In the garden we are glancing over those poems of 1872. We are imagining them. We think about their coming into this world for the first time, when a laundress’s hand gave birth to those light songs, almost popular, popular young girl songs, where the old alexandrine hums that it must die and cannot resign itself to doing so, becomes two distinct verses of six feet, but remains. And it seems as if Rimbaud’s heart is breaking in two as welclass="underline" perhaps he knows now that there is no Salvation by poetry, no Awards Day with God the Father in the role of subprefect, and your proud young mother in her Sunday dress sitting behind the potted plants of paradise. We can hear it all breaking, his heart, the verse. It is the echo of a very distant battle that reaches us, the joint defeats of a provincial childhood and the alexandrine. The alexandrine has chosen to die with this little bugle. They are together on the knoll on the evening of battle. The old flag has gone into battle too often, now it is in tatters; both legs blown off, the old general hesitates. In this hesitation, his heart beats; the drums grow fainter; collapsed against a tree, he thinks of his battles, Saint-Cyr, Guernsey, and that now he must die; perhaps that is what causes this breeze of childhood, of early morning under summer trees, to pass over him. That is what murmurs within the little paternoster; and it is sung in tune because it is the childhood of Rimbaud that dies with the old general. He is wearing the little artillery kepi. Into his bugle he sings himself hoarse. That is what rings so true, what equalizes everything, the evening of battle and its dawn, the little ant and Eternity, the deep well and the stars, as in the memory of a man about to die. That is what marries the seasons and the castles without fuss, as time and space do every day that God makes, without fuss, June rises on a bright facade, and then it is already December. It is almost dark. We are watching the comet. Our hands hang. In the garden we stop reading, a little wind passes through the hazel trees above — suddenly we know, as if the breeze were saying so, that the death of the alexandrine is no more important or true than the popular Vulgate, that simple story of two young men full of genius who loved each other and shot each other. It is another Vulgate, the one about the alexandrine, hardly less foolish than the one about clairvoyance, that we have concocted under our silk skullcaps for the attention of our peers. An absolutely modern Vulgate.
Under the hazel trees once again we hesitate; we no longer know; we abandon the letter, we close the little book again, we return to the flesh of the poet that we will not know; we will not see the laundress’s hand, without secret or clairvoyance or code, so simple, that sets down in a single line the seasons and the castles; nor the ardent patience and then suddenly the click, the exultant certainty of the hand that writes, leaves blank what must be blank, writes another short line, another one, stops, with certainty; we will never know if it is God or Baal who is making this hand move — and we pray that it is not Baal. If at that moment in the shade of the hazel trees we were permitted to see that hand as Verlaine saw it, and gradually above in the leaves the sulking face, the crooked tie, the tousled hair, if the mouth said merde, if more likely it was saying: read, extending toward us a poem with a begging, sullen, sovereign air, if before our eyes we read, we would know only what it is permitted to know on earth — what the ant knows who, without regard for the lines, is still running its way across my page, mute as the garden.
6. I RETURN TO THE GARE DE L’EST
I return to the gare de l’Est. I come back to those first days in Paris where perhaps for Rimbaud, it was all played out in three short acts: his immediate reputation as a very great poet, his keen awareness of the vanity of a reputation, and its devastation.
There was not only Verlaine. Because we know that in Paris in September from those first days Verlaine introduced him into the sort of cafés and caverns where, come evening, at marble tables, glorias steamed and pipes smoked, beers foamed, gazettes were opened, and behind beer glasses and gazettes in the paltry blue glow of gaslight, there were poets’ beards, poets’ poses, feigned impassibilities, feigned jokes, and poets’ eyes that watched you arriving from Charleville. And behind all those screens in the depths of those caverns, at the café de Madrid, the Rat Mort, Chez Battur, the Delta, in the thousand annexes of the Académie d’absinthe, there was something else that Rimbaud immediately recognized, more quickly perhaps than he recognized which glass held the gloria, which the absinthe: there, almost stuck to their skin, was the ultimate screen generating all the others and in which all the others, beards, gazettes and beers, originated, a kind of screen of opaque sulkiness. In Paris the poet was that multiple man who sulked.
