For a
moment it seemed as if he might control his passion for alcohol. He fell
profoundly in love, at first sight, with a girl of sixteen: Mathilde Maute
de Fleurville.. Verlaine and Mathilde were married in 1870, and the
strains of the Franco-Prussian War, the Siege of Paris, the Commune, and
of sharing quarters with the Mautes, proved too much for husband and wife.
Though Verlaine loved Mathilde and his infant son, he returned for solace
to gin and absinthe; the habit made him intolerably violent. In 1871
Arthur Rimbaud arrived in Paris, and any frail remaining hope of an
ordered life was lost. Verlaine was dazzled by this uncouth, brilliant,
ruthless young poet; he was physically drawn to him. In 1872 he left his
wife and son, in order to live with Rimbaud in London and Belgium. On 10
July 1875, in a drunken quarrel in Brussels, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the
wrist, and was imprisoned for two years at Mons.
In April
1874 Mathilde Verlalne obtained a separation and the shock of the
separation sent him to religion for comfort and guidance. Over the next
several years a series of tragedies befell him. His adopted favourite
student Lucien Letinois died, Verlaine sold the farm and tried (for the
bourgeois in him still struggled with the Bohemian) to get himself
employed again at the H6tel de Ville. He failed to get work, his mother
died in 1886 and at the same time he heard that his former wife had
recently remarried. Thence forward he found cafe life a deplorable but
imperious necessity.
Verlaine,
unlike many poets of that generation, never gave himself up to hashish,
opium, ether or morphine, as was then the fashion. He professed genuine
horror of these poisons of the mind... He remained faithful to the green
enchantress absinthe. With rare exceptions, Verlaine never drank anything
but absinthe, beer... and rum-and-water.
He had
finally taken refuge in the Latin Quarter, and he was often to be seen
near the Pantheon, chatting freely to a retinue of young
poets.
Increasingly the great Bohemian of the epoch sought refuge in
alcohol. Alcohol was the curtain he drew across the ugliness of reality.
Constantly exalted by absinthe, he only slept for a few troubled hours
each night. As soon as dawn broke, he was up, to stroll around the
quartier, breaking his walk at familiar taverns.
Verlaine
died on 8 January 1896. 'His is a rare and singular case,' Jules Lemaitre
had written. 'He has found the means of living in a civilised society as
if he was living in the heart of Nature... He has kept a soul as new as
that of Adam when he opened his eyes to the light....
He is a savage, a
barbarian, a child....But this child has music in his soul, and on
certain days he hears voices which have not been heard by any other on
earth.'
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