They were found, after the death of Mme. Léon Vanier, stuck at the back of a drawer containing other manuscripts belonging to her late husband, Verlaine’s publisher, and were acquired by H. Matarasso. Presented by Matarasso in the Mercure de France, January, 1948, with a detailed description of the manuscript. It was a doubly precious find for, on the reverse side of the single sheet of paper on which they were written, is a rough draft of a part of Une Saison en Enfer. The beginning of the first poem is apparently still missing. The use of the pronoun instead of Jesus’ name in the first line indicates that he has already been mentioned. It seems probable that the poem began with the scene at Jacob’s well and must at least have included the woman’s words: “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.” Perhaps some day the other page will also turn up, perhaps even other poems of the same series, perhaps a title….

De Lacoste calls the three poems: A Samaria, En Galilée, Beth-Saida (better known as “Bethesda”). The last of these, first published in 1897, was also written on one side of a rough draft of another fragment of the Season, called Fausse Confession (False Confession), which Rimbaud later changed to Nuit de l’Enfer (Night of Hell). Berrichon, at a loss to classify it, published it at different times either at the end of Illuminations or at the beginning might have intended it as a prologue, afterwards discarding it for the one he published. With the discovery of the two other poems taken from the Gospel of St. John, it becomes clear that it was one of the same biblical series. Four words, long a mystery, at the top of the Beth-Saïda autograph, “demandant grâce au jour,” are found to be the end of the lovely last line of In Galilee. Their position serves to establish the order of the poems. They were written some time in 1873, the same year as Une Saison en Enfer, as indicated by the similarity of the handwriting on the rough drafts. Like the Season, they were probably written at his mother’s farm at Roche. They suggest a Bible at hand, which in turn suggests the house of “la mother” rather than the room in London shared by the “drôle de ménage.”

Jules Laforgue, who with his gift for subtle accuracy called Rimbaud “the only isomer of Baudelaire,” is generally thought to be the originator of this kind of ironic distortion of legend. These poems show Rimbaud as his precursor. The manuscripts having been found among Léon Vanier’s papers tempts one to wonder if it is not significant that Vanier was Verlaine’s publisher, as well as Laforgue’s.

BY WAY OF A PREFACE

The following letters form a natural preface to the Illuminations in which Rimbaud put into practice the poetic theory here tentatively described. The poems enclosed in the letters are not examples of his new doctrine. They are still in the old form. Not until the Illuminations did Rimbaud find the “new forms that inventions of the unknown demand.” Perhaps in them he has not revealed to us “the unknown”; perhaps he did not succeed in being a visionary in his occult sense. But he succeeded: he invented new forms, a new language, and he has made us smell and hear and see perfumes, sounds, colors of an unknown of his invention.

LETTER TO GEORGE IZAMBARD

(DOUAI)

Charleville, May 13, 1871

Dear Sir:

So you are a teacher again! One’s duty is to Society, as you have told me; you are a member of the teaching body: you’re running in the right track. I too, I follow the principle: I am cynically getting myself kept. I unearth old imbeciles from our school: the stupidest, rottenest, meanest things I can think of—in action or words—I serve up to them: I’m paid in steins and ponies. Stat mater dolorosa, dum pendet filius. My duty is to Society, it’s true,—and I’m right. You too, you’re right, for today. As a matter of fact all you see in your principle is subjective poetry: your obstinacy in going back to the pedagogic trough—pardon me—proves it. But you’ll just end up self-satisfied without having done anything, not having wanted to do anything. Not to menton that your subjective poetry will always be horribly insipid. Some day I hope—many others hope so too—I’ll see objective poetry in your principle. I shall see it more sincerely than you will do it! I’ll be a worker: that is the idea that holds me back when mad rage drives me toward the battle of Paris where so many workers are still dying while I write to you! As for my working now, never, never; I’m on strike.

Now I am going in for debauch. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a visionary: you won’t possibly understand, and I don’t know how to explain it to you.