mère Rimbe’, or ‘La Daromphe’ (a formation from the slang word for a mother, daronne). Rimbaud styled her ‘La Mother’ – ‘La Mother m’a mis 38là dans un triste trou’, he wrote to his friend Delahaye, the ‘sad hole’ being his home, and she his gaoler there. Another phrase he used was ‘La Bouche d’Ombre’ – the Mouth of Shadow – an ironic borrowing from a poem by Victor Hugo.
One can certainly sympathize with Mme Rimbaud, a single mother with four children to care for, but one cannot quite forgive her: Rimbaud’s childhood was cold, loveless, traumatic. His mother’s ‘inconscience’, said his friend Izambard – her sheer unawareness of her son – was ‘quite extraordinary’.
And yet it is to La Mother that the vast majority of his letters from Africa are written (they are usually addressed to the whole family – to his ‘dear friends’ is the typical phrasing – but it is to his mother that they speak). It is as if that rage against her could only be healed at this great distance. It is also an irony of these letters that at his most exotic and far-flung, Rimbaud is most like the good Ardennais peasant she wanted him to be, with his constant talk of money and work, of profit and loss. He has learned how to please her. (This aspect of his letters home – this residue of deep family tension – has to be taken into account when using them as a documentary source. They are a narrow window onto his life in Africa.)
The psychologist might take this further, and find in this rejecting mother – as in the vanishing father – another deep-seated clue to the mystery of Rimbaud’s African adventure. In Love, Guilt and Reparation (1975), the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein writes of explorers:
It has been found that phantasies of exploring the mother’s body, which arise out of the child’s aggressive sexual desires, greed, curiosity and love, contribute to the man’s interest in exploring new countries … In the explorer’s unconscious mind, a new territory stands for a new mother, one that will replace the loss of the real mother. He is seeking the ‘promised land’, the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’.
* * *
39In 1862 the family moved to more salubrious surroundings. In 1863 our first picture of Arthur, aged nine, chubby and serious, in a row of schoolchildren. Another, a couple of years later, shows him at his first communion, next to Frédéric, an image which reminds me once again of ‘Seven-year-old Poets’:
He feared those washed-out Sundays in December, when he sat with his hair slicked down, on a stool of acajou wood, reading from a Bible whose pages had cabbage-green edges.
In 1865 he is enrolled at the Collège de Charleville. He is a star pupil. ‘Tu vatis eris,’ he writes, in the course of one of his prize-winning Latin compositions. ‘You will be a poet …’
At college he forms the two most important friendships of his youth: with his fellow pupil, Ernest Delahaye; and then, early in 1870, with his twenty-one-year-old schoolteacher, Georges Izambard. They would later be deserted, as was everyone, but their intimate knowledge of Rimbaud’s youth (Delahaye over many years, Izambard over just nine months) is the raw stuff of future biographies.
In 1870, aged fifteen, Rimbaud’s first publications, in magazines: ‘The Orphans’ New Year Gifts’ and ‘Three Kisses’ (later retitled ‘The First Evening’). This is a time of change, of adolescent frustrations, of dreadful clashes with La Mother. Charleville, he tells Izambard, ‘is the most supremely idiotic of all little provincial towns’.
On 19 July 1870 the Franco-Prussian War is declared. The conflict laps around northerly Charleville: soldier boys (pioupious) in the streets, jingoism in the air. The adolescent responds cynically:
A dreadful sight: aged grocers dressed up in uniform. It’s amazing how they leap into action, the notaries and glaziers and taxmen and carpenters, all the fat-bellies patrolling round the gates of Mézières with their breechloaders up against their hearts. My country rises up!! Personally I’d prefer it to stay sitting down. Don’t stir your shoes – that’s my motto. [25 August 1870]
40The Empire totters, there is revolution in the air – but not here, not in Charleville, ‘this province where the people feed on flour and mud’. And so Rimbaud runs away, to Paris: la première fugue, the first escape, at the age of fifteen. ‘Paris hypnotized him,’ Izambard said. The date was 29 August 1870.
* * *
The direct railway line to Paris was no longer open, so he travels north, across the Belgian border to Charleroi. The small sum of money in his pocket (the result of having sold off some of Izambard’s books) is soon exhausted; he travels by train from Saint-Quentin to Paris without a ticket.
On 31 August, arriving at the Gare du Nord, he is arrested. Izambard narrates as follows:
He went to see a revolution. But he didn’t see it, having no ticket to show. Picked up by two policemen, he was taken down to the station, thoroughly frisked, deprived of his papers – suspicious papers, covered with those hieroglyphics in uneven lines – taken for a thief, for a spy, for anything except what he said he was, and finally banged up in the Black Maria [le panier à salade, or salad-basket] and thence – don’t spare the horses! – to Mazas.
