We are annotating the Vulgate.
5. AGAIN WE TAKE UP THE VULGATE
Again we take up the Vulgate.
It is said that in the fight in which he struggled every inch of the way with Carabosse, since the inner closet may not have been completely sealed, Arthur Rimbaud sometimes ran off to lose her in the Ardennes countryside; that his long strides carried him into villages as formidable and dreary as cannon fire, handkerchiefs stuffed into the mouth, Warcq, Voncq, Warnécourt, Pussemange, Le Theux; that he was hungry for those places, for those handkerchiefs, for those cannons, and that the verses he strewed along the way said so; that he was hungry with ambition and tricked his hunger with little rhythmical pebbles, ogre and Tom Thumb, as his legend would have it. It is said that a longer escape, a dream, at the end of summer took him to Belgium, toward Charleroi by small paths with blackberries no doubt, mills among the trees, factories rising at the end of an oat field, and we will never know exactly where he passed or where his young mind seized upon some quatrain now better known in this world than Charleroi, where he was left holding the laces of his big shoes under the Big Dipper, but we know that, returning, he stopped in Douai, at the home of Izambard’s aunts, three gentle Fates at the far end of a large garden, fussy old seamstresses, and that those days in the large garden at the end of summer were the loveliest days of his life, perhaps the only lovely ones. It is also said that in that garden he made the poem every child knows, in which he calls his stars like one whistles for one’s dogs, in which he caresses the Big Dipper and lies down beside it; and that summer’s end was all rhythm, usually twelve feet, and Rimbaud, suspended on the rod in the northern sky but at the same time with his two feet under the table in the green inn, got all that onto the rod at one time, the pretty girl serving the ham, the arbor where he eats it, and the North Star rising overhead. And it is pure happiness. It is the very simple appearance of truth, which resembles God or a little dead girl, behind a bank of flowers in September. It is said that two escapes especially, without stars this time, far from gardens, far from truth, took him to Paris. And no one was waiting for him.
There is dispute over whether he took part in the insurrection of the Commune; if he had the pleasure and the terror of holding at rifle point a sworn enemy, evil in person, that is also to say, a poor devil from the depths of the country to whom Monsieur Thiers in Versailles had entrusted plume and rifle, and if, with the deafening beat of the two antithetical cymbals in his heart, he shot; or if he was the little drummer boy perched on the barricade; and if below the barricade he ate soup with the poor, the obscene, the gentle idiots, if he smoked tobacco with them; we would like to believe so, but it does not really seem as though we can, that story is in Les Misérables, by the Old Man, not in the life of Arthur Rimbaud. Member of the Commune or not, he returned to Charleville with the red spittle of battle like grapeshot in his heart. It is said that from Charleville in May, on May 15, he wrote to Paul Demeny, poet from Douai, author of Les Glaneuses, whom the silver nitrates had also fixed once and for all and transmit to us for reasons that have nothing to do with Les Glaneuses, and in the photo on page 54, beyond Izambard, beyond Banville, we see the poet’s goatee, the little pince-nez, the blown-back hair, the proud profile gazing squarely away toward the blue line of posthumous glories: we know that he sent to that famous addressee — whose fame was cheaply won for having once received ten or twenty pages — the so-called Seer letter; this is an avatar of the old justification of the poet, idealist, voluntarist, missionary, magician — the bravado, the pro domo smokescreen; it wears the new clothes of democratic Orphism because it is meant to please, to please the poets of Douai and elsewhere; and it is much more than that, because it is written by a young man who is trying hard to believe in it with his whole heart. But, bravado or stroke of genius, we read and reread that letter, bent over our poet’s desk, we answer it as Demeny did the first time: because “to find a language” and “make oneself a seer” are written in black and white in that letter — and those things that had been in the air for twenty years or two centuries, those things that had already been said, with more or less fanfare, by the red waistcoat, the Old Man, and by the other red waistcoat, the one who truly wore the red waistcoat in the swell of Hernani, Gautier, had been said too by Baudelaire, whose waistcoat was long and dark, by Nerval, by Mallarmé, those things are said here in a more convincing fashion, more youthful, more warlike: and so it is right that at our poet’s desk we tacitly agree that they were said here for the first time. It seems new to us, eternally new; but I want to believe with my whole heart that, for Rimbaud, it became old-fashioned poetics the very moment he put his letter into the box, maybe at the moment he signed it — although he tried to believe in it with his whole heart. It is said that he sent the young Verlaine a letter of the same kind, voluntary, provocative, superb; it is lost. It is said that Verlaine sank his teeth into that bait; and that at the end of another summer, in September 1871, for a third time a train hurled Rimbaud into Paris: but that third time, Cros and Verlaine must have waited for the dear great soul at the gare de l’Est, and Rimbaud, in the pocket of his too-short pants that showed his blue cotton socks, which we know exactly, socks knitted for him by Carabosse with a feeling we do not know exactly, perhaps love, in that pocket he had the impeccable homework, Le Bateau ivre, honed perfectly from one end to the other to please the Parnassus, and in the Parnassus to take first place.
