Rimbaud illuminations poems8/4/2023 ![]() ![]() The other volume was Les Illuminations, also represented by three copies of the first edition. One of three copies of Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer (1873) to be offered in the sale Three copies - one formerly owned by the poet Emile Verhaeren - are included in the Fischer sale (Lots 177-179, below). The rest were rediscovered in the printer’s warehouse in 1901. It was printed in Brussels in an edition of about 500 copies, with a cover-price of one franc, but Rimbaud, unable to pay the full costs, took away only a few to give to friends. Described as ‘a few dreadful pages torn from my notebook of the damned’, its fragmentary format and skittering, splenetic tone make it a key modernist text, though few people read it at the time. In part, the ‘hell’ he had passed through was the ruinous relationship with Verlaine. ![]() Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) was written and published in 1873. Only two volumes of Rimbaud’s poetry appeared in his lifetime, both mainly consisting of prose-poems. One of only 10 hors commerce copies of Jules Mouquet’s Rimbaud raconté par Paul Verlaine (1934) This infamous literary double-act has inspired various treatments - notably Christopher Hampton’s 1968 play Total Eclipse (filmed in 1995 with Leonardo di Caprio as Rimbaud and David Thewlis as Verlaine) - but for authenticity few sources can compare with Jules Mouquet’s Rimbaud raconté par Paul Verlaine (1934), a compendium of letters, drawings, dedications, articles, prefaces and police statements, of which the Fischer collection has one of 10 hors commerce copies printed on Japon paper. Despite Rimbaud’s refusal to press charges, Verlaine was sentenced to two years’ hard labour for criminal assault. The affair ended in 1873: a dreadful showdown in Brussels, where Verlaine drunkenly shot his tormentor, wounding him in the left wrist. Here, piquantly, they advertised in the columns of the Daily Telegraph as ‘deux gentlemen Parisiens’ offering lessons in French and Latin - though whether any would-be pupil ventured unwittingly into this demonic den is not known. They lived in dingy lodgings in Fitzrovia, in rooms described by Rimbaud as ‘full of dirty daylight and the noise of spiders’ - the giant plinth of the Post Office Tower now marks the site - and later on Great (now Royal) College Street in Camden Town. Verlaine, besotted, left his wife and infant son, and the pair went on the run to London. A friend of Verlaine’s, less than impressed, described him as ‘a tall, gawky young man, very thin, with the look of a rather fierce street Arab’. Rimbaud’s name is indissolubly linked with that of the Parisian poet Paul Verlaine, into whose life he barged in Montmartre in the late summer of 1871, bearing the manuscript of his great poem, Le Bateau Ivre. Rimbaud's erotic and typically anti-clerical story, Un Coeur sous une Soutane Inserted into the Fischer copy is a single sheet of notebook-paper containing the title in Rimbaud’s own schoolboy hand underneath the title he first wrote ‘Roman’ (novel), then altered it, more accurately, to ‘Nouvelle’ (short story). It dates from mid-1870, when Rimbaud was 15, though it remained unpublished until 1924. He also wrote a mischievously erotic and typically anti-clerical story called Un Coeur sous une Soutane (A Heart under a Cassock), and this little-known squib is the earliest of Rimbaud’s literary remains to be included in the Édouard-Henri Fischer collection (Lot 192, below), which is offered for sale by Christie’s in Paris on 4 November. Spells of teenage truancy produced the sparkling early poems of life on the road such as Ma Bohème and Au Cabaret-Vert. ![]() His schooldays were full of promise, but prize-winning Latin verses soon gave way to ostentatious rebellion and the carving of Merde à Dieu! on municipal benches. His father, a soldier, deserted the family when he was six, and he was brought up by his tough disciplinarian mother, Vitalie. Jean-Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was born in 1854 in the handsome but lugubrious Northern French town of Charleville in the Ardennes, close to the Belgian border. Since his death in 1891, at the age of 37, he has been acclaimed as a great pioneer of modernism, revered by Decadents, Surrealists and Beats, and by 1960s icons like Bob Dylan, who named him as his favourite poet, and Jim Morrison, who called him simply ‘The Master’. ![]()
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