Mazas prison (on what is now rue Diderot) was a notorious hole, full of dangerous criminals. He is a penniless teenage truant in a wartime city. ‘He tries to explain everything, but is not heard, is not understood, this being no time for musicians or rimesters.’
The stirring revolutionary poem ‘You Dead of Ninety-Two’ is inscribed ‘done at Mazas, 3 September 1870’ (in fact it was probably copied or rewritten there: according to Izambard it had been written some weeks earlier). On 4 September, the Empire collapses; the Republic is proclaimed. In Paris the crowd surges around the Hôtel de Ville. Rimbaud is behind bars and sees none of this.41
On the 5th, a chastened Arthur writes in desperation to Izambard: ‘Today I’m awaiting the verdict in Mazas. Oh, my hope rests in you, as in my mother … I have loved you as a brother and will love you as a father.’
The liberal, myopic and somewhat exasperated schoolteacher Izambard bails him out, pays the thirteen francs owed to the railway company, and invites Rimbaud to cool his heels in Douai with him and his three ‘aunts’ (so Izambard calls them: he had been brought up in their family after the death of his mother), the Misses Gindre, who are very sympathiques and not a little érotiques, and who are very probably the attentive ladies celebrated in Rimbaud’s gorgeous poem, ‘The Seekers of Lice’, in which ‘two tall and charming sisters’ seat a boy beside an open window and browse through his hair with their ‘silvery fingernails’. (Izambard himself believed they were the Gindres: on a folder of letters he wrote: ‘Caroline: La Chercheuse de Poux’. Caroline was the eldest of the three tantes: she was about thirty-eight when Rimbaud was there.) Their fingers run through his heavy chestnut-coloured hair, removing the lice he has brought from the Paris jailhouse:
He hears their black eyelashes beating in the perfumed silence, and their soft electric fingers make the little lice crackle as they die beneath their regal nails, and in the midst of this misty indolence there is the wine of idleness coursing through him, and the sigh of a harmonica which might just send him mad, and inside him the boy feels, ceaselessly rising and falling to the rhythm of their slow caresses, a desire to weep.
On 26 September he returns to Charleville, summoned by La Mother. For a few days he kicks around in Charleville. ‘I am decomposing among platitudes and nastiness and greyness,’ he writes to Izambard. ‘Whatever you say, I am wildly determined to worship free freedom.’
La liberté libre… A key Rimbaud phrase, much heard on the streets of Paris during the événements of 1968.42
After about ten days back home, he is off again. ‘Hat on, coat on, a fist in each pocket, and let’s go.’ This time he travels on foot to Brussels via Fumay, Vireux, Charleroi. He knocks on schoolfriends’ doors, is sometimes fed and sheltered. He visits, and swiftly offends, the editor of a local newspaper. He dines on beer and ham at an auberge called Le Cabaret Vert, served by a flirty waitress ‘with enormous tits’. He commemorates the occasion in two sonnets. Scholars have confirmed the existence of this truck-stop (actually La Maison Verte), and even the name of the pneumatic waitress, a Flemish girl called Mia.
The hapless Izambard, summoned by Mme Rimbaud and clearly deemed culpable in the matter, sets off in pursuit. He follows Rimbaud’s footsteps, but he cannot catch up. He is the paradigm of all future biographers.
Rimbaud arrives in Brussels, presents himself at the house of a friend of Izambard’s, Paul Durand, on rue Fossé-aux-Loups, but by the time Izambard arrives there in search of him he has gone again. Yes, ‘little Rimbaud’ was here, Durand says. ‘He looked like he had walked for miles. He was dusty, muddy, his collar filthy, his necktie twisted.’
In mid-October Rimbaud arrives once more on the doorstep of the bewitching tantes in Douai. ‘It’s me,’ he says sweetly, ‘I’ve come back.’ Izambard, returning from his fruitless search, is astonished to find him there, calmly copying out his new poems, dressed up to the nines on the money that Durand had given him: ‘a fashionable collar with the corners clipped, a necktie of burnished silk: the effect was dazzling; a real dandy.’
On this second stay with the Gindre sisters Rimbaud completed the ‘Douai Notebooks’, essentially his first collection of poems (though never published as such). This he sends to the poet Paul Demeny, another acquaintance of Izambard. The cahiers contain twenty-two poems, among them such gems as ‘The Sleeper in the Valley’, ‘Winter Dream’ (written on a train on 7 October 1870), ‘At the Cabaret Vert’ and ‘The Tease’ (both written at Charleroi), ‘Nina’s Replies’ and ‘My Gypsy Life’. They have a wild sparkle but this is 43not yet the deranged poet of legend: Izambard calls them ‘those very clever, very refined, very strong and completely intelligible verses of his first period’. They are about sex and romance (much of it, perhaps, imagined), about life on the road in the last days of summer 1870, striding through the countryside with his fists thrust down into the torn pockets of his overcoat – ‘mon paletot aussi devenait idéal’: his coat was so lacking in substance it had become a Platonic ‘ideal’.
