August: condition worsens, returns to Marseille. Hospitalized again, for good. Weeks pass, disease spreads, limbs fail, delusions come.

RIMBAUD’S YOUTHFUL TERRAIN

RIMBAUD’S ADULT TERRAIN

Cover of the first edition of Une saison en enfer.

LONG AGO, IF MY MEMORY SERVES

Long ago, if my memory serves, life was a feast where every heart was open, where every wine flowed.

One night, I sat Beauty on my knee. —And I found her bitter. —And I hurt her.

I took arms against justice.

I fled, entrusting my treasure to you, o witches, o misery, o hate.

I snuffed any hint of human hope from my consciousness. I made the muffled leap of a wild beast onto any hint of joy, to strangle it.

Dying, I called out to my executioners so I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called plagues to suffocate me with sand, blood. Misfortune was my god. I wallowed in the mud. I withered in criminal air. And I even tricked madness more than once.

And spring gave me an idiot’s unbearable laughter.

Just now, having nearly reached death’s door, I even considered seeking the key to the old feast, through which, perhaps, I might regain my appetite.

Charity is the key. —Such an inspiration proves I must have been dreaming.

“A hyena you’ll remain, etc.… ” cries the demon that crowns me with merry poppies. “Make for death with every appetite intact, with your egotism, and every capital sin.”

Ah. It seems I have too many already: —But, dear Satan, I beg you not to look at me that way, and while you await a few belated cowardices—you who so appreciate a writer’s inability to describe or inform—I’ll tear a few terrible leaves from my book of the damned.

BAD BLOOD

My Gallic forebears gave me pale blue eyes, a narrow skull, and bad reflexes in a fight. I dress as barbarically as they. But I don’t butter my hair.

The Gauls were the most inept animal-skinners and grass-burners of their day.

They gave me: idolatry, a love of sacrilege, and every vice: anger, lust—glorious lust—but above all, deceit and sloth.

I find even the thought of work unbearable. Masters and workers are all peasants. There’s no difference between a hand holding a pen and a hand pushing a plow. An age of hands! —I’ll have no part in it. Domesticity goes too far too fast. Begging—despite its inherent decency—pains me. Criminals are as bad as eunuchs: so what if I’m in one piece.

But. Who made my tongue so truthless that it has shepherded and safeguarded my sloth this far? Lazier than a toad, I’ve gotten by without lifting a finger: I’ve lived everywhere. There is not a family in Europe I don’t know. —Which is to say families like mine which owe everything to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. —I’ve known every young man of means.

If only I had one predecessor in French history!

But no, none.

It’s clear to me that I belong to a lesser race. I have no notion of rebellion. The only time my race ever rose up was to pillage: like wolves on carcasses they didn’t even kill.

I know French history, know the Church’s eldest daughter. Had I been a boor, I would have journeyed to the holy land; in my head are roads through Swabian plains, views of Byzantium, ramparts of Jerusalem; both the cult of Mary and of pity on the cross comingle in me amidst a thousand profane visions. —I sit like a leper on broken pots and nettles, at the foot of walls eaten away by sun.