Verlaine Shoots Rimbaud | History Today

Absinthe. Libidinal sex. Symbolist poetry. It was too much for Paul Verlaine. In 1871 he was 27, married and about to become a father. He had, however, stopped writing poetry.

Then he met 17-year-old Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud, Verlaine thought, had ‘the face of an exiled angel’. The effect on him was cataclysmic. They blazed a debauched trail through Paris that even their bohemian friends found repellent. Verlaine’s wife Mathilde lived in fear of him for months; he attacked both her and their infant son in fits of drunken rage. Then he abandoned them. But at least he was writing again.

The poets moved, first to Brussels and then to London. By July 1873 they were back in Brussels. On 10 July Verlaine was at the Hotel Liégeois with his mother, and Rimbaud had had enough. Verlaine locked the bedroom door and pulled a gun. ‘I’ll teach you to leave!’ he said, pulling the trigger. The bullet hit Rimbaud’s wrist; Verlaine fled into his mother’s room and threw himself on her bed. He and his mother suggested Rimbaud stay with them; instead Rimbaud asked a policeman for help.

Verlaine spent two years in prison for the shooting. By the time he came out, it was Rimbaud who had stopped writing poetry. He never wrote again.