… My inn was the Great Bear,
My stars rustled like silk above me,
And I listened to them, sitting on the roadside,
On those sweet September nights when I felt
The drops of dew on my brow like strong wine,
And rhyming among the fantastic shadows,
I plucked like lyres the elastic
Of my wounded shoes, one foot close to my heart!
On 20 October he celebrates his sixteenth birthday.
He left Douai again at the end of the month; it was the last time Izambard saw him. Rimbaud passes through his life like a meteor: nine months of acquaintance, decades of reminiscence thereafter. As Alfred Bardey would say of Rimbaud in Aden, many years later: ‘I could no longer hold onto him’ – here in the commercial sense of retaining him – ‘any more than I could hold onto a shooting star.’
* * *
He ran away again early in 1871. The circumstances are shadowy, the mood rather different from those first truancies. It appears he made two brief excursions to Paris. The first was in February. He arrived at the Gare de Strasbourg (now the Gare de l’Est) on the 25th. The city was in a state of unrest, the government near collapse. The displaced of the war slept under bridges beside a frozen Seine. We know nothing of this trip except that the artist André Gill, 44whose address Rimbaud had got somehow, came home one night to find this unknown gamin asleep, fully clothed, on his bed. Gill (whose name is punningly remembered in the famous Montmartre cabaret, Le Lapin Agile) gave him ten francs and sent him on his way. He slept rough, ate out of dustbins, read pamphlets on the bookstalls, offered his own poems to the Librairie Artistique, and on 10 March, less than two weeks after his arrival, set off home on foot – a journey of 150 miles, lasting about a week.
It is perhaps this harsh journey that he remembers in the Season in Hell –
Those winter nights on the road, no shelter, no clothes, no bread, a voice clutched my frozen heart: ‘Weakness or strength? Of course, choose strength. You don’t know where you’re going, or why you’re going. Enter everywhere, respond to everything. They won’t kill you, any more than they’d kill a dead man.’ In the morning I looked so lost, my face so dead, I don’t think the people I met could even see me. In the cities the mud seemed to me suddenly red and black, like a mirror when the lamp sways in the next room, like treasure in the forest …
He was scarcely home before news came of the establishment of the Paris Commune on 18 March.
It is always said that Rimbaud took part in the Commune, but his involvement must have been brief. He was in Charleville on 17 April, and again on 13 May. The brutal suppression of the Commune by loyal troops began on 21 May and was mostly accomplished by the 28th – la semaine sanglante, the Week of Blood.
According to Delahaye, he walked to Paris in mid-April, and joined up with the franc-tireurs or ‘Irregulars of the Revolution’ who were based at the Babylone barracks. A hotchpotch of soldiers and adventurers had thrown in their lot with the insurgents. There were National Guard and Algerian zouaves and disgruntled infantrymen back from the front. Among them (this is again only from 45Delahaye) Rimbaud was befriended by a soldier in the 88th Infantry Regiment, of whom he afterwards spoke ‘with a tender sadness, thinking it certain he was shot during the Versaillais victory’.
Verlaine and others, including some later police reports, confirm the general belief that he was there, but add no details. Nor do Rimbaud’s overtly Communard poems – ‘The Hands of Jeanne-Marie’, ‘Paris Repopulated’, etc. – offer any biographical purchase (though ‘The Stolen Heart’ has been interpreted as referring to a violent episode at the Babylone barracks: I will look at this in the next chapter.) It is a curious lacuna: a formative experience of which he makes no mention in his letters, of which he leaves no actual record, only rumours and guesses.
These uncertainties have recently been clarified by new photographic evidence, which shows conclusively that Rimbaud returned to Paris sometime after 16 May. This was the day the Communards toppled the statue of Napoleon in the Place Vendôme. A picture taken by the early photo-journalist, Bruno Braquehais, shows the deposed statue lying ignominiously on the ground, and a straggle of men, in various types of uniform, standing around it. This is not the tumultuous day of the demolition, but shortly after it – the atmosphere is leisuredly; those present look more like sightseers than jubilant revolutionaries. And there, to the left of the picture, standing on the remains of the statue’s plinth, is Rimbaud. He is quite unmistakeable: the face, the mouth, the hair, the stony gaze. These can all be compared with the famous studio portrait by Carjat, taken five months later. He is the ‘irregular’ par excellence, kitted out in a zouave