On the gare de l’Est platform in a derby hat Verlaine enters the story, we know; and his own story here without the least hesitation firmly enters the Mons prison, the cask of absinthe and the tragic clowning, the pallet and the Golden Legend; and beside that pallet, nuns from the almanac and whores, young Létinois who was a tall young girl; but all of them, and wretched as they were, we see leaning over Verlaine, who looks to be lower than they are, as though brought down: because he was brought down and remained there, just as Izambard had been.
He did not need Rimbaud certainly, he was great enough to bring about his fall all by himself, and he had the will to do so; but Rimbaud was the good excuse, the stone over which fate stumbles. And more than anything in the world, Verlaine loved to stumble.
For the moment he has the derby hat, he sleeps in a beautiful bed with a beautiful wife. He alone knows that he stumbles with every step, he is young, it doesn’t show yet. It is said that with or without his hat, stumbling or not, he pleased Rimbaud, and it was reciprocaclass="underline" without dissembling, without any other ulterior motives except the one of being first, which they confessed to each other, we know that they each loved the writings of the other, believed him to be a seer or pretended to believe so — since it was the fashion of the time to imagine that in seeing, ineffable, secret, postulated nebula, the most distinct poems are born, the most beautiful planetary-like systems where trees grow in twelve syllables, where the universe is embodied; embodied a second time; and regarding that second incarnation each one told himself that perhaps the other had the key. Both were happy to note that the key, if it existed, was held by an accomplice to his liking. But we know that a few days after the gare de l’Est, both of them young and seething, they pleased each other in a different way: and it happened that in a dark room behind shutters they were naked before one another, erect, and short of cadences and numbers issued from clairvoyance, short of any poem, they joined; behind those shutters they stamped out the blind old bourrée of naked bodies, both of them searching for the purple eyelet in the other, and having found it, lashed themselves to it, and suspended on that mast that was not the rod, it happened that they shuddered and disappeared for a moment from this world, from the dark room, from the shutters of September, the body universally poured forth and nevertheless entirely concentrated in the mast, the eyes dead, the tongue lost. And that first bourrée that they danced together, of which we know neither the place nor the form, of which we all know the feeling, that movement of the great bedroom mast made as much wind in literature as the swell of Hernani, because men of letters are futile. However, there is no doubt about it, tempest or breeze, it passed over the writings of Arthur Rimbaud and improved them: because the young man had had a great hunger for that bourrée, for that eyelet that he may have been seeking the summer before in Charleroi and, not finding it, to summon it and to trick his hunger, he strewed little stones along the path: little stones are charming no doubt but do not suffice for the Work, which is of the race of ogres, and if the length of the rod, along with the pretty girl and the green inn, along with the Wanderlust under the rustling stars, does not also hold the dark ridiculous purple eyelet, then the rod is a bad alloy that will bend, as in the hands of Banville.