It is said that love won over their souls and went wrong, as generally happens when it wins over the soul; it is also said that, playing all the hands and all the roles, that of lover, accomplice, poet, they maddened the wife, the true one, Verlaine’s wife, with the thousand tricks dictated by absinthe; for they were tricksters; they pressed down hard upon the E string of poetic destiny, the one, in short, upon which Baudelaire had pressed so hard that it had gotten stuck on the famous crénom; of the two, Rimbaud is thought to have pressed upon it more heavily; and as for the wife, she had going for her the old E string of Eve, who hears things differently; so that the Orphic puking on all fours at four in the morning on the conjugal steps incurred the old conjugal sanction, and the little wife pointed to the door. The story goes that the two poets, driven from conjugal paradise, after detours and drunken procrastinations with Cros, with Banville, at the Hôtel des Étrangers where the Zutists hung out, took the road east and transported elsewhere the luminous, stamping bourrée, still lively, although the worm of sentiment was within it; and that in Brussels and then in London, perhaps to rediscover the pure radiance from before the sentiment, they summoned more ferociously the green fairy, absinthe, the deep gold of whiskies, ales, the mud of stouts; that from the depths of those pubs, E string against E string, they were then seen in confrontation, flushed, the note stuck; and of course at other times well-behaved and studious the two of them bent over a single poet’s desk in London, in dark, devouring London, like the very mouth of Baal, or the latrines of Baal, over which Capital was squatting behind its smokescreen, caught in the act — because that was the longed-for time of tough capitalism, when one knew who had to hold the gun and who had to be at the other end of it, which rifle butt to gnaw on, in which blood precisely to march; in that Old Testament London, sharing a poet’s desk, one of them, I want to believe, wrote Romances sans paroles, the other Chansons néantes, which he later called something else, pieces wholly of grace, light as air, hardly existing, written in the mouth of Baal but very far above Baal and the mud of stouts; for then they pressed heavily on the E string, each for himself and for the dead; and at that desk in the lull they played jokes on one another, envied one another, forgave one another. Or they recited for one another those aery pieces, one standing, the other seated, like the girls for the king at Saint-Cyr; and the one who was seated heard grace and power and great rhetoric pass; and neither one knew that they would never have such an audience again, such a stage. But, the aery piece taken wing, they remained there (at least that is how they imagined the thing, the flight of the poem and the fall of the body, for in their souls they still surreptitiously wore the red waistcoat), they remained there, they donned their greatcoats and bravely entered the mouth of Baal, which is also its latrines, and in the depths of a pub they sank into stouts. The devout manage to recognize them in the midst of that Old Testament tar, they can easily distinguish what belongs to one and what to the other, here the seer, the innovator, there the poor devil attached to outdated notions, the son of the sun who walks in front, and the son of the moon stumbling behind; the devout have the gift of clairvoyance — I myself can see none of this: in the Babylon smog their features merge, which has the beard, which the scowl? It is too dark to decide which of the two is the mad virgin, which the infernal bridegroom: they have the same violence under equally black waistcoats. They are two identical devourers slipping easily into that pub; and the coachman who carts off what remains of them coming out of that pub at four in the morning takes them by the arms, picks them up, throws them as best he can into the back of the cab with their greatcoats all awry, the coachman above who speaks to the horses in the language of Babel and disappears, he wears the same overcoat. The whip cracks behind the smog, perhaps Rimbaud in the cab cries merde. They are going to the station, they are returning to Europe: because we know that they had a row finally over something to do with herrings; over that matter they left Babylon; and that, thrown back to Brussels for a second time, crazed, terrified, one of them, the derby hat, at three in the afternoon with twelve or twenty green fairies in permanent residence raging about since eight in the morning, went to the galéries Saint-Hubert and terrified bought a Browning, which was not a Browning but a 7-mm six-shooter, what make I do not know, and with it put a piece of lead in the terrified archangel’s wing. And there he is entering the Mons prison and lying down, and the other one leaving for his Patmos, at Roche in the Ardennes, near Rilly-aux-Oies. In the inner closet, Verlaine is quietly stretched out beside Izambard. And the bourrée, insofar as it concerns them, is over.
It is said that they killed one another in that way because their characters were ideally opposite, like the sun and the moon; because one had the brilliance of the day, the ardor of the day, strength and the seven-league boots, while the other’s aspiration was to barely glisten, to appear between branches, to set, to flee; because one fomented la poésie moderne while the other made do with old-fashionedness, that is to say, made use of that very old and effective mix of sentiment and end rhyme that, strangely enough, we customarily forgive Malherbe, Villon, and Baudelaire for using, but not Verlaine; also because Verlaine, indecisive and divided like the moon, did not give himself with his whole soul, was not entirely in London and had left a part of himself in Paris, from where the little wife sent letters and pressed as persuasively as Eve upon the E string. These characters are too strongly contrasting not to be false; we have retouched them at our poets’ desks.