And each of those sulky sons was waiting for a father to come confirm his own sulkiness, to draw him from the lot, to raise him to his right hand on an invisible throne; each of them wanted to escape from civil society, not to be there, to reign by his very absence; but the monastery was closed, blue blood was no longer anything but folklore, the barracks had collapsed into the ice with the plumed sons, the marshals of the Empire, near Smolensk or on the Berezina; so all these sons, to indicate that they were orphans, exiles, that is to say, better than the others, all these sons became not captains, not barons, not monks, but poets; because that had been the custom since 1830; but since 1830 the song had worn thin; perhaps it had been sung by too many throats; too great a number were vying for the prizes from beyond; and most important, no one here below could guarantee them anymore: Baudelaire was dead, the Old Man conversing with Shakespeare alone in the four feet of his table, Saint-Cyr had long been without a king to have the last word, election was a thing of the past. The consecration that Rimbaud demanded with so much force, that all the sons no doubt demanded though less forcefully, that consecration was no longer in anyone’s domain. And all those Rastignacs of the beyond were champing at the bit behind their obscure little sonnets and magic tricks, behind the beers and gazettes, waiting, sure of being the chosen one, sure of not being chosen: of course they all had the little cutting, but what was it worth when so equally distributed?
While waiting they had their photographs taken. Because they were all aware that beyond the obscure sonnets, beyond those little closed fists of fourteen lines brandished at the future, beyond poetry, close behind the poses of exile struck with two fingers in one’s waistcoat, mane flowing, from under the black hood posterity was hastening; and on the photographer’s stool they trembled before posterity: the Old Man before Nadar, before Carjat, looked at the black hood and held his breath; Baudelaire before Nadar, Carjat, held his breath; and before them, too, gentle Mallarmé held his breath; and in the same way, Dierx, Blémont, Creissels, and Coppée trembled before Nadar, before Carjat. And Rimbaud himself. .
It is evening, October. Not exactly evening, a very beautiful afternoon in late October. It is Sunday in Montmartre, and as it is almost in the country there is no one on the sloping streets. So many trees there: chestnut or plane trees that dazzle and wring the heart, yellow and ruined against the blue sky. They are standing in the light. The golden leaves are racing beneath your feet, the slope seems to lead you into the sky — and suddenly there they are: there are four or five of them climbing the slope, young, all hopeless sons, neither monks nor captains though all draped in invisible frocks, simply sons, poets as they were called; Verlaine and Rimbaud, and then whoever else, Forain, Valade or Cros, and Richepin — whom they call Richoppe. Black clothes, hats, neat appearances, all that resolved into flashes of black under the sun; because that day they are well-dressed: someone has lent Rimbaud the uniform, someone his height, perhaps Richepin. The tie is a little crooked, but it is all there, the shirt, the polished shoes, and the opera hat, the tall cylinder on the head of poetry in person, the cylinder that has itself the air of being poetry, all the trappings of the distressed sons of the third generation — but not the piece of vermilion Chinese satin that would go so well with those leaves, not the red waistcoat, which was worn to the premiere of Hernani for only three hours and only once, just time for History to hold it in its opera glasses. It is no longer worn: moreover, at that same time the fine red waistcoat, swollen, sunk into his edema under the little red and white woolen bonnet, Gautier, between his swollen eyelids hardly sees you and does not recognize you, he is listening to a more powerful swell than that of Hernani; he is going to die this twenty-third of October, tomorrow or the next day, his swelling will not have gone down when he is carried into the Montmartre cemetery, it is very close, and I want to believe that the sons, equally well-dressed, will be there, they will say that he was an old scoundrel, they will laugh aloud and be upset, between wines they will hear the swells of Hernani. Perhaps Rimbaud will think of Izambard, when Izambard offered him Émaux et camées. They are climbing rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette in full light. They are smoking pipes which soothe their hangovers, the leaves soothe them as well, these sons; Rimbaud says that he is bored stiff, he is gloomy. They open the door of number 10, they take off their top hats, they joke around: there is still an inner court, a veranda at the back, shining in the October light. They all enter. There they are.