Arthur Rimbaud was born into the provincial middle class of Charleville (now part of
Charleville-Mézières) in the
Ardennes département in northeastern
France. He was the second child of Captain Frédéric and Vitalie Rimbaud (née Cuif). It is evident through his writing that he never felt loved by his mother. As a boy he was a restless but brilliant student. By the age of fifteen he had won many prizes and composed original verses and dialogues in
Latin. In 1870 his teacher
Georges Izambard became Rimbaud's literary mentor and his original French verses began to improve rapidly.
He frequently ran away from home and may have briefly joined the
Paris Commune of 1871, which he portrayed in his poem
L'orgie parisienne (ou : Paris se repeuple), ("The Parisian Orgy" or "Paris Repopulates"). He may have been raped by drunken
Communard soldiers (as his poem
Le cœur supplicié ("The Tortured Heart") perhaps suggests). By this time he had become an
anarchist, started drinking and amused himself by shocking the local bourgeoisie with his shabby dress and long hair. At the same time he wrote to Izambard and Paul Demeny about his method for attaining poetical transcendence or visionary power through a "long, intimidating, immense and rational derangement of all the senses" (
Les lettres du Voyant ["The Letters of the Seer"]).
He returned to
Paris in late September 1871 at the invitation of the eminent
Symbolist poet
Paul Verlaine (after Rimbaud had sent him a letter containing several samples of his work) and resided briefly in Verlaine's home. Verlaine, who was married, promptly fell in love with the sullen, blue-eyed, overgrown (5 ft 10 in), light-brown-haired adolescent. They became lovers and led a wild, vagabond-like life spiced by
absinthe and
hashish. They scandalized the Parisian literary coterie on account of the outrageous behaviour of Rimbaud, the
archetypical enfant terrible, who throughout this period continued to write strikingly
visionary verse.
Rimbaud's and Verlaine's stormy love affair took them to
London in September 1872, Verlaine abandoning his wife and infant son (both of whom he had abused in his alcoholic rages). Rimbaud and Verlaine lived in considerable poverty, in
Bloomsbury and in
Camden Town, scraping a living from teaching and an allowance from
Verlaine's mother. Rimbaud spent his days in the
Reading Room of the
British Museum where "heating, lighting, pens and ink were free".
By late June 1873, Verlaine had had enough and soon afterwards returned to Paris, where he found Rimbaud's absence hard to bear. On
July 8, he telegrammed Rimbaud, instructing him to come to the Hotel Liège in
Brussels; Rimbaud complied immediately. The Brussels reunion went badly; one argument led to another and Verlaine drank almost continuously. On the morning of
10 July, Verlaine bought a revolver and ammunition. That afternoon, "in a drunken rage", Verlaine fired two shots at Rimbaud, one of them wounding the 18-year-old in the left wrist
Rimbaud considered the wound superficial and at first did not have Verlaine charged. After this, Verlaine and his mother accompanied Rimbaud to a
Brussels train station where Verlaine "behaved as if he were insane". This made Rimbaud "fear that he might give himself over to new excesses", so he turned and ran away. In his words, "it was then I [Rimbaud] begged a police officer to arrest him [Verlaine]". Verlaine was arrested for attempted murder and subjected to a humiliating medico-legal examination. He was also interrogated about his intimate correspondence with his lover and about his wife's accusations about the nature of his relationship with Rimbaud. Rimbaud eventually withdrew the complaint, but the judge sentenced Verlaine to two years in prison.
Rimbaud returned home to Charleville and completed his
Une Saison en Enfer ("A Season in Hell") in prose, widely regarded as one of the pioneering instances of modern
Symbolist writing and a description of that
drôle de ménage ("domestic farce") life with Verlaine, his
pitoyable frère ("pitiful brother") and
vierge folle ("mad virgin") to whom he was
l'époux infernal ("infernal groom"). In 1874 he returned to London with the poet
Germain Nouveau and put together his groundbreaking
Illuminations, including the first-ever two French poems in
free verse.
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